Unit One Preparing for Research Papers
Academic Writing
Professor Shi Baohui
For BA English ’03
School of Foreign Languages
Beijing Forestry University
(September 2006)
Table of Contents
Unit One Preparing for Research Papers (1)
Unit Two Guided Summary (8)
Unit Three Abstracts of Academic Papers (14)
Unit Four Summary of a Book (18)
Unit Five Commenting on a Book (21)
Unit Six Writing a Book Review (25)
Unit Seven Mechanics of the Research Paper (31)
Unit Eight Notes (35)
Unit Nine Bibliography and References (42)
Unit One Preparing for Research Papers
I. What Is a Research Paper?
[1] A research paper is, first and foremost, a form of written communication. Like other forms of nonfiction writing—letters, memos, reports, essays, articles, books—it should present information and ideas clearly and effectively. It differs from many of them in relying on sources of information other than the writer’s personal knowledge and experience. It is based on primary research, secondary research, or a combination of the two. Primary research involves the study of a subject through firsthand observation and investigation, such as conducting a survey or carrying out a laboratory experiment; secondary research entails the examination of studies that others have made of the subject. Many academic papers, as well as many reports and proposals required in business, government, and other professions, depend on secondary research.
[2] Research will increase your knowledge and understanding of a subject and will often lend authority to your ideas and opinions. The paper based on research is not a collection of other persons’ thoughts and words but a carefully constructed presentation of ideas that relies on research sources for clarification and verification. While you must fully document the facts and opinions you draw from your research, the documentation should do no more than support your statements and provide concise information about the research cited; it should never overshadow the paper or distract the reader from the ideas you present.
(Adapted from MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Paper, 3rd edn.)
II. Topic Selection
1. Targets
1) Term paper, report, etc.—a range of topics provided by the teacher;
2) Dissertation/Thesis—agreement between student and teacher;
3) Academic paper, for journals, conferences, etc.—own choice.
2. General Approach
Except for 1) above, one will normally take the following steps though people may not always follow these steps strictly.
1) Choosing a general subject area
2) Narrowing the topic area for:
a. your interest (i.e. it has to be interesting to you)
b. your abilities (i.e. it must be within your abilities)
c. enough information to complete the paper
3) Setting up research strategy
a. research available information—Is there enough? Go from general sources to more specialized ones and create bibliography cards for relevant sources (see below).
b. start preliminary research
3. Practice
Consider the following topics. Think about 1) which topic(s) you may be interested in, and 2) how you are going about the research work (are you going to depend on primary research or secondary research or both?). If you are going to do some primary research, how will you design your research? Where might you find some secondary information?
1) Topics of general interest
a. Most people listen to music to escape from something.
b. Working women now have two jobs rather than just one.
c. Write an article about a man you have admired or detested.
d. What are the problems of being a woman in the Qing Dynasty?
e. Discuss what qualities define the good or the bad teacher.
f. What are the problems of one-parent families.
2) Topics for term papers
a. Discuss how the Norman Conquest and the Renaissance influenced the development of English vocabulary.
b. “Since the Second World War the English vocabulary has been affected powerfully by social, political, economic, especially scientific and technical changes”. Cite examples to illustrate these changes in English vocabulary.
c. Discuss the notion of “morphemes”.
d. What is word-formation? Analyse the word-formation strategies that are found in the articles in Advanced English.
3) Graduation project/thesis
a. The relationship between meaning and context
b. Some insights into the translation criteria
c. A Cinderella story: an analysis of Pride and Prejudice
d. The Dream of True Love—An Analysis of The Bridges of Madison County
e. An Analysis of Family Education on Children’s Sense of Inferiority
f. Historical Changes in U.S. Policy toward China Since 1949 and Their Consequences
III. The Procedures of Writing the Research Paper
1. Develop a preliminary thesis statement.
2. Conduct in-depth research:
1) Set up key terms and searches
2) Locate the sources
3) Retrieve and evaluate the sources
Is it useful? primary or secondary? recent or dated? authoritative/reliable or biased/prejudiced?
4) Create bibliography cards
3. Take good notes.
4. Revising the thesis statement.
5. Selecting the best structure.
1) Three-part structure: mainly for secondary research
|Introduction | |
|Body |(may treat |
| |several issues |
| |under subtopics) |
|Conclusion | |
2) Four/five-part structure: mainly for primary research
|Introduction | |
|Materials & | |
|Method | |
|Results & |(may be written as two |
|Discussion | |
| |separate sections) |
|Conclusion | |
IV. Bibliography Cards
1) For a book
|(1) |
|Carlan, Alfred E. 1975. Dark Night of the Soul: Crisis in |
|Creative Lives. Harrisburg, N. Y.: Pullman. |
|(good explanation of how | |
|writers and artists overcome |328.91 |
|severe depression) |CAR |
2) For an article
|(2) |
|Chiang, Roberta C. 1989. ‘Why Japanese Women Are Speaking |
|Out’, World News, 23 Nov.: 43-45. |
|(women’s movement in | |
|Japan) | |
3) For a website
|(2) |
|Morris, Betsy. 2001. ‘White-collar blues’, Fortune, July 23.|
|Retrieved July 21, 2001 |
|. |
|(layoffs of white-collar workers in USA) | |
V. Methods of Note-Taking
1. Paraphrasing
a. Original
One is forcibly struck by the fact of how well superstition provides at least the subjective feeling of predictability and control. It may thus serve the function of reducing anxiety: and as intense anxiety is liable to inhibit effective action in dangerous situations, there is a distinct possibility that superstition may have positive survival value in certain circumstances.
b. Paraphrase
|superstition as survival aid 3-2 |
| |
|superstition gives subjective sense of control which reduces |
|anxiety. such feelings of control can help people act more |
|effectively in dangerous situations & increase chances of |
|survival |
| |
|134-135 |
2. Summarizing
a. Original
Alice Walker's substantial body of writing, though it varies, is characterized by specific recurrent motifs. Most obvious is Walker's attention to the black woman as creator, and to how her attempt to be whole relates to the health of her community. This theme is certainly focal to Walker's two collections of short stories, In Love and Trouble and You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, to her classic essay, ‘In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens’, and to Meridian and The Color Purple.
