SQR 2

Leonardo Avila
Eng. 1301.28
Trang Phan
9/12/10

Peer Response: Teaching Specific Revision Suggestions
Neubert, Gloria A., and Sally J. NcNelis. “Peer Response: Teaching Specific Revision Suggestions.”
The English Journal 79.5 (1990): 52-56

Summary

The article shows how untrained secondary students gave vague comments to other student’s drafts in their peer response. In order to improve this teachers began attempting to teach middle-school students a method to better understand the peer response. The PQP (Praise-Question-Polish) technique was designed to help students with their peer response and was found to help students better understand what they should do during the their assigned task. During the PQP process many teachers notice that although students knew what to do they would sill gave vague responses. To better improve students way of doing the peer response with PQP they asked students to be more specific with their responses. To try and achieve this goal students were assigned groups to explain why or why not each students responses were effective. When students finally came to one agreement, it was then decided what response would be written down. Students were then shown how they should elaborate more in the praise section of the response, but still keeping it specific. After each session of the response group teachers noticed that there was an increase of “specific” question and a decrease in both “general but somewhat useful” and “vague” responses. As time progressed and when done correctly the PQP technique worked incredibly well to better understand and respond to the peer response.

How effective is the PQP technique when using it during peer response?

Well as seen in the summary we use the PQP technique to help not only improve the writers paper, but also making it easy for the writer to know what he/she should improve on. The first part of this technique is to praise what it was that we as the reader enjoyed about the paper and why, so that the writer can see how readers can relate to the paper. During the second part of the technique we must then ask a question so that the writer could know what certain part of the topic the reader couldn’t comprehend or want to know more about so the writer can fully explain it when they revise there paper. The last part of the technique is polishing the paper meaning fixing all forms of grammar errors which the writer could have made in their work or letting them know what parts of the paper are not needed. As you can see when following the PQP technique is amazingly effective in giving the writer the feedback they need in order to revise their paper to come out with a nearly perfect product.