Open Access

Kirsty Weiler

• This study seeks to investigate whether training students in peer review improves their ability to identify both local and global level writing issues in texts. Undergraduate university students of English attending a one-semester writing course were asked to identify writing issues in sample texts at the beginning and end of the course. Results show that students improved in their ability to identify local or surface-level issues and had much lower rates of wrongly reporting text segments as incorrect. However, there was no improvement regarding identifying global or discourse-level issues. This points to the value of peer review for improving students’ language mechanics competence. However, it also shows that peer review is not a panacea: many students may still fail to develop their ability to assess content, organization, and cohesion in texts.