Developing students’ writing skills through teacher and peer correction at university level: an analytical study

Writing is, undeniably, an essential skill for students’ academic success at the university level. This is doubtless because the courses at graduate study are always assessed by writing tasks and for this purpose, the number of prerequisite writing courses are imposed in university curriculums. Despite the pivotal role of writing skills in the academics, university students are prone to make a multitude of errors in their writing which subsequently impact their academic performance. Linguists and teachers, therefore, have given great attention to this problem in their studies trying to find solutions to improve students’ writing ability and reduce their errors. Of late, they have shown a special interest in the role of corrective feedback and how it is given on students’ writing. Results from their studies showed how students’ writing improvement responds differently to three sources of corrective feedback: teacher correction, peer correction and self-correction. There has been an ongoing debate about how to give feedback to students on their writing and which source of corrective feedback has more influence on their writing development Some studies showed that the improvement of students’ writing can be achieved with peer and self-correction more effectively than with teacher correction. With this controversy, a lot of questions regarding the role and the type of source of correction remained open and the present paper addresses these problems regarding teacher correction and peer correction and also finds solutions. The present research paper aims at analyzing the impact of the corrective feedback given by teachers and peers on students’ writing development. Moreover, this paper throws light on the self-correction of students and their self-evaluation for their improvement in writing. Some data is also incorporated in this study and recommendations are also given in the end.