Understanding Master’s students’ peer feedback practices from the academic discourse community perspective: A rethinking of postgraduate pedagogies

ABSTRACT

While recent research has highlighted the increasing importance of peer feedback as a supplementary pedagogy to supervision in higher education academic contexts, little is known regarding whether and how peer feedback can induct research students into the academic discourse community. Underpinned by the academic discourse community theory, this case study explores seven postgraduate students’ peer feedback practice and its effect on the revision of master thesis drafts. It examines data collected from multiple sources, including master students’ drafts of theses, peer written feedback, audio recordings of oral peer feedback conferences and students’ final theses. It was found that although different feedback providers used different types of feedback, feedback given in different languages and by different strategies to negotiate with the feedback receivers, peer feedback played an effective role in socialising Master’s students into the academic discourse community where grasping the gist of academic writing constitutes a significant part in higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Peer feedback practice
• academic discourse community
• postgraduate pedagogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Macau [Grant Number MYRG2016-FED-00100].