User:Elyandy/Academic Writing notes

thesis statement charactererictics: -is not a fact, but is an asseertion about facts - takes sonme sort of stand -justifies discussion -express one main idea -is specific An analysis of the college admission process reveals one challenge facing counselors: accepting students with high test scores or students with strong extracurricular backgrounds. The paper that follows should:

explain the analysis of the college admission process explain the challenge facing admissions counselors Example of an expository (explanatory) thesis statement:

my example:For many years it has been investigated the acquisition of a second language at different ages. The differences and similarities between children and adults when learning a second language it has become an important topic for linguistics, psycholinguistics, and pedagogies in the last 6 decades. First of all one of the crucial topics has been the different kinds of methods that have been used at different students' ages. Some of the most controversial and investigated methods that researches relate with the acquisition of a second language with children and adults are natural methods like direct method .

the use of L2 teaching methods a way to improve the l2 acquistion in children and adults

Research Question: characteristics: Do I know the field and its literature well? What are the important research questions in my field? What areas need further exploration? Could my study fill a gap? Lead to greater understanding? Has a great deal of research already been conducted in this topic area? Has this study been done before? If so, is there room for improvement? Is the timing right for this question to be answered? Is it a hot topic, or is it becoming obsolete? Would funding sources be interested? If you are proposing a service program, is the target community interested? Most importantly, will my study have a significant impact on the field? A Research Question is a statement that identifies the phenomenon to be studied. For example, “What resources are helpful to new and minority drug abuse researchers?”

my example:Can it been used the same teaching methods, strategies, techniques for children and adults?.

variables Independent Variables (IV) & Dependent Variables (DV)

In an experiment, the independent variable is the variable that is varied or manipulated by the researcher, and the dependent variable is the response that is measured.

An independent variable is the presumed cause, whereas the dependent variable is the presumed effect. example: . "There will be a statistically significant difference in graduation rates of at-risk high-school seniors who participate in an intensive study program as opposed to at-risk high-school seniors who do not participate in the intensive study program." (LaFountain & Bartos, 2002, p. 57)

IV: Participation in intensive study program. DV: Graduation rates.

Annotated Bibliography

An annotated bibliography is a bibliography that gives a summary of the research that has been done. It is still an alphabetical list of research sources. In addition to bibliographic data, an annotated bibliography provides a brief summary or annotation.

The annotation usually contains a brief summary of content and a short analysis or evaluation. Depending on your assignment you may be asked to reflect, summarise, critique, evaluate or analyse the source.

The purpose of annotations is to provide the reader with a summary and an evaluation of the source. In order to write a successful annotation, each summary must be concise. An annotation should display the source's central idea(s) and give the reader a general idea of what the source is about.

Commentaries

Good examples in each case, just in the thesis statement i'm not shure but it looks like an introduction, i thik that the example could be just a sentence that help us to focus our attention, but anyways the idea that you have there is very interesting and useful to develop a topic, so very good, also you can write a thesis statement taking information from the first three lines of your paragraph.

In your investigation of the research question, i consider that in the first lines you have extra examples that you can move to the section below, but anyways those examples are beign used to make the topic understandable which is good for the explanation, but you need to add information that explains the purpose of a research question, because there are almost only examples.

Good explanation about the variables, just provide examples of variable and expand the information

Do you think that instructional method is effective in producing learning in the classroom? According to Robert Barr “to say that the purpose of colleges is to provide instructions like… the purpose of the medical care is to fill hospital beds” , this sentence highlights that maybe the instructional methods is not the best choice for teachers but we need to understand its features before giving an opinion. Thinking about effective methods used in the classroom , it always has been a controversial topic, now Robert Barr puts under criticism the instructional method used at collages that will be discussed during this article.

It is important because it is something that is happening nowadays not only in colleges, but also in high school, secondary school and elementary school. The teachers do not pay attention if the student produce the learning “ now we see that our mission is not instruction but rather that of producing learning with every student by whatever means work best” (Barr, 1995) all the teachers around the world need to realize if our students are producing the learning, in other words if they are really learning what we teach them , the instructional method is under criticism because we do not if this method is working as Robert Barr (1995) says “passive lecture-discussion format where faculty talk and most students listen” do not expose if students are producing what they are acquiring in the classroom.

Undoubtedly the main objective of teaching is to make students produce; there are two kinds of teaching, one is the instruction paradigm (traditional teaching) and the other is learning paradigm. The first one is not the right for teaching “it consists of matter dispensed or delivered by an instructor. The chief agent in the chief agent in the process is the teacher who delivers knowledge; students are viewed as passives vessels, ingesting knowledge fro recall on tests” (Barr, 1995) here the teacher is the most important person but it has not to be like this. According to Robert Barr (1995) learning paradigm recognize that the chief agent in the process is the learner” what importance has, if the students are just in the classroom to follow orders, and just receive information if they cannot produce or take a place in the class.

As a conclusion it could be said that the most appropriate method to teach in any level of school, is the one that make students produce; because in this way the teacher can notice if the students are learning something, in the other hand with a traditional method the teacher only focus in do his/her work and to fill the empty chairs in the classroom. As we can see the teacher has to be seen such as a facilitator, not only the one that talks all the time, and only check understanding through tests. Lastly all the schools have to take into consideration, that if they want to the students really learn, they have to make them produce the learning, and what better with the learning paradigm instead of the instruction paradigm.

bibliography

Nunan D., (1999) Second Language Teaching and Learning, An international Thomson Publishing company Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

This book is going to be very useful for me because it contains topics like “is learning a second language like learning a first?”; also it talks about the chronological age in the acquisition of a second language, this is really helpful for me because it gives the idea if it is true that exist a critical stage in learning a second language, for all these reasons it gives a great value to my literature review because it answers many questions that I wrote at the beginning of the essay, also I can contrast this book with the others ones because, I could realize the differences and similarities of the ideas and believes about the same topic.

