Improving Students' Writing Skills through Peer Correction Strategy

Writing skill plays an important role in educational success since course materials in academiccareers are mostly examined in one main area which is in the form of essay test. The study explored theeffectiveness of peer correction strategy in improving the writing skills in English of senior high students.The study utilized a descriptive experimental research design wherein probability sampling was used inselecting participants of the study which is composed of 48 Grade 11 senior high students. In data gathering,the students’ argumentative essays during the pre-test and post-test were graded by the researchers and twointer-raters following Heaton’s (1988) scoring guide which focuses on contents (30 points), organization(20 points), vocabulary (20 points), grammar (25), and mechanics (5). The findings found that both controland experimental groups’ pre-test performance on the different aspects of writing test fell within the verypoor category. It also presents the post-test obtained mean scores of the control and experimental groups inthe five aspects of writing. In terms of Contents, there are more from the experimental (20.83%) whoreceived “very good” and “good” ratings (54.17%) than control groups (4.17 %) whose scores received“very good” and (50%) “good” verbal descriptions. In terms of Organization, the results show that there aremore from the experimental group (29.17%) whose scores received “very good” and (33.33%) “good’ratings, than control groups (4.17%) who received “very good” and (41.67%) “good” ratings. This wasconsistent in the other aspects of writing: vocabulary (25%), grammar (20.83%) and mechanics (20.83%) inwhich there are more from experimental groups who got higher ratings than those from the control group.Moreover, the study found that the peer-correction strategy, the scores in all aspects of writing of theparticipants from the experimental group have significantly improved.