‘You need to criticize, not just summarize!’

Abstract

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.

Teaching through written assignments in the Open University: an approach to the “voice” of postgraduate students on Instructional Discourse

“…In this case the tutors should provide the students with the necessary cognitive and psychological support during their educational journey with the HOU so as to facilitate their studies at the institution. The findings of this study are in accordance with the findings of other studies that reveal the benefits that emerge for the academic success of the students from the detailed, analytic and informative feedback on their written assignments (Chokwe, 2015;Mirador, 2018;Poulos & Mahony, 2008;Price, Handley, & Millar, 2011;Simpson, 2018). The students of the sample during their learning journey at the HOU encountered tutors whose pedagogical choices diverged from the institutional habitus of the institution as much at the stage prior to the writing of the assignments as after it.…”

“…This is because they constitute the chief means of formulating assessment that contributes to how students are informed of their progress, and they are closely linked to the phenomenon of dropping-out (Chetwynd & Dobbyn, 2011;Gregori, P., Martinez, & Moyano-Fernandez, 2018;Maliotaki, 2019;Pierrakeas, Xenos, Panagiotakopoulos, & Vergidis, 2004;Simpson, 2018). Scientific literature on written assignments in open distance learning is rich and focuses on detecting teachers' and learners' views on questions of their effect on the course of students' long distance studies, the procedure and the difficulties encountered in preparing them, as well as the quality and usefulness of feedback for 10 the students (see: Blair & McGinty, 2013;Calfoglou, Georgountzou, Hill, & Sifakis, 2011;Chatzinikita & Vorvulas, 2019;Cokwe, 2015;Kofou, 2019;Kreonidou & Kazamia, 2019;Lizzio & Wilson, 2008;Mirador, 2018;Poulos & Mahony, 2008;Walker, 2009). A gap in research is observed in the sociological approach to the institution of written assignments that constitute a chief element for the formation of pedagogical practices in the Open Universities (Koustourakis, 2006(Koustourakis, , 2015Koustourakis, Panagiotakopoulos, & Vergidis, 2008).…”

Feedback in Postgraduate Online Learning: Perspectives and Practices

“…What is also necessary to note, for our purposes here, is that the evolution of postgraduate habits of mind typically represents, for the students concerned, a metamorphosis-a step-change in learning demands from those encountered in undergraduate studies. The 'challenging negotiations' this transition can call for (Tobbell et al 2010) have been highlighted in various studies (Heussi 2012;West 2012;Mirador 2018;Bamber et al 2019;Coneyworth et al 2020), running counter to the pervasive assumption that the transition to postgraduate study will be unproblematic. Indeed, examining the challenges feedback presents, Scott et al (2014: 134) observed:…”

“…These ways of thinking and practising were not confined to knowledge and understanding, but could also take in subject-specific skills and know-how, an evolving familiarity with the Feedback in Postgraduate Online Learning: Perspectives and Practices values and conventions governing scholarly communication within the relevant disciplinary and professional community, and even a nascent meta-understanding of how new knowledge within the field was generated. (Hounsell and Anderson 2008: 72) Like the latter, postgraduate habits of mind are not generic or universal features of study at that level but are rather, ways of thinking and practising characteristic of, and particular to, a given subject and/or professional domain, and encompass programme-specific concerns such as, in medicine, clinical reasoning (Ajjawi and Higgs 2008;Sandhu 2018); the ability to discuss how theory can inform professional practice, in medicine (Aitken et al 2019) and in education (Turner and Simon 2013); critique as a 'way of knowing' in design (Gray 2019); integrating policy, practice, theory and research in social work (Schneller and Brocato 2011); ethical decision-making (Magalhães-Sant'Ana 2014) in veterinary practice; critical thinking in education (Rattray 2017;Mirador 2018); or context-sensitive communication and messaging of scientific knowledge in coastal management (Treby and Shah 2005).…”