Han Z., (2004) Fossilization in adults second language acquisition, Buffalo N.K.
This book is very useful for me because it contains key topics for my research about why for adults is difficult to learn a second language and to achieve perfect grammar or pronunciation in that foreign language , and for children is easier, this book talks about fossilization that is crucial topic, also includes subtopics like critical period hypothesis etc. for all the reasons I motioned before, the information of this book is going to give a great value to my literature review because it will give evidence about the topic I want to talk about. Also this book contains a lot of topics about linguistics I think this book addressed to people studying linguistics or people studying languages.

Reagan T. , (2002) Language, Education, and ideology, Mapping the Linguistic landscape of U.S. schools, U.S.A.
This book will help me to contrast the topics about why adults do not achieve a successful second language acquisition, it talks about the myths of the learning a second language it says that it is not true that children learn faster another language and that is easier to them learn a second language. It will help me to make a controversy about what all the authors said in a second language acquisition, it is the only way that this book will help me.

Grass S,Selinker L.,(2008) Second Language Acquisition, Routledge, New York N.Y.
This books is going to help  me to explain in a psychological way why adults learn languages less readily than children do, this book makes contrast directly about the controversy between children and adults , it will help to make contrast with the others books about the different points of view with children and adults, for this reason this book gives a great value to my literature review, this book is addressed to physiologists, and linguistics.

Ellis R.,(1990) instructed second language acquisition, blackwell publishers,Massachusetts,USA. this article is going to help to explain the natural approach that it is mention as the main method to learn a second language like the first one(like children learn the first language), i think this will help me to make a competition between children and adults, if we as a teachers can use this method with children and adults, I think this article is addressed to teachers that want to know more about different and efficient methods. Also i can make a competition with the others books if adults learn a second language in the same way as children.

Lightown P.,Spada N.,(2006),how language are learn,Oxford university Press. this book discusses the effects of factors such as intelligence, personality, and age. It helps teachers assess the merits of different methods and textbooks, includes tion on theories of first language acquisition and early bilingualism, and the affects of motivation and style. it help me to understand the effects in age and if it is true that the early bilingualism is better, (children and adults.

Birdsong D. (1999) second language acquisition and critical period hypothesis, Lawrence Erlbaum, NY. This book contains many interesting articles for my literature review for example critical periods in learning a second language, confounded age linguistic and cognitive factors n age differences for second language acquisition, this topic are really interesting because it makes a comparition between ages and as well known that's my topic for these reasons it will help me a lot, I think this book is also addressed to linguistics teachers etc. I think all this books have relation with the previous ones, because all of them talk about age differences, critical periods and this help me to understand different points of views and to make comparitions and to find similarities.

  Kalat J. (20079  Biological psychology, Tenth edition, Wadsword cengage learning.

This article talks about cognitive differences between adults and children for example it says that adults are better in memorization that children but children achieve better proficiency in pronunciation and mastering grammar, it talks about a sensitive period on learning a second language, this article allow me to find similarities with others books and articles that say the same, it gives examples and I think it is good to understand better its point of view

Justification

I think my research is really important and appealing for many people and for many teachers because it is a taboo in way the children learn and the way the adults learn a second language. Sometimes we as a teachers do not know to apply the correct activities in our classrooms according to the age of the students, first we have to know the cognitive and pedagogic differences to plan a good class; sometimes one teacher have worked only with adults and he/she does not how to work with children. For this reason I think it is an interesting topic to know a wide vision about the area work you can develop your teacher’s skills. This topic have been investigated for some researchers where they have found important characteristics about this topic for example critical hypothesis stage, fossilization etc that will be mentioned in this research.

EPISTEMOLOGICO
PSICOLOGICO
Constructivism
PEDAGOGICO
JEAN PIGET-Piaget´s theory talks about the development of the children’s mind, children increase their capacity to understand their world: they cannot undertake certain tasks until they are psychologically mature enough to do so. Piaget proposed 4 stages: SATTERLY D (1987) "Piaget and Education" in R L Gregory (ed.) The Oxford Companion to the Mind Oxford, Oxford University Press

Stage Characterised by
Sensori-motor
(Birth-2 yrs) Differentiates self from objects
Recognises self as agent of action and begins to act intentionally: e.g. pulls a string to set mobile in motion or shakes a rattle to make a noise
Achieves object permanence: realises that things continue to exist even when no longer present to the sense (pace Bishop Berkeley)
Pre-operational
(2-7 years) Learns to use language and to represent objects by images and words
Thinking is still egocentric: has difficulty taking the viewpoint of others
Classifies objects by a single feature: e.g. groups together all the red blocks regardless of shape or all the square blocks regardless of colour
Concrete operational
(7-11 years) Can think logically about objects and events
Achieves conservation of number (age 6), mass (age 7), and weight (age 9)
Classifies objects according to several features and can order them in series along a single dimension such as size.
Formal operational
(11 years and up) Can think logically about abstract propositions and test hypotheses systemtically
Becomes concerned with the hypothetical, the future, and ideological problems
This helps us a lot as a teachers because we can realize what kind of activities we can use at different ages .and stage for example we can see that in the pre-operational stage children learn language through objects and images only with examples and repeated words , on other hand in the formal operational stage they can think logically, and you can teach some aspects of grammar.

WOOD D (1998) How Children Think and Learn (2nd edition) Oxford; Blackwell Publishing.
SOCIAL
Vigotsky and Bruner other people enblame children to learn the language