Humanities School, Universidad de Murcia
“Academic writing and research may be knotty and strange, remote and insular, technical and specialized, forbidding and clannish—but that’s because academia has become that way, too. Today’s academic work, excellent though it may be, is the product of a shrinking system. It’s a tightly-packed, super-competitive jungle in there”.
Read the article by Joshua Rothman
A Beginner’s Guide to Writing in English for University Study. Starts January 19.
Exploring English: Language and Culture. Starts Feb. 2.
Cultural Studies and Modern Languages: an Introduction. Starts Feb 16.
The next session of Writing in the Sciences starts Tuesday September 2 on OpenEdX.
Registration is here: https://class.stanford.edu/courses/Medicine/Sci-Write/Fall2014/about
From the Cambridge Extra blog:
In our state-of-the-art article ‘Plagiarism in second-language writing’ we trace the development of plagiarism as a research topic in L2 writing, discussing the received view of plagiarism as a transgressive act and alternative understandings which have been presented in the L1 and L2 writing literature.
The article then surveys the rapidly growing body of work relating to plagiarism, primarily from an L2
writing/applied linguistic perspective, identifying salient themes. One of these is the role of intention. Significant evidence exists to support the idea, familiar to many writing teachers, that plagiarism sometimes has causes other than a desire to cheat in order to receive unearned academic credit.
Access the article here.
Published by opencolleges.edu.au :
Those are the four main styles used when writing professionally or academically. Students will need to use one of these standard styles, so it’s important that you at least have a familiarity with them.
That’s why we created this webpage, which pulls together style guide resources from all over into one convenient place and gives you the information you really need to know.
Modern Language Association (MLA) Resource Guide
American Psychological Association (APA) Resource Guide
Chicago / Turabian Resource Guide
Council of Science Editors Style (CSE) Resource Guide
This cites “The types and effects of native speakers’ feedback on CMC“ Language, Learning & Technology article.
This exploratory computer assisted-language learning (CALL) study used a computer-mediated communication (CMC) interface to allow English as a foreign language (EFL) writing students in classes at two universities to give each other anonymous peer feedback about essay-writing assignments reacting to selected news stories. Experts also provided feedback review. Follow-up questions were facilitated by the interface.
The students felt that they benefitted from the instructional design, but found that the peer review focused most on things like grammar whereas the experts focused on organization and structure, making the expert feedback more valuable. Researchers found that more complex issues discussed in the source news articles resulted in lower outcome scores, based on a rubric, than did source material simpler issues.
The study also compared performance of students with higher and lower ability and evaluated the quality of the review comments. Conclusions and recommendations for practice are provided. This study is significant because it used CALL/CMC technology to provide online interactivity between students and reviewers in an open forum that allowed students to seek follow-up clarification to the comments of reviewers. The review process, therefore, was not a one-way anonymous communication from reviewer to student but rather allowed interactive discussion of the points and suggestions made by the reviewers.
DOI:10.1080/09588221.2014.937442
Authors: Wen-Chi Vivian Wua, Emily Petita & Ching-Huei Chenb