Fostering interdisciplinary exchanges through peer feedback to improve academic writing skills

Abstract

peer reviewedThe University of Luxembourg is quadrilingual, with mono-, bi-, tri- and quadrilingual programmes in French, German, English and Luxembourgish. PhD students can choose to write their thesis in any one of these languages. Two teaching approaches are practised for thesis writing: critiquing groups, in which doctoral students read and comment on the writing of other students, and productivity groups, in which students write alongside each other (Guerin & Aitchison, 2023). Agreeing to submit a piece of writing to peers can help students apply information obtained from theoretical reading to their research results. But in the course of this feedback on written work, which is a stage-by-stage, multilayered process (Becker, 1986), general inconsistencies in reasoning and local misconceptions remain. The peer proofreading process takes place among students at the same hierarchical level, which facilitates discussions on the meaning of passages in the text (Lejot, 2017). But some students point to the fact that peers are not sufficiently qualified to give comments comparable to those provided by higher education professors (Rollinson, 2005). The interdisciplinary nature of texts written by different PhD students also contributes to the lack of qualification of proofreaders. This article will address the following research question: What impact do interdisciplinarity and multilingualism have on peer proofreading? To answer the question, we will analyse questionnaires completed by 50 doctoral students who participated in an academic writing course including peer proofreading. We will analyse the responses to the questionnaire and the feedback given on the course. First results suggest that the interdisciplinary nature of peer proofreading, in other words doctoral students in medicine, physics, political science, education and literature reading each other’s texts, initially gives rise to scepticism among participants before ultimately leading to discussions and explanations of respective discipline-specific conventions, and therefore a better awareness and understanding of one’s own ways of working. We will suggest applicable recommendations to promote favourable conditions for our PhD students to write in a multilingual environment, thereby improving the sense of belonging to an academic community (Vincent et al, 2022)