Abstract:

The purpose of this study was to explore critical thinking skills in peer feedback for Business English writing in order to facilitate the quality of peer feedback and quality of Business English writing. “Critical peer feedback” was conceptualized with the integration of “critical thinking” and “peer feedback” in order to improve the quality of peer feedback. This study explored the process, content and factors of critical peer feedback through Qzone weblogs, and summarized the model of critical peer feedback. A qualitative case study was conducted with a group of six junior students majoring in Business English for one semester in a Chinese university. Three models of critical thinking including Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, Paul-Elder Model and Reichenbach’s Six Steps Model, were transferred to the participants in the workshops. Three kinds of data including semi-structured interview transcripts, six writing assignments and artifacts of critical peer feedback, were analyzed by QSR NVivo 8. The findings revealed that the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy is more acceptable for the beginners of critical peer feedback which provides a six-step model of critical thinking. The process of critical peer feedback in online context was summarized as four steps- “intake”, “critical thinking”, “output”, and “post-output”. Each of the four steps had several mental processes in critical peer feedback. This study may be significant for the knowledge of higher-order peer feedback to facilitate the quality of higher-level writing.

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