Another recurrent motif in Walker's work is her insistence on probing the relationship between struggle and change, a probing that encompasses the pain of black people's lives, against which the writer protests but which she will not ignore. Paradoxically, such pain sometimes results in growth.
b. Summary
|recurrent motifs — Walker 1-3 |
| |
|Walker's motifs highlight strengths of black people: |
|1) black woman as creator—her struggles to be whole affect |
|community's health |
|2) relationship between struggle and change—pain of struggle |
|sometimes produces growth |
| |
|39-40 |
3. Direct Quote
a. Original
The French General Henri Navarre was given command of the French troops in Vietnam near the end of the French-Indochina war. At a time when the Viet Minh were soundly defeating his forces, General Navarre uttered a phrase that Americans would hear over and over again on the way to their own defeat in Southeast Asia. ‘Now we can see it clearly—like light at the end of the tunnel.’
b. Direct Quote
|French General Navarre’s quote 4-5 |
| |
|Phrase that came to haunt Americans in their Viet Nam War first |
|uttered by General Henri Navarre: |
|“Now we see it [victory] clearly—like light at the end of the |
|tunnel.” |
| |
|79 |
4. Your Comments
a. Original
The drug trade is a fine specimen of unrestricted competition which brings down prices and pushes up consumption. Governments refuse to limit the trade by regulation. Instead, they try to prohibit it. In 1980, the U.S. spent just under $1 billion trying to keep heroin, cocaine, and marijuana out of its domestic market. By 1988, it was spending almost $4 billion. Yet the retail price of drugs dropped faster than the cost of policing them rose.
b. Your Comments and Opinions
|Prohibition encourages drug trade 4-2 |
| |
|Prohibition throws drug trade wide open to competition & sets up a |
|vicious cycle—competition brings down price, which makes drugs more |
|affordable, which encourages consumption. More people enter drug |
|trade, costs government more to fight greater number of dealers. |
| |
|27-28 |
5. No Plagiarism!
a. Original
Few people know that during the Battle of Waterloo, a twelve-foot ditch proved to be the best ally of the English troops. As the French cavalry charged across the field, the front ranks tumbled into the ditch, which had been concealed in the tall grass. So great was the press of the charge, that men and horses continued to fall until the ditch was filled with bodies. Only then did the remaining forces ride over their solid mass toward the English. The delay had been enough, however, to allow the English to maneuver their artillery into position. Their savage cannon fire shattered the French cavalry charge.
b. Plagiarized Version!
The French took the field first and charged the English position. But the front ranks tumbled into a ditch which had been concealed in the tall grass. So great was the press of the charge that men and horses continued to fall until the ditch was filled with bodies. Only then did the remaining forces ride over their solid mass toward the English. …
c. Paraphrased Version
The French took the field first and charged the English position. Less than halfway across the field, the front ranks fell into a concealed ditch. The horses and riders behind them were unable to stop and tumbled in after, quickly filling the ditch with bodies. This grisly bridge enabled the rest of the cavalry to rush across toward the English …
6. Practice
Use one of the note-taking strategies to take notes from the following passages:
1) The British have in fact always imported food from abroad. From the time of the Roman invasion foreign trade was a major influence on British cooking. English kitchens, like the English language, absorbed ingredients from all over the world—chickens, rabbits, apples and tea. All of these and more were successfully incorporated into British dishes. Another important influence on British cooking was of course the weather. The good old British rain gives us rich soil and green grass, and means that we are able to produce some of the finest varieties of meat, fruit and vegetables, which don’t need fancy sauces or complicated recipes to disguise their taste.
2) The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of world history, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—human beings—acquired significant power to alter the nature of their world.
3) Radio and television present the important news of the day. Many radio stations in the US broadcast news and news commentary programs all day. Most commercial television stations have news programs in the evening. The evening news generally consists of national network news program and local news program, while at night it is usually a local program. In addition, some TV stations offer early morning news, late night news, and weekly “news magazine” programs. Cable television networks in some cities offer foreign language news.
Unit Two Guided Summary
I. Guided Summary (Sample 1)
1. Question
Summarize in 50-100 words what the passage says about the initial development of capitalism in Britain.
2. Passage
[1] British capitalism and the Industrial Revolution did not coincide. The pocketing of wealth by the few had already taken place before the first mechanised spinning-wheel marked the end of cottage industries and the dawn of mass production. It was the dissipation and venality of the Tudor monarchy that set the pattern for stripping the country of its wealth. By the time of Henry VIII, the families from the British shires who schemed in the royal court were grabbing thousands of acres of land. More than a quarter of England was in the hands of a new landowning aristocracy. Another quarter, perhaps more, was in the hands of the Church, as much a political and capitalist enterprise as a spiritual one. The Church also collected 30 per cent of the customary dues paid by the smaller landowners to the greater.
[2] With the Crown increasingly desperate for money to raise armies and to defend itself, it turned on the Church and gave dispensation to the landowners to grab Church lands. By the early seventeenth century more than half of the land was in the hands of a powerful oligarchy of plundering landowners. The monarchy itself was impoverished, already decaying into a symbol and tool. The people of England had been dispossessed of what was then the only universal prospect of wealth and security: land and property.
[3] The appropriation of this wealth was completed just as Newcomen built his steam engine; within another generation Hargreaves had produced the spinning jenny, James Watt his condenser patent. Iron ore had been smelted by coke. All these innovations needed capital: and the source of capital lay with the landowning oligarchy, families whose wealth was less than a century old. During that decisive first impact of future shock, there were incredible tides running: the Puritans recoiled from the mercenary orgy and went off to make their New England; paper money and modern banking were devised; the English peasantry were coerced into industrial slavery; technology was the new witchcraft; Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations. And the British were defeated in the American Revolution.
