I. Build up your vocabulary

A) Study the words and expressions for ordering and arranging the parts of a report.

B) Fill the gaps with the words the meaning of which is given in brackets.

1. I shall ____ to this issue later in this essay. (come back to)

2. The question of monetary union____ us to our next topic: the idea of a federal Europe. (means we’ve arrived at)

3. Smith just ____ upon the subject of Internet policing but does not go into it in depth. (mentions only briefly)

4. I shall attempt to____ the problem of censorship later in this discussion. (attend to, consider)

5. Psychological factors in learning foreign language are____ this essay. (outside of the topic area)

6. I shall discuss the poets in____ order, that is to say I shall comment on the least important ones first.

7. In the final analysis, we are____ that there is little hope of stamping out illegal drugs altogether. (have no choice but to believe)

8. This unit has attempted to____ a range of useful vocabulary for formal writing. (give all the necessary information about)

II. Analysis

The following method sections are taken from the articles published in different professional journals. Read the one which is closer to the field you are majoring in and write out the verbs describing procedural steps.

a)“Canadian Journal of Communication”

Methodology

… This study analyzes Canadian press coverage of the Middle East during two contrasting periods. The first is the last quarter of 1985, a time of hostage-takings, bombing and killings perpetrated largely by Palestinians and their supporters. The second period is from December 1987 to September 1988 and is one dominated by the Palestinian uprising in Gaza and the West Bank.

For the last quarter of 1985, we content analyzed five major Canadian daily newspapers: the “Chronicle Herald” (Halifax), “Le Devoir” (Moutreal), the “Globe and Mail” (Toronto), the “Sun” (Vancouver). These papers were chosen on the basis of their national and regional importance and in order to reflect both official languages. Beginning with a randomly selected date within the first three days of October, we sampled each of these papers every third day until December 31. Each of these issues was examined in the entirety for material dealing with the Middle East and all itemps were coded under several categories of analysis…

b) “Contemporary educational psychology”

Method

Subjects

One hundred and sixty three Portuguese students from grades 8 and 12 participated in the study. All of the students had some prior training in science. The two experimental paragraphs that were used in this study respectively deal with the solution of oxygen in water and the scattering of light in clouds. This specific information had not been taught to the students, according to the information provided by the teachers.

Students from each grade level were randomly distributed in two conditions, as explained below, corresponding to length of the causal chain: short vs. long. An adjustment in the number of students was made after having gathered the responses. In order to obtain an equal number of 40 students in every condition at each grade level, results from one student randomly chosen were discarded from one of the groups, and those corresponding to two students in another group.

Materials

Two short paragraphs, "Clouds" and "Dissolved Oxygen” that had already been used in a previous experiment on question asking (Costa et al., 2000) were adapted to be used in this study. In addition, each paragraph included one control sentence that was the same in the two conditions. It was used to adjust for biases in judging comprehensibility, as explained below.

Procedure

The experiment was carried out during a 50min regular class period. One of the researchers randomly (according to position in the classroom) provided students with booklets that included the two paragraphs, either in the short or long versions, and two blank pages where students could write questions. These booklets had instructions to carry out the task on the first page. The students were instructed to read the paragraph, one at a time, ask in writing any question that they may have on the paragraph, and to rate the comprehensibility of each key sentence on a five point scale, from Very Poor (1) to Very Good (5). The students had to rate the comprehensibility of the control sentence too. Ratings of the key sentences were calculated relative to the comprehensibility rating of the control sentence. Thus, any bias toward high or low ratings caused by personal factors was corrected.

c) “Social Problems”

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 1127