The purpose of this study is to describe and examine the negotiations of the peer response groups in an EFL writing classroom in order to understand what actually happens when students tutor one another on their writing products. The negotiations of fourteen college juniors in either groups of 2 or 3 about one in-class composition were audiotaped and analyzed. The result shows that students resorted to different language functions (inform, elicit, direct, restate) to achieve their purposes of communication, The fact that the highest proportion of negotiations dealt with the subject matter in the essays and a considerable amount of the talk was about the structure of the paragraph or the text suggests that if well informed and sufficiently trained, students are able to focus on global discourse issues such as content and organization of the essay, thereby countering the common belief that students can, at best, do sentence level corrections in peer response groups.
