Graduate Researcher Series: an interview with Carrie Peng
Juerong Qiu
Carrie Peng is a third-year doctoral candidate in applied linguistics at the School of Languages and Linguistics. Her research explores how teacher feedback and peer feedback in second language writing affect secondary school students’ English writing development and the effectiveness of different feedback processing modes.
Juerong interviewed Carrie about her doctoral research, her PhD journey, and the challenges she encountered during the candidature.
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I’m wondering if you could start by telling us about your topic and the significance of this research.
My research interest is in the feedback on second language writing. I’m focusing on teenage Chinese learners of English, which is an under-represented group of second-language learners in the literature. My fieldwork was conducted in English language learning classrooms in a secondary school, in Chongqing, China, over one school semester, which ensures the ecological validity of my research. I explore how younger and lower English language proficiency level learners process teacher feedback and peer feedback. My research also looks at the effectiveness of different feedback sources on students’ longitudinal writing development.
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What support did you get in the data-collecting process?
I received a lot of support during my fieldwork. First of all, all my participants were highly engaged in the tasks I gave them. They had six writing tasks during the semester. I also got support from the school teachers and the headmaster of the school. I had their consent for my fieldwork. Before I did my fieldwork, I got invaluable advice from my supervisors on how to make my data collection more efficient and revise my data collection methods. Initially, I wanted to do individual interviews with the students but then my supervisor suggested focus group interviews. This was a better consideration of the students’ young age and the unfamiliarity of being interviewed by an external person. We decided to do a focus group interview to better encourage students to speak more in the interview. I’m grateful to my supervisors for the guidance in the design of my research, as well as to the students and teachers who participated in my research.
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Since your participants were under 18, there might be more processes to go through when you applied for ethics approval. Could you tell us about your ethics application process?
It was more than a year ago. I remember I needed to fill in quite a few forms. I needed to clearly state things like I have gained consent from the school gatekeeper, and I have contacted the students’ parents and distributed the consent form to them. Since the participants were under 18, we needed to inform their parents and make sure I had their permission. I remember I submitted the form, and there were a few rounds of revision. I received different reviewers’ comments and needed to justify why I designed different data collection methods. My supervisor also helped me a lot during the revision process. Finally, the application was approved two months after the submission.
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How did you come to this research topic?
My initial interest in this topic began when I was doing an internship job during my undergraduate studies. I had the opportunity to work as a peer tutor at a writing centre. I provided some peer feedback to some non-English major students who want to revise their written assignments or personal statements to apply for postgraduate courses overseas. I found that the peer-reviewing process was extremely effective and rewarding for both the feedback receivers and me as a feedback giver. After the consultation, students did make progress in their writing. I learned a lot from them as well. So I think this is a really good task to do in the English writing class.
When I reflected on my own English language learning experience, I suddenly realized that I didn’t have this opportunity before I entered the university. So I began to think about whether this could also be applied to secondary school English classrooms. When I was doing a master’s degree in the UK, I picked up this topic as a thesis project. I flew back to China to do a one-month experiment. When I applied for my PhD, I thought maybe I can conduct a more longitudinal project on this interesting topic.
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I learn that you’ve finished the Results chapter. Could you share some interesting findings with us?
Reflecting on my hypotheses and the actual research findings, I observe that writing development is a non-linear and complex process. In the real language classroom, there are so many factors that could impact the student’s language learning process. And yet feedback can be a really powerful tool if utilized properly. My participants are quite young, 13 or 14 years old. They have limited language proficiency and are still developing their cognitive processing capacity. However, I realized that we should never underestimate their ability to deal with problems. Apparently, they encountered a lot of difficulties during their writing revision process, and many of them actively resorted to external help in order to solve problems. I also have witnessed their potential to make progress within a short time.
However, the swift progress doesn’t necessarily mean that they internalize the knowledge, because students still make repeated errors on the same thing in their writing at a later stage. You could see those repeated patterns appear again and again, even though maybe they took up the teacher’s feedback and then they suddenly returned to the initial problem. True development takes time. That’s why we as researchers always need to do longitudinal research to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the effectiveness of a certain intervention.
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I remember when we started back in 2019, we were stuck in our home country during the Covid-19 outbreak. Thinking back, what is something you wished you’d known then?
I was stuck in China because of the border restrictions. So reflecting on my previous two years’ learning experience, I would say, I wished I could have understood the importance of keeping a healthy and regular daily routine. After I came here, I can go to campus from Monday to Friday, which helped me to quickly shift to work mode during the daytime. I can also relax a little bit on weekends and also in the evenings and I don’t have to stay up late. But two years ago, I didn’t have a fixed and healthy routine. I was constantly distracted by family gatherings and Chinese public holidays. It was really difficult to concentrate on my tasks regularly.
Another thing I think could be helpful is the importance of staying connected with other fellow PhD researchers or even talking with your supervisors more. After my arrival, I had more opportunities to meet different students face-to-face and we can have a chat or just briefly talk about our progress or any concerns we have at the moment. These discussions help us get new perspectives on something we are currently working on. Face-to-face meetings make our relationship closer and more personal. You can feel that your peers and supervisors are concerned about you about your well-being and your project progress.
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You’ve also had the opportunity to tutor the Introductory Academic Program this winter. Can you tell us a bit about this experience?
This program focuses on supporting a group of Australian Awards scholarship winners to transition smoothly to Australian university academic culture. My role in this program was to introduce some generic academic reading and writing skills to them. Those students came from a professional background. They have already worked for 10 years or more. They know very little about academic writing or the expectation of Australian universities on them as postgraduate students. I felt this experience was really rewarding and I enjoyed tutoring them, although it was quite challenging. For example, they came from different backgrounds ranging from criminology to taxation to development studies. The topics of the essays covered a wide range. I needed to focus on their writing skills instead of my familiarity with that topic, looking at how they presented their ideas instead of judging whether their arguments were right or wrong. This allowed me to have a better understanding of how to present my ideas robustly to readers outside my discipline and how to link my ideas through signposting or transitions in my writing. This in turn benefited my academic writing as well.
Thank you for taking the time to talk with me, Carrie.
Thank you, Juerong.