Peer assessment of process writing in a virtual exchange project

Abstract

One of the possible ways of assessing students’ collaborative work in Virtual Exchange (VE) is by the use of Peer Assessment (PA) – a formative assessment technique in which students review each other’s work to provide descriptive feedback on the basis of a set of criteria. This article describes a VE procedure, in which students from three different institutions collaborate on the preparation of a tourist brochure. The project participants include two European English for tourism classes and a group of native-speaker participants of an English composition class at a US university. The proposed VE scheme is supplemented with a possible PA procedure and evaluation criteria that has been developed on the basis of previous VE experiences, the students’ post-project feedback, and the subject literature.