[4] The world changed, but not the inherent imbalance of wealth in Britain. No wonder the British ruling classes abhorred the French Revolution and reviled Bonaparte. An alternative idea was planted in Europe, and although it took nearly 200 years to do so it has finally led to the humiliation of the British: an economic humiliation rather than a military one.
[5] Now, in their ethnocentricity, the British suspect that European membership is the beginning of racial pollution, a subtler variety than they had already been asked to endure by living alongside their black slaves. One survey of British attitudes towards Europe turned up a pronounced aversion to the bidet, which is thought of as ‘dirty’ and ‘Continental’. Although the British are reticent on the subject, it appears that the average Briton takes a bath only once every three days.
[6] In the British view of Europe, food seems crucial. The liberal middle class, who are mostly pro-European, have tasted French food and can’t wait to see the grisly diet of the British pub replaced by the delights of the Paris bistro. The conservative working class, on the other hand, who are heavily anti-European, are deeply suspicious of anything other than their own bland and greasy diet.
[7] A year after the British had, in theory, become fully paid-up Europeans they were more hostile to the idea rather than less. Ironically, the greatest suspicion of and hostility towards Europeans comes from the poorest and the oldest among the British. They do not seem to realise that of all the European democracies, the one that screws them the most is their own. It is not the Common Market that made the British the paupers of Europe.
3. Summary
Capitalism had developed in Britain before the Industrial Revolution began. Over a quarter of English land was taken over in Tudor times by landowners who had influence at court. The church also owned considerable land and took a percentage of other landowners’ rents. Later on the monarchy, badly needing money for defensive arms, allowed private landowners to seize church lands. By the beginning of the Industrial Revolution more than half the land in Britain was in the hands of landowners whose families had obtained it by seizure. (87 words)
II. Guided Summary (Sample 2)
1. Question
Summarize in 50-100 words the different ways in which men hide their identities and inadequacies, as described in the passage.
2. Passage
[1] What about the insecure and inadequate men? Except in a very few societies and times, men have not worn cosmetics, mainly because the use of paint and powder has become so firmly associated with women. Their use by men becomes a mark of effeminacy or homosexuality. Men have adopted a different series of mechanisms for finding a persona—the most important being the occupational mask. Nearly all jobs have an occupational uniform which is considered ‘proper’ or suitable for its exponents: the bowler hat and rolled umbrella of ‘something in the City’, the scrupulously unconventional clothes of the actor or advertising executive, the tie-dyed jeans of the progressive student, the black coat and striped trousers of the barrister. Every uniform means security, belonging, for its wearer, and every man who wears such an occupational mask uses it to hide his own personality and take on the semblance of the part he is playing. The judge dresses up in his uniform, the wig and robes, and ceases to be a fallible and perhaps even kind-hearted old gentlemen. He becomes an instrument for playing complicated verbal games with people’s lives. The salesman puts on his slightly brash suit and carefully tilted hat, and becomes a machine for overcoming sales resistance.
[2] Some men, more inadequate than most, even join societies which allow them to dress up after working hours; they play at being Grand Masters or Great Cyclopses, with enough robes and ritual to fill the great echoing empty spaces of their minds.
[3] Another persona device which is very popular with men is the choice of a car that expresses some of their unattained aspirations. The plump, elderly businessman who puts on string-backed gloves and squeezes himself into a sports two-seater is crying for his unsuccessful youth in the same way as the middle-aged matron who wears half-inch eyelashes, has peroxide-tortured hair, and displays a yard of patterned tights—and at least she works out her frustrations in a less lethal way. Men buy powerful cars, and women buy such things as mink-oil face cream, as a passport to love, adventure, and a taste of the ‘good life’. Neither method is very successful.
[4] Men are supposed, by the mores of our society, to dislike cosmetics not only for themselves, but on women. The outcry against these harmless evasions of the truth rings down the ages, and can still be heard in these days. But in practice, many men are attracted to the made-up face, and the girl who looks as if she were covered with machine-printed vinyl plastic seems to arouse more interest than the girl who relies on her natural good complexion. Make-up, as has been said before, simplifies and depersonalises a face. Throughout the ages, women have known this, and have also observed that it attracts male attention.
3. Summary
The most important way in which men hide their identities and inadequacies is by adopting ‘an occupational mask’. Wearing the uniform associated with their job frees them from their own personalities and enables them to play a part. More inadequate men go further and join societies which give them the opportunity to dress up outside working hours. Another popular device with some men is a car which symbolises the person they would like to be or to have been, rather then the person they are. (85 words)
III. Guided Summary (Sample 3)
1. Question
Summarize in 50-100 words the differences between the African and European systems of slavery mentioned in the following passage.
2. Passage
[1] Certain great crimes stain the centuries. The transportation of some twenty-four million men and women and children from Africa across the Atlantic to serve as slaves was the greatest of the crimes of Europe. Nine million of the victims died on the voyage across, fifteen million survived to toil in the Americas. The very mass of the slaves involved in the trade degraded their individuality and their condition. As in the later case of the Jews in the Nazi concentration camps, the size of the operation reduced its victims to the status of animals. ‘Markets of men are here kept,’ a slave wrote from West Africa, ‘in the same manner as those of beasts with us.’
[2] So they were. The African captives were snared like game, physically examined as closely as horses, bought and branded like cattle, herded in a baracoon like pigs, chained below decks like wild beasts, then penned and led out to labour in the American fields under the whip like donkeys until they were worn to death. Slavery, as Voltaire said, may have been as ancient as war, and war as human nature. But no civilisation had ever subjected the ancient institution so stringently to the laws of commerce. The mechanism of Europe, from the account-book to the design of the between-decks of the slave-ship, from the auction in Charleston to the drunken haggling with the kings of Bonny, was designed to degrade man’s view of man. The Protestant slavers did not baptise as the Portuguese had. There was no mission now in Africa, only money to be made. The crews on the slave-ships were the refuse of the docks, for they were as likely to die of disease in the stinking holds as they were to be abandoned penniless and sick in the West Indies, themselves servants to a system that counted men’s work only in ledgers. The economic basis of slavery corrupted whomsoever it touched and freed through wealth only some thousands of citizens in a few European cities.
