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Abstract While online peer review’s impact on EFL argumentative writing has been widely studied, its role in shaping narrative writing remains underexplored. This study investigated changes in cohesion and coherence in EFL learners’ narrative writing following online peer review. Thirty first-year English majors in China completed a two-round narrative writing task on the Peerceptiv platform. Subjective peer ratings and objective Coh-Metrix indices were analyzed. Due to non-normal data distribution, bootstrapped paired-samples t -tests with 10,000 resamples were employed to compare writing drafts. Results revealed selective changes in cohesion and coherence indices. Subjective Peerceptiv ratings showed significant gains in Topic Sentence and Organization (cohesion), and in Emotion and Concluding Part (coherence), suggesting improvements in local and meaning-focused aspects in narrative writing. However, Focus and Transition remained unchanged, indicating EFL learners’ difficulty with text-level control. Objective Coh-Metrix analysis revealed increased use of overall (CNCALL) and causal connectives (CNCCaus), and decreased adjacent sentence stem overlap (CRFSO1) under cohesion indices, suggesting more lexical variety. Only causal cohesion (SMCAUSr) improved among coherence indices; Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and other situation model measures remained stable, reflecting limited influence on deeper semantic integration. These findings suggest that peer review may support cohesion and coherence development in EFL narrative writing, especially when supported by rubrics that balance local and global features. Given the limited change in deeper semantic coherence and the study’s exploratory design, future research with extended interventions and comparison groups is recommended.