This review considers Ellen C. Carillo's The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading, an important contribution that examines labor-based grading contracts through a disability studies lens.

This study explores the attitudes and perceptions about online peer review of 18 Spanish learners enrolled in a third-year college Spanish writing course. Students participated in peer review training, wrote a personal narrative, and completed two online peer review sessions before submitting their final narrative. Using data from questionnaires, interviews, a peer review simulation task, and the first author’s journal, this qualitative study investigates students’ approaches to peer review and the different practices they employ when commenting on their peers’ drafts. Results show that even though students receive the same training, they interpret and enact that training differently. Students position themselves into specific feedback-giving stances: critical, sensitive, interpretive, and supportive. Two case studies show how two students’ particular stances as feedback givers (critical and sensitive, respectively) impact commenting practices and decision-making during the peer-review process. Based on these findings, recommendations for language teachers to enhance students’ awareness of themselves as feedback givers are drawn.

Writing classrooms focused on summative assessment are likely to lack formative feedback components that contribute to more motivated, confident, and autonomous writers, notes Icy Lee (2017), author of Classroom Writing Assessment and Feedback in L2 School Contexts. Ranging from $66.02 (Kindle) to $69.49– $102.24 (hardcopy), this 157-page work presents a strong case for school second-language (L2) writing education to shift away from traditional, score-based assessment. Though Lee targets L2 writing teachers and teacher trainers, she also appeals to researchers of L2 writing. Ten chapters provide thorough theoretical and research-based justification for a student-centered, learning-oriented feedback and assessment system and also provide practical suggestions for implementation. These chapters begin with the purpose, theory, and practice of L2 writing assessment and then explores various types of assessment and feedback, as well as the use of portfolios for assessment. The text concludes with chapters on technology in L2 writing assessment and classroom assessment literacy for L2 writing teachers. As a whole, the research-based guidance that Lee offers encourages writing teachers and educators to implement assessment, so it can “bring improvement to student learning and is supported by self-, peer-, and teacher-feedback” (p. 5).

This article reports on a large-scale study of peer and instructor response and student reflection on response. The corpus of instructor and peer response to 864 drafts of student writing was collected via ePortfolios from first-year writing courses and courses across disciplines at 70 U.S. institutions of higher education. The following questions guided a qualitative analysis of the data: (a) What are the similarities and differences in the ways instructors and peers respond to college writing? (b) What perspectives do college students have on the feedback they receive on their writing from instructors and peers? Three themes emerged from a review of the literature on peer and instructor response and the results of the analysis of the data: (a) peer responders tend to be more focused on global concerns than instructors, (b) peer responders tend to be less directive than instructors, and (c) students learn as much from reading their peers’ drafts as they do from the comments they receive from peer responders or the instructor. The findings support an argument for placing peer response at the center of the response construct, rather than thinking of peer response as merely a complement to instructor response.

Despite extensive attention to peer review in composition studies literature, the activity remains challenging to design, in part because there are multiple potential goals for peer review. This article draws on existing literature to describe a variety of peer review goals and then presents interview data to illustrate the perceptions of first-year composition instructors (n=3) and students (n=8) about the goals of peer review. The three instructor interviewees each described a specific and distinct goal for peer review: constructing quality feedback, identifying effective writing, and developing peer trust. However, when asked about the purpose of peer review, all eight of the students focused on one goal: improving draft quality. This article recommends increased attention to naming and differentiating among specific goals of peer review, as well as more discussion of ways to deliberately articulate those goals to students.

Welcome to the second issue of our third year of publication. As the journal has become more established, we are seeing a wide range of fascinating research and teaching work related to response to writing in both first and second language contexts. This issue is no different. In this issue, we present two research articles, two teaching articles, and a book review. In the first piece, “L2 Learners’ Engagement with Direct Written Corrective Feedback in First-Year Composition Courses,” Izabela Uscinski examines how second language learners of English engage with feedback from their college writing teachers. Uscinski draws on Svalberg’s (2009) definition of engagement, suggesting that it “encompasses not only the cognitive realm, but also affective and social.” To better understand how writers make use of written corrective feedback and whether it leads to meta-awareness and noticing of language structures, she recruited eight Chinese-L1 first-year college students taking a stretch composition course at a university in the United States. She asked the students to meet with her when they had received grammar feedback from their teachers and recorded the computer screen as they revised their essays. Playing back the recordings, she then asked the students to discuss what they had done and why.