[3] For slavery in Africa was not a process for the accumulation of capital. There was no local method of doing this. Among the Ashanti, for instance, the number of slaves possessed by a man represented his place in society, not his wealth. Fo slaves were allowed to keep their personal property and the hard-working slave enriched himself, not his master. Only in the European system was economic robbery added to personal slavery. Once the slave was considered as a mere unit of production, arguments could be held seriously in Jamaica about the return on capital if slaves were worked to death quickly and new imports had to be bought, as opposed to the profit when slaves were worked to death slowly and bred their own replacements. In investment terms, treating people as beasts made the calculus more simple.
[4] Apologists for the slave-trade used repetitive arguments. The first was the rescue of the African from savagery. On one of the rare occasions that he opposed Dr Johnson, Boswell praised the slave-owners. He maintained that even if extreme cruelty was practised on the African savages, yet a portion of them were saved ‘from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country’, and introduced ‘into a much happier state of life’. Of course, such a tarnished version of African village society and such a gilded version of American plantation existence were dependent on the biased reports brought back by the slave-traders themselves. For the civilised European needed to be able to justify this distasteful source of his wealth.
3. Summary
Slavery in Africa was not designed in order to make money, whereas in the European system it was. Among the Ashanti, for example, the number of slaves a person had indicated his place in society, rather than his wealth. For Europeans and Americans, on the other hand, the number of slaves was an indication of a man’s wealth. The other principal difference concerned the slaves themselves. In Africa, slaves could keep their personal property and by hard work enrich themselves. Under the European system, however, slaves had all their property taken from them. The hard-working slave enriched only his master. (100 words)
IV. Guided Summary (Sample 4)
1. Question
Summarize in 50-100 words the passage’s description of Dr Pankhurst’s appearance, character and ideas.
2. Passage
If a husband was the ‘Open Sesame’ to ecstasy in Paris how much more was this so in Manchester, where Emmeline had no function and no duty but to adorn her parents’ home. Such service was perfect serfdom. Her spirit yearned to harness itself to the yoke of some liberating idealism…or idealist. She was determined ‘only to give herself to an important man’. Of course, she would not flirt; that was ‘degrading’. A lady revealed her want of a mate with a refined circumspection; as one contemporary journal wrote, ‘Half the art of the woman of the world consists in doing disgusting things delicately.’ However, when she found her prospective spouse she kindled his ardour so directly that Mrs Goulden accused Emmeline of ‘throwing herself at him’. Richard Marsden Pankhurst, LL.D., with his carroty beard and piping treble voice which often caused him to be mistaken for a woman, seemed an improbable key to bliss. He was twice Emmeline’s age. He had always lived with his Baptist parents and never left the house for an hour without telling them where he was going. A scholarly barrister, he was small, unprepossessing and so physically incompetent that his wife always had to do the carving. Still, he had beautiful hands. And in other respects the ‘Red Doctor’ was a distinctly glamorous figure. He was the most prominent and the most flaming radical in ‘Cottonopolis’. He was a pioneer of every advanced faith and a ‘standard-bearer of every forlorn hope’. He was a democrat, a republican, a communist, a Home Ruler, a pacifist, an internationalist, an agnostic. He was an opponent of imperialism and the House of Lords—it was ‘a public abattoir’ in which human rights were butchered. He was a proponent of free secular education and women’s rights—clawing the air with his long, curved finger-nails, he once exclaimed, ‘Why are women so patient? Why don’t you force us to give you the vote? Why don’t you scratch our eyes out?’ In short, Dr Pankhurst was an extremist and he courted Emmeline with an impetuosity that matched her own. On 8 September 1879 he wrote to ‘Dear Miss Goulden’ trying to interest her, ‘one of the party of progress’, in the movement for female higher education. On 23 September he addressed her as ‘Dearest Treasure’, assured her that ‘Every struggling cause shall be ours’ and rejoiced at the prospect ‘of two lives made one by that love which seeks more the other than self’. Emmeline was so transported by the eloquence and devotion of this glorious revolutionary that she proposed they should enter into a ‘free union’. The Doctor quickly explained that to violate sexual orthodoxy was to invite social damnation and thus to miss their chance of reforming the world. Emmeline learnt the lesson well and reconciled herself to defying convention in a brown velvet wedding-dress. Discovering too late that a superfluous row of brass buttons down the front made her look ‘like a little page boy’, she burst into tears.
3. Summary
Dr Pankhurst did not possess obvious physical attraction. He was small with a red beard and a high-pitched voice, and was twice as old as Emmeline. He was useless with his, admittedly beautiful, hands and still lived at home, always keeping his parents informed about his movements.
However, his ideas and behaviour made him very attractive. He was the most widely-known and extreme radical in Manchester. He took up and fought for many advanced ideas and hopeless causes, including republicanism, communism, pacificism, agnoticism, free secular education and women’s rights. He strongly opposed imperialism and the House of Lords. (98 words)
V. Practice (1)
1. Question
Summarize in 50-100 words the conflict between what customers see as their needs and what professionals see they should need. Use your own words and include only the relevant information.
2. Passage
[1] Many of the historic sources of company superiority—technology, innovation, economies of scale—allowed companies to focus their efforts internally and prosper. Today, internal focus in many companies is shifting to an external focus on the customer. Companies are acknowledging that unless customer needs are taken into account in designing and delivering both services and goods, all the technical superiority in the world will not bring success.
[2] While the requirement for customer focus may seem obvious to a marketing student or practitioner, the reality is that many organizations—private, public, and even non-profit—have historically viewed the customer as a distant and sometimes even bothersome necessity. To these companies, external focus on the customer brings with it a major culture change. High-tech companies driven by research and development (R&D) and invention, in fact, sometimes see an inherent conflict in focusing on the customer, believing that the creativity and autonomy of the company will be stifled. Yet the reality is that customers today will not buy overly complicated services or overengineered products, not just because they are too expensive but also because the extras and complications actually detract from the worth of the offering.
