Teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards peer feedback in grade 10 English speaking classes at Vung Tau High School: Master’s Thesis

Abstract

Among different factors contributing to foreign language teaching and learning, affective variables such as teachers’ and learners' attitudes are of paramount importance. This study, therefore, aimed to explore teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards peer feedback in grade 10 speaking classes at Vung Tau high school. Three aspects of attitude including cognitive, affective, and behavioral components were taken into consideration. Both quantitative and qualitative approach were employed in this study, i.e. data were collected from questionnaires, in-depth interviews and semi-structured interviews. There were 80 grade 10 students were asked to complete the questionnaires in the survey, 10 of whom were selected randomly for the in-depth interviews. In addition, 10 high school teachers of English at Vung Tau high school agreed to participate in the semi-structured interviews. As for data analysis, descriptive statistics (e.g., mean, standard deviation) were used to analyze quantitative data, whereas qualitative data were analyzed through content analysis. The findings of the study indicated that both students and teachers expressed highly positive attitudes towards peer feedback implementation in grade 10 English speaking classes. However, while students and teachers shared the same attitudes in affective and behavioral components, there was a significant difference between their perception of peer feedback concerning cognitive component. Among the five areas of speaking competence, students agreed that they enhanced much more in lexical resource, discourse management and interactive communication than grammatical resource and pronunciation, which showed a contrast with teachers’ belief. The outcome of this research has a number of important implications for administrators, teachers and students for future practice