Academic Style Research Articles

Detection of Common Errors in Turkish EFL Students’ Writing through a Corpus Analytic Approach

The present study aims to explore Turkish EFL students’ major writing difficulties by analyzing the frequent writing errors in academic essays. Accordingly, the study examined errors in a corpus of 150 academic essays written by Turkish EFL students studying at the Department of English Language and Literature at a public university in Turkey. The essays were written on assigned topics as take home exam papers or assignments in the context of a first year academic writing course. The corpus consisted of essays of various lengths ranging from 500 word essays to 1500 word essays. The essays were compiled into a corpus and analyzed by using a concordance program. The essays were also checked for plagiarism using the online plagiarism detection software and plagiarized essays were excluded from the analysis. Errors were classified by using an error classification system which was organized according to lexico-grammatical categories. The resulting categories consisted of mostly syntactic and lexical categories of error but academic style errors were considered as well. As a result of the analysis, in terms of error categories, the most frequent errors were observed in the verb related error categories. When considered individually, the most frequent errors were observed in noun modification and were mostly interference related.

An Intervention to Retrain Attributions Using CBT: A Pilot Study

The role of affective and cognitive factors in learning have long been recognised as imperative determinants of the learning process. Maladaptive styles with which we perceive and explain accomplishments and failures in achievement outcomes have an important motivational impact upon approach and avoidance behaviours towards academic tasks. Interventions to change these maladaptive styles are well established, although they stand to gain via addition of cognitive behavioural therapy components. A pilot study attribution retraining intervention was implemented with eight secondary school students, and their results on academic performance, self-concept, and attributional styles were compared to a control group. With significant gains in some specific academic domains, the attributional retraining program is being substantiated for effective use within secondary schools. Implications suggest that this could be an effective tool to retrain students’ attributions, with some gains, as the reattribution technique is revisited and reinvigorated.

Researcher’s Academic Culture in the Educational Space of the University: Linguo-Axiological Approach

The article is devoted to the nature of the concepts “classic University”, “cultural and educational space of the University”, “research activity of future professional”, “researcher’s academic culture” and approach to academic culture as the basis of research culture in a university. It is defined that the concept of academic culture is complex. We are talking in general about the culture at the university, values, traditions, norms, rules of scientific research, and the scientific language culture, the culture of spirituality and morality, the culture of communication between science tutors and students, a culture of unique pedagogical action of master and his social, moral responsibility for the studying results. The formation of academic culture and own style, is better to develop on the positions of personal-activity, competence, axiological, cultural, acmeological approaches

The Role of Professors in the Formation of Finnish Parliamentary Life: The Struggle between Two Conceptions of Parliament

The Frankfurt Parliament (1848–49) was subsequently dismissively referred to as the “Professors’ Parliament” due to its heavy representation of scholars and the academic style of its lengthy discussions. Professors have played a prominent role in the deliberations and development of other European assemblies, too. This article examines the role of professors in the formation of Finnish parliamentary life. It moreover underlines the close relationship between the academia and national politics in late nineteenth-century Finland, starting from the European revolutions of 1848. The article highlights how politically active professors, together with the newspaper press, were crucial in transferring European ideas to Finnish debates. Professors promoted ideological conceptions of parliamentary politics, which were inspired by their scholarly interests and formulated by applying European discussions and concepts selectively to the Finnish context. The article focuses on a debate between Finnish professors and their competing conceptions of parliament. The struggle between the Hegelian philosopher J. V. Snellman and the liberal Professor of Law Leo Mechelin reflects a wider European debate on the role and purposes of parliaments as national representative and deliberative institutions. The article evaluates the role of Snellman’s and Mechelin’s conceptions of parliament in Finnish parliamentary culture in the longer term.

The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the humanities, by Eric Hayot

The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the humanities, by Eric Hayot

A Corpus-based Study on the Use of Contractions by EFL Learners in Argumentative Essays

Contraction forms in English are mostly occur in speech and informal writing and they are generally avoided in formal writing types such as academic prose, business reports and journal articles, therefore, most teachers discourage their use in academic essays (Biber, Johansonn, Leech, Conrad and Finegan 1999). Contractions in English have two types; negative contractions (isn’t, haven’t, doesn’t) and verb contractions (I’m, they’ve, that’s). This corpus based study attempts to investigate contraction usage in learner and native English speaker essays. Major goal is to examine whether learners consider essay writing rules in respect of contractions which are accepted inappropriate for academic prose style. Five corpora, three learner and two native English, were utilized in order to analyze verb and not-contraction forms. Frequency calculations of contraction forms in each corpus compared via log-likelihood measurement for statistical significance. Results revealed that learners use considerably more contraction forms, especially negative ones, than native English students in their argumentative essays.Keywords: English for Academic Purposes, learner corpus, contractions