[3] Customer focus is also anathema to many professional services organizations in medicine, law, accounting, even higher education. To these and other professions, there seems to be a conflict between technical excellence and customer-perceived excellence. Lawyers, for example, sometimes see customer focus as a paradox: customers, they believe, are not knowledgeable enough to know what they need. What legal clients want, they contend, is to receive the least costly, least constraining advice—the opposite in many cases of what the experts know they need. Physicians and dentists sometimes offer a credible argument about the difficulty of simultaneously providing high technical quality and customer satisfaction: courses of treatment needed to eliminate disease are often painful and uncomfortable. Professors and other educators, too, may fear that customer focus means they must compromise their ethics and standards by focusing on what they believe students want: no homework, easy A’s, and twenty-four-hour access to professors.
[4] When customers become scarce in an industry and competition heats up, however, the customer gains power. In the early 1990s, when competition for master of business administration students intensified and Business Week conducted “customer surveys” of students to rank the best business schools in the United States, the business school “customer” assumed a more central position in these organizations. What students wanted in courses and experiences began to drive curricula, content, and peripherals associated with business degrees. Business schools overhauled their MBA programs to make them more relevant to the students and the business environment. Many B-schools revamped the course content of their programs, recognized their key constituents (students, faculty, administrators, alumni, and corporate recruiters), and acknowledged that they needed research to understand their customers’ expectations.
[5] In the 1990s, few organizations can ignore the centrality of the customer in remaining financially viable. Few organizations can develop winning services and products without understanding customers’ wants and needs and using them as foundation for development and delivery.
VI. Practice (2)
1. Question
Summarize in 50-100 words why nonverbal communication is important. Use your own words and include only the relevant points.
2. Passage
[1] Oral and written communication are different forms of verbal communication, or communication that conveys meaning through words. Nonverbal communication, communication transmitted through actions and behaviors, may carry equal weight, though. Gestures, posture, eye contact, tone of voice, even clothing choices—all of these send nonverbal communication cues. Nonverbal cues become important during oral communication since they can distort the intended meaning of a message.
[2] Nonverbal cues can have a far greater impact on people’s ability to communicate than they realize. One study, for instance, divided face-to-face conversations into three sources of communication cues: verbal (the actual words spoken), vocal (pitch, tone, and timbre of a person’s voice), and facial expressions. The researchers evaluated relative weights of these factors in message interpretation as follows: verbal (7 percent), vocal (38 percent), and facial expressions (55 percent).
[3] Even personal space — the physical distance between people who are communicating — can convey powerful messages. Personal space and social interaction fall into a continuum of four zones: intimate (within 18 inches of each other), personal (1.5 to 4 feet), social (4 to 12 feet), and public (12 feet and more) zones. In the United States, most business conversations occur within the social zone, roughly between 4 and 12 feet apart. If one person tried to approach closer than that, the other is likely to feel uncomfortable or threatened.
[4] Interpreting nonverbal cues from people with unfamiliar cultural backgrounds can be especially challenging. Concepts of appropriate personal space can differ substantially, to name just one example. Latin Americans insist on conducting business while standing too close for the comfort of most Americans and northern Europeans, who back away to preserve their personal space, causing the Latin Americans to perceive them as cold and unfriendly. To protect themselves from such feelings of personal threat, experienced Americans use desks or tables to separate themselves from their Latin American counterparts. “The result,” explains cultural anthropologist Edward T. Hall, “is that the Latin American may even climb over the obstacles until he has achieved a distance at which he can comfortably talk.”
[5] People are usually sending nonverbal messages, even when they try consciously not to do so. Sometimes nonverbal cues may reveal a person’s hidden attitudes and thoughts. A discrepancy between verbal and nonverbal messages may include that someone is not being truthful. Generally, when verbal and nonverbal cues conflict, audiences tend to believe the nonverbal indicators. Consider what happened when several employees at manufacturing firm Refuse Compactor told their plant manager, George Miller, that they wanted a pay raise, an extra week of vacation, and another paid holiday. Miller told them to put the request in writing so he could show it to company president Art Nevill. However, his nonverbal cues apparently did not fit his verbal message, since the employees interpreted this remark as a rejection. Shortly thereafter, they voted to join a union and went on strike.
Unit Three Abstracts of Academic Papers
I. Abstracts in Academic Journals
1) Current discussions on the future of Chinese writing system: a survey
Shao Jing
Current discussion on the future of the Chinese writing system has aroused considerable interest. Earlier proposals to abandon Chinese characters in favor of alphabetical writing were motivated by the belief that the latter is far more machine-manageable and most conducive to technological efficiency. In the current discussion, however, the emphasis begins to be shifted to further investigating the nature of the Chinese writing system, its evolution and its benefits to the Chinese language. The once unquestioned belief that alphabetical writing will eventually take the place of ideographic characters is no longer unquestionably held and indeed is found to be theoretically naive.
2) Semantic restructuring in second language acquisition
Wang Chuming
This paper constitutes an attempt to test the hypothesis that learning another language involves mastering a new semantic system residing in both verb meaning and the semantic constraints associated with the syntactic structures in the target language. The findings from two empirical studies with the English adjectival participle as the target of research lend support to this hypothesis.
3) 25 years of communicative language teaching
Shi Baohui
Communicative language teaching (CLT) has been discussed and practiced for a quarter of a century and has also received the attention of Chinese language teachers, resulting in a new understanding of language teaching in general. This paper begins with a look at CLT from the historical perspective and goes on to examine its theories and principles. In the third part, it attempts to provide an objective evaluation of CLT and argues for a “Generalized Communicative Approach to Language Teaching”.
