Empowering university EFL learners through peer review

This study focuses on a teaching practice intended to empower students and support their success; namely peer review (Woodward, 2015; Massery, 2013). Here, peer review is implemented with a group of 16 third-year French-speaking undergraduate students enrolled in an English studies programme. We hypothesize that a peer review process prior to the final evaluation (a ten-minute oral presentation with a slideshow) serves to enhance students’ understanding of the assessment criteria (made explicit through the use of a checklist) and contributes to improving the quality of their initial work. The results show that: (i) students tend to underrate their own productions and overrate those of their partners; (ii) they integrate more assessment criteria and revise their work accordingly; (iii) their second self-evaluation procedure aligns more closely with the teacher’s final evaluation procedure; (iv) they report experiencing a “mirror effect” in the way they revise their work.