VP110 Building Capacity In Health Technology Assessment Through Plain Language

INTRODUCTION:Health Technology Assessments (HTAs) and policy papers are generally written in academic style using industry jargon — pharmaceutical, medical, or scientific terminology — with a generous use of abbreviations. Transforming technical or biomedical data into easily understandable text is a necessity and a challenge for all of us if our goal is to facilitate HTA collaboration beyond borders and integrate HTA into healthcare practice. Many countries have legislated for plain language (PL), and organizations globally are beginning to recognize how it helps in the uptake of information, whether geared to healthcare professionals and all those interested in HTA, or the lay public.METHODS:A preliminary, informal online search for legislative and supporting guidance on PL was conducted, and a query sent out to forty-eight International Network of Agencies for Health Technology Assessment (INAHTA) members.RESULTS:•The United States Plain Writing Act of 2010 has legislated that federal agencies use “clear Government communication that the public can understand and use” (1). Of the twenty-one respondents from INAHTA Listserv, seven use plain language in either their knowledge transfer tools (such as executive and research summaries, booklets and fact sheets, and patient or lay material).•The Government of Canada promotes plain language in all of its communications (2).•McMaster University's 2014 Health Forum on strengthening public and patient engagement in HTA in Ontario supported “clarity and consistency in the use of public- and patient-engagement terminology” in HTAs.•A growing number of international health-related and HTA organizations promote PL in their reports and HTAs to help with their health literacy.•Many pharmaceutical companies encourage PL communication in their writing (3).•Of the eighteen INAHTA responses received, eight reported that they use PL in their report summaries, knowledge transfer materials, and/or patient education tools.CONCLUSIONS:Adopting the practice of clear, straightforward writing and editing in all biomedical communication — including HTAs and journal articles — encourages interaction and engagement among patient, public, and healthcare stakeholders invested in HTAs, and their desire to have measured decision making based on comprehensive, informed, and easily understandable information. However, it remains to be seen if PL will be embraced by organizations worldwide. This preliminary, informal inquiry as to its use suggests that the adoption of PL by governments, HTA organizations, and the scientific community worldwide has not yet been fully embraced.

Danto as Educator

From the title as Educator (1874)1 it would be natural to expect Nietzsche to offer us a detailed account of how Schopenhauer's philosophical system influenced his own thought, or perhaps at a minimum how the sage of Frankfurt's work was crucial for his development as a thinker. After all, Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation clearly left a profound mark on Nietzsche's earliest published work, The Birth of Tragedy. But Nietzsche frustrates these reasonable expectations in the essay, as he is almost entirely silent on Schopenhauer's actual philosophical system. By the point in time of writing as Educator, Nietzsche has apparently taken for granted that this post-Kantian's version of transcendental idealism, his will-less aesthetics, the ethics of compassion, and the praise of asceticism as redemption from the will-to-life are just plain wrongheaded. So why would Nietzsche call Schopenhauer his educator, if Schopenhauer's oeuvre was not particularly educational?Nietzsche focuses on the man as educator. He lauds Schopenhauer as an example of how to be a true philosopher for one's time and culture. Most impressive to him was Schopenhauer's manner of living: independent, free from the dominant religious, political and social thinking of his day; free from the need to draw an income; and, accordingly, free from a formal academic environment. Above all, what was most worthy of emulation, according to Nietzsche, was Schopenhauer's quest for the truth and the suffering he undertook for truth's sake. He suffered in part because of the intellectual climate in which he philosophized that favored Hegelian currents rather antithetical to Schopenhauer's peculiar mixture of Plato, Kant, Vedic thought and attention to contemporary natural science. Ultimately, it is the example of the free, truth-seeking and suffering genius that creates a philosophy with the capacity to disturb that makes Schopenhauer his educator.2Arthur Danto was one of my most important educators. He is responsible, for better or for worse, for putting me on the intellectual and academic path I've been pursuing for the past 20 years, that is, to reconstruct many facets of Schopenhauer's thought, especially his metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics for contemporary use. Unlike Schopenhauer's influence on Nietzsche, however, it is both Danto's work and his personal example as an engaged philosopher and art critic that educated me. Further, Danto's model as a philosophical educator is anything but that of a solitary, untimely sufferer for the sake of the truth, though he did exemplify a kind of freedom from traditional academic style and freedom from the oftentimes-sterile academic concerns of his day. While Danto certainly sought out the truth about the nature and importance of art, history, and many other philosophically rich topics, he was no solitary sufferer. On the contrary, Danto was a very sociable and even joyful philosopher, deeply engaged in his contemporary society, in the academy, and especially in the world of art past and present.I decided to pursue graduate study in philosophy at Columbia in the early 1990s largely because of Arthur Danto. As an undergraduate I read The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), and I recall reading the whole 200-page book in one sitting. In that book, Danto takes the reader on an exhilarating, ridiculously erudite journey through the history of philosophical aesthetics, the history of art, and through contemporary currents in the visual arts especially in the 1950s and 1960s. The meandering but purposive path he takes in the book delivers a compelling case that the essence of a work of art, as opposed to an ordinary object, is that it is an embodiment of meaning, and further, that one needs to understand the historical and institutional background of artistic practice in order to grasp that meaning and to grasp the essential nature of art and why it matters. …

