An investigation into Business students’ criticality in article critique assignments

Effective critiques involve an introduction to the scrutinised text, content summary, and cogent evaluations (Devira & Westin, 2021; Hartley, 2006). Yet, novice writers often overlook genre requirements (Howitt et al., 2022; Teramoto & Mickan, 2008), focus narrowly (List & Oaxaca, 2023), and thus lack criticality (Leong, 2013; Mirador, 2018). Previous research on students’ critiques mainly concentrated on the number and foci of critical evaluations. How well students incorporate and organise essential rhetorical moves has been overlooked, and students’ and instructors’ perceptions of critique writing were seldom surveyed. Addressing this gap, this study examines the rhetorical moves in 45 English article critiques by L2 Business undergraduates, complemented by ten interviews with students and instructors. The analysis reveals frequent omissions of two essential stages: an introduction contextualising the analysis and a conclusion recapitulating the evaluation. Moreover, descriptive summaries tend to dominate, while critiques are given sparsely. They are often unintegrated and disconnected from an overall judgment. The interview further identifies instructors’ diverging expectations for coherent writing and critical evaluations, potential reasons for students’ fragmented presentation and lack of evaluation. Explicit genre-based instructions are therefore necessary to fully exploit the pedagogical value of critique writing and nurture student competence in disciplinary discussions.