'Try to Say Things Straight, without Being Offensive, Obviously': Investigating the Pragmatics of Online Peer Review

The aim of this chapter is to explore the pragmatic strategies adopted by university language students in online comments on their peers’ written production in an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing module. The paper addresses the following research questions: the extent to which learners mitigate the criticism in their peer review messages with praise for their peers’ work; whether students tend to use more positive or negative politeness strategies in their comments; whether they transfer the use of hedging expressions (see, for example, Myers 1989) from their academic writing to their peer reviews; what kinds of messages the learners themselves wish to receive from their peers in terms of pragmatics. In order to answer these questions, the chapter examines a corpus of 170 online peer review messages collected between 2015 and 2017 along with a number of replies to a task in which students were required to define “good” peer review. The findings reveal that in the vast majority of texts (91%) students include both compliments and criticism, while it is extremely rare for peers to give merely critical comments (1%). The results of the study may be useful to instructors of academic writing who would like to address the issue of the pragmatic features of online peer review, while at the same time allaying some of the students’ possible fears in commenting on their peers’ work.