Understanding climatic traditions: A quantitative and qualitative analysis of historic dwellings of Cadiz

Many historical European cities are home to houses of great heritage value. These structures have been able to provide comfort throughout history without the use of artificial conditioning systems. Even though such dwellings were influenced by academic styles, by contradicting vernacular architecture, their adaptation to local climate in order to achieve thermal comfort is commonplace. They were mostly built within compact urban tissues, making use of local materials, workforce and construction technologies. Learning from the past knowledge of these design strategies that are specifically adapted to specific climates can play a significant role in reducing the energy demand of extant buildings. Likewise, this paper thoroughly investigates the remaining urban conglomerate of Cadiz from a scientific approach. An original simulation software, duly tested with on-site measurements, was used to analyse the passive design strategies that were applied effectively. The results of this study indicate that historic neighbourhoods in Cadiz are creatively adapted to their natural conditions. In this sense, the main conclusion is that in mild climates, the combination of a compact urban tissue and climate responsive dwelling design should be sufficient to maintain acceptable indoor comfort levels.

A originalidade técnica no desenho de Goya e seus contemporâneos: Abordagens sobre o desenho na segunda metade do século XVIII

Resumo Durante a segunda metade do século XVIII, o ensino do desenho na Espanha foi reforçado e sistematizado pela abertura de academias e escolas de desenho oficiais, onde se ensinava um método de trabalho completo, constituído por fases sucessivas para definir todos os elementos da composição pictórica. Francisco de Goya, o mais notável artista espanhol de seu tempo, usou o desenho de forma variada, experimentando e acomodando as técnicas a suas preferências e capacidades expressivas. Entretanto, Goya não era o único, visto que outros artistas trabalhavam nos mesmos âmbitos que ele. Dessa forma, colocam-se as seguintes questões: somente Goya teria experimentado e adaptado as técnicas de desenho? Teria o resto de seus contemporâneos praticado apenas o desenho acadêmico? Para responder a estas perguntas, o texto aborda as técnicas e formas de desenhar de outros artistas da época, em comparação com aquelas usadas por Goya. Nesse sentido, o artigo analisa os desenhos desses artistas e do pintor, conservados em coleções tanto espanholas como internacionais, levando em consideração a sua aprendizagem e o seu processo de trabalho, assim como as ideias da época, recolhidas em distintos documentos e estudos. O resultado revela que Goya não foi o único a experimentar, dado que os artistas usavam as distintas técnicas de desenho como mais lhes convinha, de acordo com seu método de trabalho, suas necessidades expressivas e suas preferências.

Pedagogical Design Promoting Writing Productivity on the Doctoral Level – a Case Study from Finland

Publication productivity constitutes a key measure of institutional and researcher performance, determining success in university rankings and academic career development. To promote such productivity, Aalto University launched the Writing Doctoral Research course for engineers. To build a domain-specific course for doctoral candidates, their needs were examined quantitatively (n=325) and qualitatively (n=74). The aim was to identify pedagogy for raising the quality of publications and expediting doctoral degree completion. These investigations showed that 1) in the absence of sufficient supervision, engineers require more support in writing-related mental processes, 2) the mechanics of writing needs to promote argumentativity, 3) researchers lack precision when describing their research aims, 4) articulation of causality in data commentary requires more accuracy, and 5) instruments must be provided for writer self-correction. Instead of taking the lexicogrammar approach, the course was designed in a way that aligned with the principles of enculturation, assisting researchers in scientific positioning and socialization into their fields. Such an approach emphasizes reporting and structural conventions in engineering and the field-specific academic style.

