Abstract
Among different forms of giving feedback to students, peer feedback is the one which has been more studied in recent years. Peer feedback is the process in which students are required to give feedback to their peers through collaborative discussions, compared with teacher feedback in which the students receive feedback merely from the teacher. This study examines the effects of peer-feedback and teacher-feedback on Iranian EFL learners’ writing ability. 52 homogenous undergraduate university students majoring in English literature and translation at Arak University, Iran, participated in the study and were placed in control and experimental groups. The experimental group received some instructions regarding peer feedback and how to comment on their peer’s essays, while the control group received feedback from the teacher. Both groups wrote five essays on five different topics as tasks of elicitation. The participants’ writings were scored by two raters using Paulus’s rating scales, and then compared via t-tests and ANOVA. The results indicated that peer feedback is not more effective than teacher feedback in helping the learners improve their writing ability. Possible explanations of the results of the study and implications of the findings for language teaching, especially teaching writing, will be discussed and presented.