Jurnal Bahasa dan Budaya China

The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 caught many people off guard. Many industries were forced to close or shift online, and in the education sector, learning continued despite class suspensions. During online learning, teachers of the Intermediate Chinese Writing course in the Chinese Language Department of Bunda Mulia University adopted peer review as a method for correcting students' assignments. Peer review, also known as peer feedback, is a technique used in writing instruction that benefits both first-language and second-language writing. Many studies have explored peer feedback to determine how to use it more effectively and to analyze the challenges it presents. This study examines the compositions of third- and fourth-year students in the Intermediate Chinese Writing course at Bunda Mulia University. Data were collected through student writings and questionnaires to understand the current state of peer review in intermediate Chinese writing assignments, the challenges students face, and the aspects they focus on during peer review. The findings indicate that the frequency of peer review declined over the semester due to restrictions imposed by teacher, limiting students’ opportunities to review their peers' work. Most students were able to provide feedback in five areas—semantics, mechanics, grammar, vocabulary, and discourse— with semantic corrections being the most common. The questionnaire results also showed that most students had a positive attitude toward peer review and hoped their peers would provide more grammar-related corrections. However, challenges were identified, such as students perceiving their classmates' compositions as already well-written and not requiring corrections or recognizing errors but not knowing how to correct them. Additionally, when revising their work based on peer feedback, many students doubted the accuracy of their peers' suggestions.