**1. Introduction**

Academic writing plays a vital role in higher education worldwide. Many university programs and courses often require students to write a wide variety of coursework and assignments. Typically, university students write assignments, and only their teachers read and assess them. However, written genres such as graduation theses and research articles have different readers whose expectations vary. In any genre, writers are expected to write a target text for readers (e.g., [1–3]). More precisely, writers need to consider readers' expectations about the text they compose and adjust their writing appropriately to meet them.

In English as a second language (ESL) and foreign (EFL) contexts, first-year university students are taught academic writing and its rules in English language classes. This applies to the EFL context in Japan, where this study was conducted. Not surprisingly, it is challenging for novice writers to understand academic writing rules because not many students experience academic writing or learn rules of citation before entering university. For instance, it is common for first-year university students to be unfamiliar with an essay, the main genre in universities, that is, a piece of writing that presents information or the writer's ideas logically in the structure of an introduction, a body, and a conclusion [4]. Furthermore, first-year university students tend not to be aware of their writing features and behavior, partly because of limited experience of writing and receiving feedback from teachers and peers.

In teaching and learning academic writing, peer feedback plays a vital role (e.g., [5]), which is often used complementarily with teacher feedback. In peer feedback, student writers exchange their drafts with peers in the form of written, oral, or a combination of written and oral feedback [6]. Peer feedback is regarded as peer support [7] because peers actively take part in giving feedback on drafts and helping peers to improve them. Activities involving peers are named differently among researchers depending on the purpose or focus of the activities although they are called interchangeably: peer revision [8], peer review [2, 9], peer evaluation [10], and peer response [1, 11–14]. While peer evaluation emphasizes judgment or grading, "peer feedback stresses the provision of rich feedback without grades or formal evaluations ([6], p. 82)."

Peer feedback has been used and valued in various classroom settings (e.g., [7, 9–10, 15]) owing to many merits and positive effects on students' development of writing in a first language (L1) and a second language (L2). More specifically, it creates opportunities for students to learn from each other and collaborate. For instance, Rollinson examined the effect of peer feedback in the ESL writing class and argued that peer readers can provide useful feedback on peers' writing if they are trained and peer feedback sessions are set up properly [16]. Additional advantages are related to the development of writing fluency, mitigation of writing anxiety, and improvement in the sense of readers [10].

Crinon and Marin stressed the important role readers play in peer feedback [7]. They investigated how young French learners' L1 writing ability was developed in collaborative revision activities through peer feedback. This study revealed that the readers of texts played a tutor's role and benefited from peer feedback more than the writers of the texts who were given feedback comments. This finding indicated that the readers perceived and learned various generic and textual features from peers' texts, which enabled them to improve their texts in terms of coherence and quality [7]. Similarly, it was suggested that students may become critical readers by reading and analyzing peers' texts in peer feedback, and consequently, they are likely to read and revise their texts critically [16]. This implies that peer feedback plays a crucial role in the development of critical reading and writing skills.

In EFL contexts, peer readers' comments in peer feedback were investigated with a focus on Japanese university students' writing and revision activities [17]. The results showed that the content of texts was the most frequent aspect of peer feedback comments, followed by vocabulary. Another study that examined peer feedback by Japanese university students indicated that peer readers focused on the writing style, which is a local issue [14], more than on the so-called global issues of content or organization of writing [18]. However, the study revealed that students with higher writing ability were able to take peers' advice on content and organization in revising their drafts. Ono found that the number of praises was higher than that of shortcomings in Japanese university students' feedback comments [19]. Moreover, the most frequent aspect in their feedback comments

### *Approach to Writing from Readers' Perspectives: Incorporating Self-Evaluation, Peer Feedback… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100308*

was the content of texts, followed by language [19]. These findings are almost in accordance with Hirose's study [17], but incongruent with Sawaya and Yokoyama's [18]. Furthermore, skilled writers and less-skilled writers were found to differ in the way they made comments [19]. The former tended to clearly explain reasons or justification for praises or shortcomings and explicitly suggest ideas for revisions. In contrast, the latter hardly provided suggestions for improvement of texts, especially in terms of content and organization. These findings suggest that teachers should encourage students to focus on global issues instead of minor local issues, make specific, constructive comments, describe reasons for praises and shortcomings, and provide suggestions for the improvement of peers' texts.

Students' perceptions of peer feedback have been investigated, and the results have not reached a consensus. This is because peer feedback is conducted differently depending on individual teaching contexts, and teachers' instructions may also vary depending on the purpose and focus of this activity. For example, 12 high-proficient ESL graduate students from different majors participated in peer review sessions and regarded them as useful [2]. Importantly, the students carefully selected which comments they should incorporate into their revisions, and the inclusion of peer feedback in the teaching of L2 writing was supported. Furthermore, a questionnaire survey of 121 first- and second-year ESL students in Hong Kong and Taiwan revealed that most (93%) had positive views on peer feedback as a form of feedback [20]. In contrast, Nelson and Carson found that 11 ESL students with Chinese or Spanish language backgrounds did not perceive peer feedback positively and preferred teacher feedback [21]. However, those students valued peers' negative feedback that specified problematic areas of their writing, whereas they perceived comments regarding grammar and sentences as relatively ineffective. Thus, peer feedback is not always received positively by students, and peers' comments concerning global issues are likely to be seen as useful by students.

Considering mixed findings of previous studies, more studies need to determine L2 university students' perceptions of peer feedback, especially in EFL contexts. It is also worth investigating how first-year university students, who tend to have limited knowledge and experience in academic writing, perceive peer feedback. Moreover, it is questionable whether they can identify strengths and weaknesses in their writing. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the perceptions of Japanese first-year university students' writing and revising essays through self-evaluation, peer feedback, and self-reflection. Four research questions were formulated for this study.

