An Exploration of the Effect of Time Pressure and Peer Feedback on the Iranian EFL Students' Writing Performance

Writing is one of the most important skills in second language teaching, learning and assessment. Consequently, it is crucial to enhance writing ability. According to several studies, one beneficial way is using peer feedback. Furthermore, time pressure is one of those non-linguistic factors which may affect the students’ writings. This study was an attempt to investigate the effect of time pressure and peer feedback on Iranian EFL students' writing performance. To conduct this study, 69 female and male students received an Oxford Proficiency Test (OPT) and 60 homogeneous participants whose scores ranged from 150 to 169 (advanced level) were selected. They were divided into three groups of twenty and asked to write about the same topic under three different conditions. In the first group the participants had timed exam without peer feedback for 40 minutes, the second group had timed exam with peer feedback for 40 minutes, and the last group had untimed exam with peer feedback. Finally, results of a two-way ANOVA test indicated that the best performance is related to the group who received peer feedback under time pressure; next, the group who received peer feedback without any time pressure, and the last group who wrote without peer feedback under time pressure. To recap, the results illustrated that peer feedback had a significant effect, while time pressure did not have any effect on writing performance. Furthermore, it was revealed that there was no interaction between peer feedback and time pressure.