(From Foreign Language Teaching and Research)
4) An investigation of the structure of group activities in ELT coursebooks
George M. Jacobs and Jessica Ball
This article reports a study examining the use of group activities in ELT coursebooks published since 1990. Ten randomly selected coursebooks were analysed in order to find the number and percentage of group activities as a whole, and of those group activities rates as fostering cooperation. The results are discussed in light of theory and research on cooperative learning, task-based language teaching, and the roles of learners, teachers, and coursebooks. Suggestions are made for how group activities can better foster co-operation among group members.
5) Reader-response theory and ELT
Alan Hirvela
Much of the current use of literature in ELT involves a ‘personal-response’ approach, which aims at eliciting learner production of discourse in the target language. The approach has played a major role in literature’s return to acceptability in ELT. This paper argues that the prevailing notion of personal-response limits the value of the responses. It then draws a distinction between reader-response and personal-response approaches, and demonstrates how the inclusion of reader-response theory in literature-based communicative language teaching will strengthen such instruction.
(From ELT Journal)
II. Abstracts of Conference Papers
1) Public Involvement Processes in Forest Management in Canada
Glen Blouin, B.A., M.F.
Canadian Forestry Association, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Eighty-five percent of Canadian forests are owned by the provinces, the balance is owned by the federal government (9%) and private individuals and corporations (6%). Provincial crown forests have traditionally been managed by the forest industry under long term agreements with the provinces, primarily to meet timber objectives. Recent trends towards forest management for both timber and non-timber values have led to greater public involvement in decision-making. Canadians have input into management of all three forests indirectly via laws and regulations, and directly by public participation. A variety of processes for public involvement are underway. The cornerstones to success are: equitable representation; access to information; fair and open processes informed participants.
2) Forest Science & Technology in Canada Entering the New Millennium
Dr. Gordon Miller, Director General, Science Branch
Natural Resources Canada—Canadian Forest Service, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
[1] In response to the recent reviews of government mandates and restructuring of the forest industry, roles and responsibilities for forest management in Canada are changing. Across Canada forest companies are increasingly being given responsibility for the operational management of forests while governments are focusing more on development of forest-related policies, from land tenure and codes of practice to international trade. The shifts in responsibility are changing the context for forest research.
[2] Within the context of sustainable development, there is a need to forge stronger links between policy makers, operational forest managers and researchers. As well, there is need for more cooperation among research organizations, despite a more competitive fiscal environment, in order to bring adequate expertise to bear on issues faced by the forest community. A positive trend already developing because of the focus on sustainable development is a growing interaction amongst biological scientists, economists and social scientists.
[3] Mechanisms have been established by government which allow for the development of a common agenda for forest science and technology. For example, Canada’s forest strategy, similar in intent to the Forest Action Plan for China’s Agenda 21, outlines Canada’s commitment to sustainable forest management and identifies where research is needed.
[4] International conventions and agreements are also exerting increasing influence on forest science and technology activities in Canada. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity are examples of international policies which are both founded on science and require additional scientific inputs for ongoing discussions.
[5] This paper describes the current situation of forest science and technology in Canada, including the general objectives, action plans within Canada’s Forest Strategy, and changing roles and responsibilities. Future directions are also discussed.
(From International Symposium on Forestry Towards the 21st Century,
June 11-15, 1997, Beijing, China)
III. Abstracts of Degree Theses
1) Some Insights into the Translation Criteria
Abstract
Referring to what the recent publications have dealt with in related chapters, the essay makes a full review of the historical development in the theory of translation principles and criteria. The writer objectively and critically analyzes the theories available one by one, and renowned characters like Yan Fu, Lu Xun, Tytler, Nida and so on are successively discussed on the merits and drawbacks of their theories. Illustrated with typical examples as well as quotations, the author forms his own idea eventually by contrasting and discriminating those criteria put forward before. As a conclusion, the author urges to strengthen the prosperity of diversity on the subject while enjoying his individual preference.
2) The Relationship Between Meaning and Context
Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between meaning and context. It first presents a classification of the types of meaning possible and then goes on to look at the different kinds of meaning in contact with the various linguistic and non-linguistic contexts. It concludes that contexts are necessary in determination of the exact meaning of polysemic and homonymous words.
3) Historical Changes in the US Policy toward China
Since 1949 and Their Consequences
Abstract
The US policy toward China since 1949 went through three periods. In the first period (1949-1969), the United States adopted a “Policy of Containment” which made the Sino-US relations tight and hostile. In the second period (1969-1981), it began to improve the relationship with China and established the Sino-US diplomatic relations. This was a turning point of the US policy toward China and led to the normalization of the Sino-American relations. In the third period (1981-present), the US government pursues a “Policy of Contact” under which, on the one hand, cooperation with China is found in many fields and, on the other, it attempts to influence and cause China to change from inside. This research is a detailed study of the changes and consequences of the US policy toward China.
IV. Practice
Improve the following abstracts.
1) This paper dealt with the preliminary study on thoughts of sustainable forestry. The general framework of sustainable forestry on Hebei Province was formed.
2) Based on discussing about the concept, the category and the role of urban forestry and some questions which sustainable development of urban forestry in China is faced with, the connotation, the target and the strategy for sustainable development of urban forestry in China were probed in this paper.
3) In this paper, the theory of ecological civilization was discussed. The application of this theory in sustainable development of forestry and ecological forestry engineering was also considered. The point of the author was that establishment of ecological civilization is the way of forestry sustainable development. We should pay highly attention to the ecological spirit civilization in the engineering of ecological forestry, which was the basis of realization of ecological forestry engineering.
4) With the development of the society, the traditional roles in the family are changed. Women begin to work outside the home, furthermore to take some kinds of special jobs. In the political area, women are also a very important part. Their roles in the family now are very different from what those used to be. The factors influenced this change include social reform, economy situation and the family structure. The article discusses the above problems on the base of some convey results and the investigation of the author.
5) This paper discussed the changing situations of traditional roles in the family and the influence of developing era on it. It has also been offered a contrast of the feature in the family role or personal nature in China with that in American and European countries in current times.
