scholarly journals Reading and writing for complexity: Using key concepts and key terms to engage multilingual and other learners in scholarly conversations

Author(s):  
Anna Sophia Habib ◽  
Karyn Mallett ◽  
Sharon Doetsch-Kidder ◽  
James Savage ◽  
Esther Namubiru

Mason faculty across the curriculum have expressed concern about their multilingual students’ ability to understand and engage with complex course content (Zawacki and Habib, 2014). This interactive session by composition and language faculty in the INTO Mason undergraduate and graduate pathway programs is designed to respond to this faculty concern. The session will provide strategies for how to teach students to engage with complex course content through conscious attention to the key concepts in their course readings and the terms used to define, describe, expand, and limit those concepts. This approach serves as a foundation for reading comprehension, drawing connections between sources, building an object of study, limiting or shaping the scope of a research question, finding search terms, evaluating sources, and writing coherent academic paragraphs. Participants will learn tools for teaching deep reading that will allow students to confidently recognize the writing strategies of successful academic scholars. By drawing attention to the conventions and language patterns of academic writing, students can improve their comprehension of complex course content while developing skills for critical thinking, writing, and research. 

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-38
Author(s):  
Tatiana Pospelova

Self-editing skills are extremely important in foreign language learning; without them university students tend not to write appropriately in academic contexts. These skills are, however, often less developed in school graduates and it is thus essential to understand the challenges faced by university students. The present study was conducted to answer the research question: whether self-editing as a final component of written production can boost the writing micro skills of learners. It analyzes English-language essays written by 50 second-year ESL students in the Faculty of Economics at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, and reports on the most frequent errors committed in their formal writing. The aim of this study is to focus on the stage of self-editing and identify the role of self-editing in micro skills development. Findings reveal that students are most often weak at producing coherent and cohesive paragraphs; they also lack appropriate argumentation and are often inaccurate in using grammatical structures and lexis. Results also suggest, however, that L2 writing students can improve their own writing by transferring micro skills they learn when editing texts. The present study may contribute to teachers’ views on developing micro skills of student writers.


Planta Medica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thaise Boeing ◽  
Priscila de Souza ◽  
Luisa Mota da Silva ◽  
Arquimedes Gasparotto Junior

AbstractThis review focuses on the efficacy of herbal medicines for managing dyspepsia in humans and animals. Searches were conducted on the PubMed, Science Direct, and Medline databases, for publications in the last 3 years. In each database, the search terms used consisted of the 2 key terms describing the disorder and subtypes plus each of the terms relating to the therapy. The key terms used were “natural product” and “medicinal plant” in a cross-over with “dyspepsia” and “functional dyspepsia” (i.e., gastroprotection, Helicobacter pylori infection, prokinetic). We included all human and animal studies on the effects of herbal medicines reporting the key outcome of dyspepsia symptoms. Preclinical studies using critically validated models showed that most medicinal plants with gastroprotective action had antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-apoptotic, and antisecretory effects. Moreover, several species displayed anti Helicobacter pylori and prokinetic efficacy. The data availability of controlled clinical studies is currently minimal. The use of different methodologies and the minimal number of patients raise doubts about the effects of these preparations. Only adequate clinical trials with scientifically validated methods can determine whether different herbal medicines can be used as viable alternatives to the conventional pharmacological treatments used to control dyspepsia symptoms.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Listyani

One of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in the world of education is the implementation of online learning. Almost all teaching/learning activities must be changed and adjusted with the virtual classes. One among other activities commonly done in an English language education program is group work or collaborative work between or among students. Due to the pandemic situation, this particular activity should also be done online. This study aims to describe freshmen’s perspectives on collaborative work done in a Procedural Writing class. The teacher of the writing class randomly paired the students to work collaboratively. There is only one research question in this study: What challenges do Procedural Writing students experience in doing collaborative learning during the pandemic COVID 19? Data were derived from reflections that fourteen (14) Procedural Writing students at an English Language Education Program (ELEP), UKSW, Indonesia, wrote in the sixth week of Semester II/ 2020-2021 academic year, and from interviews with two participants who said that they were not happy with collaborative learning. Findings showed that in general, the freshmen felt that collaborative work helped them write better, they got more ideas, helped in their grammar, and exchanged knowledge. Only two students felt unhappy due to misunderstanding and ideas which were not delivered successfully. This study will hopefully be useful for writing teachers, practitioners in education, as well as students so that they will have a wider horizon of what writing students feel and experience in collaborative learning during this pandemic era.


