The either/or choice between teacher and peer feedback in Zhang’s question was a concern for Jacobs and his colleagues (1998), who claimed that peer and teacher feedback could co-exist, and thus forcing students to make a choice between these two types of feedback might be misleading. They, then, asked 121 Chinese ESL college students (from Hong Kong and Taiwan), who had previously experienced teacher and peer feedback in their writing courses, to write in response to two options which focused exclusively on whether they liked or disliked peer feedback:

1. I prefer to have feedback from other students as one type of feedback on my writing.

2. I prefer not to have feedback from other students on writing.

(Jacobs et al. 1998, pg.311)

The results showed that 112 out of the 121 participants expressed their preference for having peer feedback as a form of feedback because of its benefits in spotting problems they themselves might have missed and the value of reading peers’ writing. In this way, Jacobs and his colleagues argued to take a middle path on the issue of feedback: to combine teacher-, peer- and self-directed feedback in a judicious way via a well-planned implementation process of integrating peer feedback into writing instructions, sharing teachers’ own writing experiences, providing peer review sheets, training students in how to work with peers, and using peer feedback in different writing phases.

In a response to Jacobs and his colleagues’1998 study, Zhang (1999) defended his either/or choice between teacher and non-teacher feedback, arguing that:

 The options used in the Jacobs et al (1998) questionnaire did not allow students to spell out their preferred type of feedback; therefore, their results could not be used to refute his 1995 finding;

 Studies which did not use the either/or choice, such as Nelson and Carson (1998), produced similar results to his 1995 finding. In this sense, their criticism of his question as misleading could not support their criticism of his finding;

 That students would like to have peer feedback as a type of writing feedback did not mean they preferred peer feedback over teacher feedback;

 Jacobs et al (1998)’s finding, that the majority of students expected to have teacher feedback to assist peer feedback, indicated that students preferred teacher feedback over peer feedback. This actually suggested the convergence of the findings in these two studies.  

With reference to these arguments, Zhang (1999) once again asserted that peer feedback was less popular than teacher feedback among ESL student writers. A similar claim was made by Yang et al’s (2006) study of 12 Chinese EFL college students, who fully confirmed the value of teacher feedback for the improvement of their final writings whereas held reservations about the value of peer feedback. The most salient reason reported by learners for their preference for teacher feedback was that teachers were more experienced and knowledgeable and thus more trustworthy in providing valid written feedback than students who might provide “incorrect” (Yang et al. 2006, pg.189) feedback. In this sense, we can observe that the empirical studies commonly suggested that ESL/EFL learners prioritised teacher feedback to peer feedback for their writing.

(2) the provision and effectiveness of peer feedback relative to teacher feedback

In terms of the provision and effectiveness of peer feedback were explored, it seems to be a convention of using teacher feedback as the baseline for comparison. Yang et al’s (2006) study of twelve Chinese college EFL learners in a Chinese university reported that the teacher provided more written feedback instances (N=235) than the peer reviewers (N=225) on the same students’ writing assignments. Caulk (1994) observed that the peer assessors focused more on content like ordinary readers whereas she, as the writing tutor, paid more attention to forms and clarity given their importance for academic writing. In accord with this, Yang et al (2006) also noted that peer feedback was more meaning-oriented, whereas teacher feedback was balanced on both surface (e.g. grammar, vocabulary and sentence structure) and meaning-oriented (e.g. content) changes. In view of the type of feedback, Caulk (1994) observed that teacher feedback was more generalised without supplying revision strategies (i.e. indirect feedback) whereas peer feedback was more specified via providing specific revisions strategies (i.e. direct feedback).