The Problem of All Problems

EDITOR’S ABSTRACTBei Cun’s article is short and not written in an academic style but as a reflective essay. The essay is theological, discussing sin, authority, and resurrection, but it is also spiritually political, discussing how the Chinese people should choose its future path and what is true authority. It was originally published in the April 2011 issue of the lifestyle magazine Xinrui (Thinkers’ Letter), not in a literary or philosophical journal.

An exploratory study into the dynamics of Chinese L2 writing development

The present study is inspired by the often heard Chinese university level students’ complaint that they do not improve in English proficiency during their university courses. With a pre-post design, the study explores the potential gains in language development in free response data (writing samples) of three groups of L2 learners: a senior high school group and two university groups of different proficiency levels. Four writing samples, two collected at the beginning and two at the end of the students’ respective courses, were scored holistically on general proficiency and analytically on 47 complexity measures in a computerized tool (Synlex Analyzer). The holistic scores showed some improvement over time for the high school group, but not for the university groups. The analytical measures showed improvements in fairly different aspects of the written language for the three groups, suggesting that at different levels of proficiency different variables may develop. The highest level group actually regressed in almost all syntactic variables, but additional hand coded measures point to a subtle move toward a more academic style of writing with more non-finite constructions. The findings suggest that no single complexity measure is robust for all proficiency levels and that for the highest levels, other metrics tapping into inter-clausal complexity should be added.

Language and “the Things That Are There”: Paul de Man’s “Poetic Attitudes” Applied to Post-WWII American Poetry

In his essay “Process and Poetry” (1956), Paul de Man identifies two types of “poetic attitude,” a poetry of process and a poetry of substance. Where de Man illuminates these attitudes by focusing on the content rather than the form of poems written by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin, this essay will apply these attitudes to post-war American poets while expanding de Man’s consideration to include elements of prosody and their relationship to “process” and “substance.” The purpose of this essay is to argue for the applicability of these attitudes to American poets of the era and further to argue that such a critical approach offers fresh views of this work. There are clear examples of de Man’s attitudes in poetry written in the US since 1945, and these are reflected in the dominant critical model of this poetry as divided between avant-garde and academic styles. By examining the free verse poetry in Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry (1960), and the formal poetry in Robert Pack, Louis Simpson and Donald Hall’s anthology New Poets of England and America (1957), this essay will identify poems that exemplify each of de Man’s attitudes, before taking into account the Language poetry of the 1970s as a development in American poetry of process. Finally, the essay shall identify a poet who, as de Man argues for Hölderlin, has found “accomplishment” by synthesizing process and substance, writing what have recently been termed “hybrid” poems. <b>Jazyk a „věci, které existují“: De Manovy „poetické postoje“ vzhledem k americké poválečné poezii</b> Paul de Man ve svém eseji Proces a poezie („Process and Poetry“, 1956) rozlišuje dva typy básnického postoje („poetic attitude“): poezii procesu a poezii podstaty. Tento esej aplikuje dané postoje na díla poválečných amerických básníků a rozšiřuje de Manovy úvahy o zahrnutí prvků prosodie a jejich vztahu k „procesu“ a „podstatě“. V poezii napsané v USA po roce 1945 nacházíme jasné příklady de Manových postojů. Ty se odráží i v převládajícím kritickém modelu poezie tohoto období, který ji vnímá jako rozdělenou na avantgardní a akademickou. Pomocí zkoumání poezie psané volným veršem v antologii Donalda Halla Nová americká poezie (The New American Poetry, 1960) a formální poezie v antologii Noví básníci Anglie a Ameriky (New Poets of England and America, 1957) Roberta Packa, Louise Simpsona a Donalda Halla identifikuje tento esej básně, které ilustrují de Manovy postoje, a poté se zamýšlí nad „Language poetry“ sedmdesátých let minulého století jako nad americkou poezií procesu.