Author(s):  
Ada Alexandrovna Bernatskaya

The purpose of the article is to outline the specifics of the discourse of information psychological war on the material of fiction.As a result of consistent interpretation of the key concepts as the basis of the linguo-philosophical aspect of the study, it is concluded that information psychological war as a socio-and linguo-cultural phenomenon responds to all the features and categories of discourse. The object of this research consists in the implementation of the information psychological war subtype, the dominant attribute of which is the material / object of study (a combination of aesthetic function with a number of social ones) and the content heterogeneity of the text as a condition for the potential realization of any discourses in it. The author raises an is sue about the scientific and ethical pro and contra of the research of fiction from the information psychological war perspective. The conclusion is made about the necessity of introducing the factor of “degree” of confrontation / struggle and, accordingly, the study of the fiction for the individual symptoms / features of information psychological war.The conditions and criteria for their establishment in specific practices are formulated.The article presents the targets of information psychological war in the discursive practices studied earlier by the author.In conclusion, the criteria for the selection of fiction texts in the aspect of information psychological war and the criteria for distinguishing information psychological war symptoms from social criticism are summarized.


2020 ◽  
Vol 122 (12) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Michelle P. Martin-Raugh ◽  
Harrison J. Kell ◽  
Richard J. Tannenbaum

Background/Context Rich classroom discussions are thought to provide several benefits to students, including improved connections to course content and general literacy development, and they provide a rich evidence stream from which teachers can make inferences about student learning to contribute to decisions about next teaching and learning steps. However, the way in which teachers perceive complex social situations characterized by student behaviors and aspects of the learning environment varies. Research has shown that expert teachers are better than novice teachers at identifying information that is important in complex social situations and that this expertise translates into improved teaching decisions. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This study examined whether situation perception is related to teachers’ performance when they lead classroom discussions. Research Design A total of 126 elementary school teacher candidates completed video-based situation perception and personality measures; scores were used to predict performance in simulations of facilitated classroom discussions. Findings/Results Situation perception was associated with candidates’ performance in discussions (r = .20, p < .05), and agreeableness was associated with situation perception (r = .21, p < .05) and performance in leading discussions (r = .19, p < .05). Conclusions/Recommendations Findings provide preliminary evidence to suggest that situation perception may be an important skill for teachers in leading discussions.


Business advances its business process in order to adapt to a constantly changing situation in economy and society. Analysis of buyers' burstiness assists in optimization of flow of business process in order to increase the profit. However, burstiness in quasi-group decision making in business settings has not attracted a lot of research efforts. The aim of the chapter is to explore the nature, origins, and impact of burstiness in quasi-group decision making in business settings underpinning implementation of an empirical study and elaboration of a new research question for further studies. The meaning of such key concepts as burstiness, mirror neurons, quasi-group, and decision making is studied. Moreover, the study demonstrates how the key concepts are related to the idea of business settings. The novel contribution of this manuscript is the newly defined research question on burstiness in quasi-group decision making in business settings. Directions of further research are proposed.


Author(s):  
Austin Michael ◽  
Sarah Carnochan

Practice Research in the Human Services: A University-Agency Partnership Model describes the array of research methods employed in practice research as a foundation for distinguishing this approach from other applied research frameworks. Chapter 9 builds upon the preceding chapters and provides a comparative analysis of the differences and similarities between practice research and the basic elements of participatory action research and program evaluation and intervention research. It describes and compares approaches to research question formulation, sources of literature and practice wisdom, data collection tools, data analysis and interpretation processes, research dissemination processes, and knowledge development processes. With these common components in mind, the analysis also addresses the key concepts of principles, process challenges, methodological challenges, and success factors that are associated with each of the frameworks.


2020 ◽  
pp. 123-158
Author(s):  
Sandra Halperin ◽  
Oliver Heath

This chapter shows how to develop an answer to a particular research question. It first considers the requirements and components of an answer to a research question before discussing the role of ‘theory’ in social science research, what a ‘theoretical framework’ is, and what a hypothesis is. It then explores the three components of a hypothesis: an independent variable, a dependent variable, and a proposition (a statement about the relationship between the variables). It also looks at the different types of hypotheses and how they guide various kinds of research. It also explains why conceptual and operational definitions of key terms are important and how they are formulated. Finally, it offers suggestions on how to answer normative questions.


Publications ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Morell ◽  
Susana Pastor Cesteros

Genre pedagogy plays an important role in helping graduate students to enter the discourse community of their fields. Although familiarity with research genres benefits graduate students, few studies have explored the influences of instruction on learners’ subsequent generic practices. In this study, we describe the genre-based approach used in a bilingual (English and Spanish) Applied Linguistics graduate course, which aimed to enhance students’ research genre awareness to allow them to be better able to confront their own work as investigators. The description of the course is followed by a study to determine if and how a research article discourse analysis task influenced the students’ academic writing in their own papers. Our research question was the following: To what extent can course instruction influence students’ academic writing? The study entails a survey to elicit students’ perspectives on the influence of the course and its tasks on their academic writing, as well as teachers’ comments on the students’ written work. Although learning to do research at the graduate level requires a broad range of competencies that go beyond genre awareness, the findings from the survey confirmed the positive effects of genre knowledge gains in accomplishing further research goals.


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