6) In response to the current discuss on violence TV program, this paper make a partly review of the TV developing history in China. The writer objectively and critically analyzes the benefit and harm of TV programs to young people. As a conclusion, the author urges that young people should reduce the time staying in front of TV sets and go outdoor to make exercises.
7) Referring to what some recent article have been concerned with television, the essay makes a brief review about television’s importance. The writer objectively analyzes the main functions of television and the reason people like to watch television in the light of current situation that different group of people has a different hobby and attitude to television. Illustrated with some examples as well as quotations, the writer put forward his own opinion and think television indeed play an indispensable role in modern life.
Unit Four Summary of a Book
III. Summary of a Book
1. Samples
1) A summary of Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, published in 1813.
[1] Mr and Mrs Bennet live with their five daughters at Longbourn in Hertfordshire. In the absence of a male heir, the property is due to pass by entail to a cousin, William Collins. Through the patronage of the haughty Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Collins has been presented with a living near Rosings, the Kentish seat of Lady Catherine. Charles Bingley, a rich young bachelor, takes Netherfield, a house near Longbourn, bringing with him his two sisters and his friend Fitzwilliam Darcy, nephew of Lady Catherine. Bingley and Jane, the eldest of the Bennet girls, very soon fall in love. Darcy, though attracted to the next sister, the lively and spirited Elizabeth, greatly offends her by his supercilious behaviour at a ball. This dislike is increased by the account given her by George Wickham, a dashing young militia officer (and son of the late steward of the Darcy property), of the unjust treatment he has met with at Darcy’s hands. The aversion is further intensified when Darcy and Bingley’s two sisters, disgusted with the vulgarity of Mrs Bennet and her two youngest daughters, effectively separate Bingley from Jane.
[2] Meanwhile the fatuous Mr Collins, urged to marry by Lady Catherine (for whom he shows the most grovelling and obsequious respect), and thinking to remedy the hardship caused to the Bennet girls by the entail, proposed to Elizabeth. When firmly rejected he promptly transfers his affections to Charlotte Lucas, a friend of Elizabeth’s, who accepts him. Staying with the newly married couple in their patronage, Elizabeth again encounters Darcy, who is visiting Lady Catherine. Captivated by her in spite of himself, Darcy proposes to her in terms which do not conceal the violence the proposal does to his self-esteem. Elizabeth indignantly rejects him, on the grounds of his overweening pride, the part he has played in separating Jane from Bingley, and his alleged treatment of Wickham. Greatly mortified, Darcy in a letter justifies the separation of his friend and Jane, and makes it clear that Wickham is, in fact, an unprincipled adventurer.
[3] On an expedition to the north of England with her uncle and aunt, Mr and Mrs Gardiner, Elizabeth visits Pemberley, Darcy’s seat in Derbyshire, believing Darcy to be absent. However, Darcy appears, welcomes the visitors, and introduces them to his sister. His manner, though still grave, is now gentle and attentive. At this point news reaches Elizabeth that her youngest sister Lydia has eloped with Wickham. With considerable help from Darcy, the fugitives are traced, their marriage is arranged, and (again through Darcy) they are suitably provided for. Bingley and Jane are reunited and become engaged. In spite, and indeed in consequence, of the insolent intervention of Lady Catherine, Darcy and Elizabeth also become engaged. The story ends with both their marriages, an indication of their subsequent happiness, and an eventual reconciliation with Lady Catherine.
(From The Oxford Companion to English Literature)
2) A summary of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1850.
[1] The novel is set in 17th-century Boston, and opens as a young woman named Hester Prynne emerges from prison with her illegitimate baby in her arms. Charged with adultery, she must stand exposed on the public scaffold for three hours, and must thereafter wear the scarlet “A” on her breast as a lifelong sign of her sin. Her husband is an elderly English scholar who two years earlier had sent her to Boston to prepare a home for them, but had failed to follow her at the appointed time. Unknown to Hester, he had been captured by Indians, and in fact arrives just in time to see his wife publicly condemned. Hester will not reveal the identity of her lover, try as the community does to draw out the secret. Ironically, the guilty man is one of that community’s most respected figures, the young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale. A highly conscientious man, he escapes outward condemnation, but is inwardly tormented by his sin.
[2] Years pass and Hester settles into her new life. She proves to be a strongminded and capable woman and, in spite of her humiliation, finds a place in Boston society by helping other unfortunates and outcasts. Her daughter, Pearl, has developed into a mischievous, “elfin” child who reminds Hester of her guilt by asking rather acute questions about the minister and the letter. Meanwhile, Hester’s husband has taken the name Roger Chillingworth and has settled in Boston as a doctor. He makes Hester swear to keep his identity secret, and indulges his private obsession with finding the identity of her lover. Happening upon Hester, Pearl, and Dimmesdale speaking together one midnight, he guesses correctly at Dommesdale’s guilt. Aware that the minister’s failing health is related to his unconfessed sin, Chillingworth pretends to help him medically, while torturing him spiritually with veiled allusions to his crime. When Hester discovers what he is doing she pleads with him to stop, but he is intoxicated by his power over Dimmesdale and puts aside everything but his continuing revenge. Hester intercepts Arthur one day on a walk through the forest and begs him to escape with her to Europe. He would like to do so, and Hester even removes the letter from her breast, but he sees flight as a yielding to further temptation. He returns to town, his mind filled with evil thoughts, to finish writing his Election Day Sermon. Hester learns that Chillingworth has blocked her plan of escape by booking passage on the same ship. Having delivered a powerful sermon, Dimmesdale leaves the church and bids Hester and Pearl to join him on the pillory, where at last he publicly confesses his sin. As Dimmesdale dies in his lover’s arms, Chillingworth cries out in agony at having lost the sole object of his perverse life. Hester and Pearl, now free from the restraints of the mortified community, leave Boston. The book ends with Hester’s return to Boston and her voluntary decision to resume wearing the scarlet letter. While Pearl settles in Europe, Hester continues her life of penance, a model of endurance, goodness, and victory over sin.
(From The Cambridge Handbook of American Literature)
2. Practice
1) A different version of the summary of The Scarlet Letter. Fill the blanks.
