Improving ESP Students’ Writing Skill through Cooperative Learning Instruction and Peer Feedback Technique

Abstract

The need for learning English has increased lately due to its status as an important tool of communication in different domains along with being a lingua franca. Accordingly, university students’ demand for learning English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in their preparation for future career skills has risen. In this context, among the skills that students have to master in order to succeed in their studies and future jobs, writing is the most challenging. Consequently, recent empirical studies held in Algerian universities revealed that students suffer from low proficiency at writing and lack motivation towards learning this skill. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of incorporating peer feedback technique (PF) within cooperative learning (CL) instruction in ESP classrooms in enhancing students’ writing competency via reviewing the findings of previous theoretical and empirical research that tackled the subject. It also accounts for the efficiency of CL in promoting students’ motivation and attitudes towards learning the writing skill. The gathered data show that the integration of PF technique and CL instruction in the ESP course has a significant effect in enhancing ESP students’ writing competency and promoting their motivation and attitudes towards learning writing.