One way to examine whether or not there is a match between tutor intentions and student perceptions is to focus on the feedback given to students. This paper presents a move analysis of a corpus of written feedback provided to postgraduate students enrolled in a part-time Education program. This paper focuses on the discussion of the information types found in written feedback, the patterns of organising such information and the linguistic preferences that signal tutor intentions. The paper is relevant to researchers in discourse analysis and tutors providing assessment feedback.
This article discusses the results of an investigation into feedback commentaries provided by tutors to assignments of Masters in Education students in a pre-2002teaching and learning institution in the UK. The methodology adopted involved a qualitative discourse analysis of fifty feedback commentaries and made use of an inter-rating procedure involving three raters to identify tutor messages. The investigation revealed three groups of "moves" (tutor messages) in feedback. Additionally, the article argues that tutor messages can find theoretical anchor in Heron"s categories of counselling interventions, and that such categories can explain tutor intentions in feedback provision. The research concludes that the use of facilitative "moves" by tutors is a way for them to provide strong support to postgraduate students.
Perhaps one challenge facing postgraduate students is the writing of essays responding to a specific reading assignment. Such an essay requires students not only to summarize, but to engage in a discussion of the significant points of the article, pointing out its strengths as well as its weaknesses. This paper presents the results of an investigation on criticality in written assignments of postgraduate students in applied linguistics and TESOL. It will discuss: How 'critical' are students when writing their assignments? What kind of 'critical' comments are they able to offer? Seventy assignments in the form of essays were analysed, using corpora from three universities in Asia (2010-2014). The investigation adopted a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis. In the quantitative phase, the commenting or critiquing sentences were identified and counted vis-à-vis reporting/summarizing information. In the qualitative phase, the critiquing or commenting parts were further analysed, and identified according to their functions or 'moves'. The initial findings from the investigation include: (1) the almost equal proportion of commenting/critiquing and summarizing/reporting information in the assignments; (2) the identification of four broad functions for the commenting or critiquing information adopted by students, each of which has a number of possible specific 'moves' or categories; (3) presence of critique 'nodes' as distinguished from 'support' comments; and (4) the identification of at least four moves as the most recurrent and possibly obligatory categories. This investigation has unearthed issues that are definitely worth investigating as extensions of this research, and will be of interest (most especially) to genre analysts and teachers of writing. Most of all, it will be of interest to postgraduate students in applied linguistics/TESOL programmes who may be wondering about the level of criticality they exhibit when writing assignments for their courses.
The aims of this exploratory research on the academic writing apprenticeship of Chinese students are four-fold: (1) to determine what students thought were the purposes of academic writing, (2) to find out if students were adopting the preferred organisational patterns in writing argumentative essays, (3) to identify what their most common errors were when writing for academic purposes, and (4) to determine teacher perceptions of the academic writing program. The researcher surveyed 47 Chinese students, analysed the organisation of 31 sample essays, conducted an error analysis of 120 paragraphs, and interviewed 10 EAP writing teachers. Findings revealed that students generally associated academic writing with skills-based improvement rather than development of higher order skills as criticality; students acculturated to the preferred ways of organising essays; lexis posed the most serious issue for student writing; and teachers interviewed generally raised concerns about the effectiveness and direction of the writing program.One major consequence of globalisation is the increase in the number of extension campuses of western universities in different parts of the world. In this paper, an extension campus refers to an institution that operates as a branch of a university that is based in the west. Asia, in particular, has seen the growth of universities catering to the English language needs of students who would rather be educated on local shores, but within a generally western university model. This has been the case in China.Most extension campuses of western institutions of higher education offer degree programs featuring a final year of study in the main institution after two or three years of study in China. Studying in an institution following a Western model may pose challenges to students used to the local system of education. Challenges range from adapting to new ways of doing things to acculturating to new conventions and meeting the expectations of western education predominantly taught by an international faculty, most of whom are native English-speaking, if not educated in western countries.
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