Peer Review on Blog to Improve Critical Thinking and to Increase Motivation in French Writing

Abstract

In our experience on teaching the course "Reading and Writing in French" with 2nd and 3rd year Thai students, majoring in French at the Faculty of Humanities in Chiang Mai University, we noted several problems. First, the students wrote essays motivated only by the thought of making the submission where the instructors were the sole readers. Second, the fact that the students repeatedly made the same mistakes, implied that instructors’ feedbacks from previous submission had little effect. We then introduced a peer-review system through a blog in "Reading and Writing in French 2", a subsequence course. On the blog, students published their writing for their "classmate buddies" to read and review. The purpose of this research is to study how peer reviewing on the blog affected student's ability to criticize others compositions and students' motivation in writing. This research was conducted with 22 Chiang Mai University students who registered for "Reading and Writing in French 2" course over a period of 4 month (3 hours/week). The results shows that 1) online publication of students’ essays led them to write with motivations toward wider readers; 2) peer reviewing developed the students' critiquing skill. In addition, the introduction of the blog increased students' overall enthusiasm in classes.