Dr. Ken Lau

Engaging reader through reflective writing: A scholarship-informed approach to criticality  

‘Criticality’ is increasingly commonplace in higher education, despite the fact that there appears not much consensus between assessors as to what defines it and how it should be operationalized. This talk intends to address this gap by making an attempt to textually reify ‘criticality’ as exemplified in written reflection completed by a group of Hong Kong undergraduate students for an out-of-class learning component of an ESP course. Written reflections which were judged by teachers as ‘critical’ were collected to form a corpus, and coded with reference to the Engagement resources under the APPRAISAL theory. Under Engagement, the linguistic resources deal with the alignment and dis-alignment between the reader and writer as well as the incorporation of monoglossic or heteroglossic voice (Martin & White, 2005, Mesa & Chang, 2010). The range and types of Engagement resources deployed seem to be contributing factors to the success of these reflective pieces.