Critical thinking as mediation for genre awareness in EFL public speaking: a classroom discourse case study in China

Grounded in a sociocultural view of learning as socially mediated, this qualitative case study investigates how critical thinking (CT) functions as a mediational resource for developing genre awareness and audience-responsive speaking in an English Public Speaking (EPS) course at a Chinese university. Ten third-year English majors participated in an elective class that integrated CT-enhanced instruction: guided genre analysis, open-ended questioning, peer critique, and reflective writing, into speech preparation and delivery. Data included semi-structured interviews, focus-group discussions, classroom observations, and speech scripts collected at two time points. Thematic analysis, guided by an explicit discourse-analytic heuristic, shows a progression from noticing differences between academic and speech genres, through reconceptualization of communicative purpose, to recontextualization in students’ drafts and performances. Micro-analyses of classroom interaction and successive script versions illustrate how teacher prompts and peer talk mediated shifts toward conversational tone, direct audience address, and rhetorically flexible design (e.g., narrative openings, strategic questioning, acrostic and initialism patterning). Students reported greater confidence and ownership as genre knowledge informed intentional rhetorical and delivery choices. The study contributes mechanism-level evidence for CT as classroom mediation rather than a purely individual cognitive attribute, and it distills transferable design moves: contrastive genre analysis, CT-enhanced reflective prompts, peer-review protocols targeting genre moves, and multimodal experimentation. While bounded by a small, context-specific cohort, the analysis offers analytic generalization to exam-driven, teacher-centered EFL settings where academic norms often dominate oral discourse.

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