Introduction of ClIl approach in Sociological Doctoral Programmes: The Ethnolinguistic focus on theses written in Russian or in English

For a long time, the assumption prevailed that all scientific texts should conform to a common academic style. Then some papers started to emphasise the specificity of a discourse into scientific disciplines. Now, under the influence of globalization and the shift to teaching in the lingua franca languages, there is a question about the peculiarities of a national style of academic discourse. The article continues a series of studies in the field of sociological discourse and its changing after the introduction of SFL-based CLIL approach in non-western sociological doctoral programmes. The current paper is focusing specifically on tools for the structuring of science written discourse that are significantly different in different cultures. The research is interdisciplinary since it is performed at the intersection of sociology and ethnolinguistics. The method is an analysis of discourse markers as one of the widely recognized approaches in ethnolinguistics to the identification of differences in scientific writing in Russian and English. Data collected from doctoral theses in Russian and in English from the field of sociology. It is shown that the average number of discourse markers at 1000 words-3.89 in Russian theses and 1.75 in doctoral theses written in English. The authors suggest that these variations are associated with the structure and goals of a scholarly paper. English academic genres are more empirical, whereas Russian focused on the development of theory. The results of the study clarify the reasons for refusal of Russian professors of scientific advising in English, and their negative attitude towards the English-speaking model of a thesis, traditional for Western science.

Hayot, Eric: Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities

Hayot, Eric: Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities

Deconstructing Institutionalisation of the European Standards for Quality Assurance: From Instrument Mixes to Quality Cultures and Implications for International Research

AbstractThe paper enquires into the implementation of the European Standards and Guidelines for Internal Quality Assurance of Higher Education Institutions (ESG 1). The enquiry uses data from universities in the Czech Republic and compares them against those obtained in the relevant pan‐European survey. The aims are to empirically deconstruct ESG 1 translation through instrument mixes, to identify the corresponding implementation styles and to explore the implications of such styles for institutional quality cultures. In these respects, the enquiry yielded three corresponding findings. First, the ESG 1 instrument mixes are complex and entail the application of up to four major types of tools, cutting across the substantive and procedural categories over time. Second, two typical ESG 1 implementation styles were identified: managerial and academic. Third, the managerial style was found to bear on regenerative culture while the academic style bore on reproductive culture. Furthermore, utilisation of hybrid quality cultures (regenerative–reproductive, reproductive–regenerative) was found, depending on internal institutional configurations. It is through verification of these findings in other policy settings that international research on higher education quality assurance may gainfully proceed.

Teacher-Researchers in ActionTeachers Research!

When the word ‘research’ is used in any publication, readers have particular expectations about what they will read in terms of the language that is used in the publication. In most cases, such publications in education are written with a particular audience in mind that for the most part is academics. Academics usually author such publications for many reasons, such as their own advancement and dissemination of the results of their research. In many of these academic style publications related to teaching we usually get reports of, for example, why language teachers teach in the way they do, or research reports on teachers by academics for academic audiences. Such reports are reasonable in themselves as they may advance the ‘knowledge-base’ of the profession and the career of the academics, all fine of course. However, many times we also see that practising teachers have been criticized for their lack of knowledge or engagement in such ‘research’. The teachers themselves remark in many cases that these publications are not really accessible in the form they are presented. In other words, from the teachers’ perspective, what is missing from the literature are research reports that are accessible to teachers or reports about what language teachers themselves think about what they do: research with teachers, by teachers, and for teachers.

Mon portrait par Bonnat : imaginaire scénique de l’homme politique républicain

Before World War 1, French painter Léon Bonnat became famous by portraying celebrities, among which almost every leading politician in the newly founded Republic. His academic and dark style however was criticized by art critics and humourists; hence his portraits put on stage in character comedies have to be read as critics of the very people they represent and of himself as an official artist.

O sposobach definiowania znaczeń leksyki religijnej w tematycznych słownikach internetowych

The research material comprises dictionaries of terms related to Catholicism, functioning on Polish websites. The aim of this lexicographical-nature study is the description of dictionary definitions, namely ways of defining meanings that appear in the online dictionaries collected. The author distinguishes 3 types of texts appearing in the section of the headword, in which a definition is traditionally placed: 1) information about what the headword means, tending to be balanced, provided in stylistically neutral vocabulary, sometimes with features of academic style – objective definitions; 2) information about the meaning of a word, supplemented by a humorous or satirical presentation of the designatum – subjective definitions; 3) Texts that replace a proper definition, connected to headwords in different ways – pseudo-definitions (failed definitions or comments). The number of dictionaries published on the Internet proves that the model of a dictionary as a way to share information is considered useful and attractive. The method of composing a definition, however, shows how different objectives are attributed to online dictionaries: not only should they impart knowledge about the language, but first of all describe the world and shape favorable or reluctant attitude of readers to religious issues.