Abstract
Practitioners use peer response as a tool in the collaborative composition classroom for a variety of reasons. A key component of the peer response group is to teach students about revising and re-seeing their work through a varied audience. There are many different ways in which instructors implement peer response in their courses. One such method is to use teacher facilitator workshop scripts in order to encourage students to focus on the content and organization of a draft as opposed to lower order concerns such as grammar and mechanics. In this paper, I have studied and analyzed the teacher facilitated workshop method and the ways in which this type of tool influences students’ revision practices. I studied two different groups of 25 students over a period of two semesters in my first year composition course. I tape recorded conversations in the peer response groups, collected workshop scripts as well as the first and second drafts for three formal paper assignments. Students also completed a questionnaire at the end of the semester discussing how they felt the workshop scripts influenced their revision practices. While the majority of the students responded positively in the questionnaire to the useful practice of using workshop scripts to encourage revision, most of the students do not necessarily revise their work. When these students revise, they tend to focus on lower order concerns as opposed to the suggestions of their peers pertaining to content and organization on the workshop scripts. As a result, I do not suggest discarding the peer response group as a way to teach revision nor do I suggest completely getting rid of the teacher-facilitated workshop script. I do suggest however that perhaps incorporating a variety of response types, both teacher-facilitated and student-directed, may more effectively encourage revision. I also encourage instructors to study their own methods and discuss these practices with students to understand whether or not the activities in the classroom are effectively teaching students to become better readers and writers of texts.