Developing culturally-situated student feedback literacy through multi-peer feedback giving: an online community-based approach

While multi-peer feedback has been increasingly implemented in the academic writing classroom in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts, scant attention has been paid to the development of culturally-situated student feedback literacy arising from the provider-provider interaction in teacher-centered EFL classroom contexts. This study investigated how student reviewers developed their culturally-situated feedback literacy in online community-based multi-peer feedback. Drawing on multiple sources of data (pre-task surveys, feedback comments, post-task stimulated recalls, in-depth group interviews, and follow-up individual WeChat interviews) from 31 Chinese EFL learners, our analysis revealed that the openly shared, asynchronous multi-peer feedback (1) helped students construct knowledge and community norms; (2) facilitated the students in multiple rounds of comparison and self-reflection; (3) encouraged open criticism as acts of in-group cohesion and established students' own standards for affective appropriateness; and (4) motivated students to take actions to close the gaps in their feedback-giving practices within the community.