Written corrective feedback (WCF) has been increasingly attracting researchers in second language acquisition (SLA) as well as second language (L2) writing practitioners. Bitchener and Storch, two renowned WCF researchers, define WCF as “a written response to a linguistic error that has been made in the writing of a text by an L2 learner” (p. 1). This increasing interest in WCF is understandable because the implementation of WCF is time-consuming as well as pedagogically imperative. However, it is widely known that learners keep making the same error, and thus teachers’ efforts do not pay off easily. Therefore, with the increasing number of published research, it is beneficial to review studies about WCF to synthesize findings and identify issues to guide future research. To this end, Written Corrective Feedback for L2 Development comprehensively reviews WCF studies, especially those conducted under cognitive and sociocultural perspectives, the two major driving forces in this domain.

This issue completes the second volume year of JRW. It is hard to believe how quickly the two years have gone by, and we are gratified with the excellent work that authors have shared with us and with the positive response from readers. This issue has five papers—two research articles, two teaching articles, and a book review—which notably discuss response topics from a broad range of pedagogical contexts. With the publication of Magda Tigchelaar’s article, “The Impact of Peer Review on Writing Development in French as a Foreign Language,” we are happy to extend our discussions of response to writing to the teaching of languages other than English. Comparing the effects of peer review and self-review over a semester, Tigchelaar found that student writers were more likely to attend to/apply suggestions from their own self-reviews than they were to incorporate suggestions from their peers. She also found that peers were more likely to emphasize global concerns such as organization, and self-reviewers were more interested in fine-tuning at the sentence level and across sentences (cohesion). In particular, the study argues for a meaningful and increased role for guided self-feedback in writing instruction: “Learning how to review one’s own texts may require more time and training, but this initial investment may plant the seeds for more effective development of autonomous writers.”

“English can be both amusing and treacherous,” notes Ben Rafoth, coeditor of ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. Together with coeditor Shanti Bruce and dozens of other English, composition, and English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers and academics, this book presents the enjoyment and obstacles that tutors and tutees face. The 16 chapters cover a variety of ESL students: international, Generation 1.5, graduates of U.S. high schools, and professionals. In addition, this guide “also discusses differences in tutoring styles in various settings—for instance, with undergrads, peers, grad students, and instructors— as well as variations” also lays out differences in tutoring styles in various settings by undergrads, peers, grad students, and instructors, as well as variations in writing centers across the United States and at foreign universities

Nancy Sommers’s Responding to Student Writers is a self-proclaimed “modest book” (vii) with an important goal: discussing best practices in responding to student writing. Published by Bedford St. Martin’s, the book aims to address teachers at the college-level who may find themselves struggling with increasing enrollment and a practice that “takes more time, thought, empathy, and energy than any other aspect of teaching writing” (x). At approximately 50 pages, Sommers’s slim book is both conversational and easy to digest, a text that could easily be slipped in a carry-on bag for a trip to a conference or read quickly between classes. Though the retail price for students is $18.99, teachers can request a desk copy for free through Bedford. The majority of the volume is organized into an introduction and six main sections; however, an index, brief bibliography, and summary of best practices are also provided.

Peer Pressure, Peer Power: Theory and Practice in Peer Review and Response for the Writing Classroom ($38.00 in paperback; 296 pages) compiles research and theory articles from a wide assortment of scholars interested in peer review, an area of research that, according to the editors, is woefully underdeveloped, despite being “a ubiquitous feature of the composition classroom” (Lawson Ching, p. 15). As such, this book provides valuable insights into theories and research-based pedagogical suggestions to increase the effectiveness of peer review in various contexts. With the aim of keeping this review concise, I will not address each article featured in this book, and will cite individual articles only by author name with the page number for direct quotes. This in no way is intended to act as a slight toward those chapters that aren’t included; each chapter contributes to the larger discourse in meaningful ways and warrants attention.