Friday 17 April 2015

Critical reflection

In ES1102, most of our reader response drafts are being reviewed by our peers and most of the essay drafts are reviewed by our tutor. 

When I receive feedback from my classmates, I accept it with an open mind. I feel that there is always room for improvement in my writing and every feedback counts. However, in the event the feedback given is inaccurate, it will result in a waste of time. That being said, the chances of it happening are quite slim as the English standard of all the students in ES1102 are about the same.

The peer and tutor feed backs are very helpful in improving my English writing skills. However, it seems that peer to peer feed backs are only helpful to a certain extent because most, if not all of the feedbacks given by my peers are not up to the tutor's standard. The same could also be said for me. When tasked to give feedback to my peer, I feel that my English writing skills are still inadequate to be correcting another of my classmate's English. The feedback given by me may be inaccurate and may even point out mistakes that are in fact, correct. There are two things that I can take away from the peer to peer review. One is that it forces me to think critically and spot any grammatical errors that my peers may have. This will allow me to improve my writing skills as it raises my awareness of grammatical errors and other errors the sentence may have. Another point is that it actually gives the tutor more time to review our essays and give even higher quality feedback for our essay drafts

APA citations, academic writing and editing are skills that I have picked up in ES1102. These are skills that will help me in GEK1549 and ES2331. They are critical writing and English communication modules that I will have to take in the next academic year.

In conclusion, I think this system of peer and tutor review is good in a sense it efficiently allocate the resources (time) in class. This is a good system and it should continue in ES1102 for the future classes.

1 comment:

  1. Thank you, Zhen Liang, for this well focused reflection. You contextualize the peer feedback within the course assignment ( though I'm not certain how accurate that is, since I gave you feedback on two drafts of your reader response -- one before the graded submission and one after -- and students did give feedback to each other on the essay's first draft). You then focus the discussion on the value of the peer and tutor feedback, and you express your opinions on the various aspects with good clarity. It’s interesting to me that you (like many other students) have doubts about not just your own ability to critique the language use of your peers, but also the feedback you got on your own language use. This is normal, of course. For that reason what is most important in the process seems to be the idea that you mention: “...it forces me to think critically and spot any grammatical errors that my peers may have. This will allow me to improve my writing skills as it raises my awareness of grammatical errors and other errors the sentence may have.” This is a good insight.

    I also appreciate the attention you give to how this review process might be helpful in your writing process in the future, though I wonder specifically how that might be true.

    Whatever the case, the best of luck as you continue your learning journey!

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