Examining Peer Review Bias in Evaluation Native and Non-Native English Academic Writings: The Case of Iranian TEFL Professors and Gradute Students[Latin Thesis]

Ehsan Nemati

The purpose of this mixed-methods research is twofold; firstly, to see whether or not advanced Iranian EFL speakers are capable of distinguishing between writings of Native speakers with those of Iranian university professors of Applied Linguistics. Secondly, to examine if advanced Iranian EFL speakers are biased towards Native speakers affiliated with prestigious Western academia. For the first phase, a list containing three abstracts written by renowned Native writers from the field of TESOL, and three written by Iranian non-Native university professors of Applied Linguistics was distributed among students and professors of Applied Linguistics. The abstracts were ordered randomly and any hints to the identity of the authors were removed. The 63 participants were asked to guess which abstract was written by a Native and which one by a non-Native speaker. The majority of the participants incorrectly guessed the author of four out of a total six abstracts. In the second phase, 75 Male and Female participants who were either MA students, PhD Students, or university professors of Applied Linguistics were asked to review two abstracts using an evaluation checklist. One abstract was indicated to have been authored by an Iranian with an Iranian university affiliation, while the other had a Native speaker s name affiliated with a highly prestigious Western university. A second group of 120 participants, reviewed the same abstracts, but with the author s name and affiliation interchanged. A comparison of the mean score of each abstract using a t-test revealed that the participants were significantly biased towards the abstracts with the Native speaker name and Western university title. Eight of the participants who were primarily university professors, were interviewed to ask what the differences between writings of Native and Iranian non-Native speakers are from their point of view. Through thematic analysis the major themes categorizing the differences were extracted, namely Proper use of collocations, Lacking a theoretical background, and Beating around the bush. The results of this study indicate that advanced Iranian EFL speakers are significantly biased in their overall evaluation of a research article and its quality of writing towards Native speakers of English affiliated with prestigious Western universities. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the quality of EAP writings of Iranian university professors of Applied Linguistics seems to be on par with EAP writings of Native English speakers, making it difficult for advanced Iranian EFL speakers to differentiate between them.