Investigating the Perception of Student Teachers in Hong Kong Towards Peer-editing

Despite its popularity in other countries, like America and Canada, peer editing is considered quite ‘avant-garde’ in the Hong Kong academic community and has never been a common practice in local secondary schools’ classrooms. This paper will try to unveil the reasons why a number of Hong Kong English teachers are reluctant to use peer-editing. It is hypothesized that any positive experience of peer editing among teachers themselves is an impetus to use peer editing in class. Based on this hypothesis, a brief survey was carried out to examine a group of fifteen student-teachers’ attitudes who had taken a second language writing course in a graduate school’s setting, in which peer-editing activities of each other’s work over six weeks, in six one-hour blocks, were conducted. Reservations concerning adopting peer-editing were observed among the student-teachers’ future classes. All forms of resistance and reservations, according to the participants, were claimed to derive from external constraints. A closer look, however, suggests that none of these given constraints were purely external. Rather, I believe these teachers might have either been prejudiced or neglected ‘locus of control’, which refers to the possible control and power a teacher possess over their classes. This paper looks at both the teachers’ personalities, characterized by skeptical beliefs in peer-editing, and the external constraints from the local social situations that contribute to the resistance and reluctance of teachers implementing peer editing in Hong Kong’s education institutions.