Students’ perceptions of peer review for assessing digital multimodal composing: the case of a discipline-specific English course

Abstract

While peer review has been widely incorporated in assessing digital multimodal composing (DMC) to provide formative feedback, how students perceive its benefits and problems remains inadequately investigated. Drawing upon the concept of student feedback literacy, this study applied semi-structured interviews to explore students’ perceptions towards peer review of a DMC task in a discipline-specific English course at a Chinese university. The findings revealed that students generally held a favourable attitude towards peer review in advancing their feedback literacy through enhancing their self-reflexivity and self-regulation of learning, improving the quality of DMC outputs, promoting a co-learning environment, and developing the knowledge repertoire of evaluating multimodal tasks. However, challenges were also identified regarding cognitive capability, time constraints, language proficiency, interpersonal relations and unwillingness to participate, with some students not fully engaging. Practical strategies such as task-based learning, additional scaffolding support and peer teaching are recommended to address these challenges. The study highlights the importance of the teachers’ role in providing explicit instruction and guidance to manage peer review effectively. It expands our understanding of peer review in DMC and sheds light on improving the formative process of DMC assessment, as well as designing and managing peer review of DMC tasks.

Keywords:

• Peer review
• digital multimodal composing
• student feedback literacy
• multiliteracies
• formative assessment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yi Deng

Yi Deng is a lecturer at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China. Her research interests include multimodal discourse analysis, language teaching, and business communication. Her works were published in Journal of Pragmatics, Visual Communication, Asia Pacific Journal of Education, and Lingua, etc.

Dan Liu

Dan Liu is a lecturer at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China. Her research interests include students’ perceptions of English language teaching and learning in higher education. Her works were published in Teaching in Higher Education, Asia Pacific Education Researcher, Journal of Marketing for Higher Education, Gender and Education, Sage Open, Frontiers in Psychology, etc.

Dezheng (William) Feng

Dezheng (William) Feng, PhD, is Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Research Centre for Professional Communication in English at the Department of English and Communication, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research focuses on the critical and multimodal discourse analysis of various media and communication practices. His publications appeared in journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Discourse and Communication, Visual Communication, and Teaching and Teacher Education.