An aged English scholar sends ________ (1) young wife, Hester Prynne, to establish their home ________ (2) Boston. When he arrives two years ________ (3), he finds Hester in the pillory with ________ (4) illegitimate child in her arms. She refuses ________ (5) name her lover and is sentenced to wear a scarlet A, signifying Adulteress, ________ (6) a token of her sin. The husband conceals his identity, assumes the ________ (7) Roger Chillingworth, and in the guise of a doctor seeks to ________ (8) her paramour. Hester, a woman ________ (9) strong independent nature, in her ostracism becomes sympathetic ________ (10) other unfortunates, and her works of mercy gradually ________ (11) her the respect of her neighbors. Chillingworth meanwhile discovers ________ (12) the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, a revered, seemingly saintly young minister, is the ________ (13) of Hester’s beautiful, mischievous child, Pearl. Dimmesdale has struggled for ________ (14) with his burden of hidden guilt, but, though ________ (15) does secret penance, pride prevents him ________ (16) confessing publicly, and he continues to be tortured ________ (17) his conscience. Chillingworth’s life is ruined by his preoccupation ________ (18) his cruel search, and he becomes a morally degraded monomaniac. Hester wishes her ________ (19) to flee with her to Europe, ________ (20) he refuses the plan as a temptation from the Evil One, and ________ (21) a public confession on the pillory in which Hester had once ________ (22) placed. He dies there in her arms, a man broken by his concealed guilt, but Hester lives ________ (23), triumphant over her sin because she openly ________ (24) it, to devote herself to ensuring a happy life in Europe for Pearl and ________ (25) others in misfortune.
(From The Oxford Companion to American Literature)
2) Use your own words to rewrite the summaries of Pride and Prejudice and The Scarlet Letter.
3) Write a summary, in no more than 500 words, of a novel you have read.
Unit Five Commenting on a Book
Finding About Authors
1. Jane Austen
1) A brief note
Austen /ˈɒstɪn, ˈɔ:-/, Jane (1775-1817), English novelist. Her major novels are Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey (1818), and Persuasion (1818). They are notable for skillful characterization, dry wit, and penetrating social observation.
(From The New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1998)
2) Slightly more detailed
Austen /ˈɒstɪn/, Jane (1775-1817), English novelist. The youngest of seven children of a Hampshire rector, she was greatly stimulated by her extended and affectionate family. Her major novels are Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey (1818), and Persuasion (1818). They are notable for skillful characterization and penetrating social observation; Austen brings a dry wit and satirical eye to her portrayal of middle and upper-class life, capturing contemporary values and moral dilemmas.
(From The Oxford English Reference Dictionary, 1996)
3) A short biography
Austen, Jane (1775-1817)
Life A. was b. the seventh child of the minister of the parish of Steventon, Hampshire. Of her brothers one became a minister, like his father, and two rose high in the Navy. She lived the first 26 years of her life in Steventon. In 1801, on her father’s retirement, she moved with her parents to Bath. When her father died in 1805, she moved with her mother to Southampton. Then, from 1809 until the last year of her life, she lived in Chawton, Hampshire. Apart from visits to London, A. never travelled far from the county of her birth. She wrote stories from when she was quite young, with her father’s encouragement. Her first known novel Love and Friendship—not published until over a century later, in 1922, was written when she was 14. Three of the novels by which she is now known were written in Steventon, but all of them underwent change before they were finally published under new names. She revised and polished all her works tirelessly. Northanger Abbey was written in 1797, but it was not sold to a publisher until 1803 (for £10), and even then he failed to publish it so it had to be bought back again. It did not finally appear until 1818, a year after A.’s death. She came near to marriage twice; her first husband-to-be died in 1801, and she herself ended the relationship with the second, an old family friend. She wrote her last novel, Persuasion, in 1815-16, as her health began to fail. In 1817, she moved to Winchester to be near her doctor but, within a few months, she died of consumption. Like that of so many ladies of her class, A.’s life was short and uneventful.
(This is followed by a long, detailed description of her Works.)
(From British Fiction: A Student’s A—Z)
2. William Thackeray
1) A brief note
Thackeray /ˈθakəri/, William Makepeace (1811-63), British novelist. He established his reputation with Vanity Fair (1847-8), a satire of the upper middle class of early 19th-century society.
(From The New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1998)
2) Slightly more detailed
Thackeray /ˈθækərɪ/, William Makepeace (1811-63), British novelist, born in Calcutta. He worked in London as a journalist and illustrator after leaving Cambridge University without a degree. All of his novels originally appeared in serial form; he established his reputation with Vanity Fair (1847-8), a vivid portrayal of early 19th-century society, satirizing upper-middle class pretensions through its central character Becky Sharp. Later novels include Pendennis (1848-50), The History of Henry Esmond (1852), and The Virginians (1857-9). In 1860 Thackeray became the first editor of the Cornhill Magazine, in which much of his later work was published.
(From The Oxford English Reference Dictionary, 1996)
3) An analysis of Thackeray’s life
[1] Thacheray had been born into a comfortably secure upper-middle-class family, and reared to expect the leisured life of a gentleman. However, partly through bad luck and bad financial advice, partly through his own profligacy in early youth—he was at Cambridge and for some years afterwards a compulsive gambler—he had been left with nothing to rely on but his brains and energy. He dreamed of writing a great novel; but he was well aware that while he dreamed and dawdled, writers whom he despised, such as Bulwer-Lytton, were writing best-sellers.
[2] Writing had not been his first choice of profession. To please his mother he spent some tedious months studying law, but his earliest ambition was to be a painter. He studied art in London and Paris before deciding that his talent was too small for him to be anything but an amateur painter, though he continued to draw professionally, and illustrated most of his own novels. He then turned to journalism. In 1836, while he was still struggling to make his way, he married a penniless girl of eighteen, in the face of her mother’s fierce opposition.
[3] With considerable courage, Thackeray began to make a living for his growing family from miscellaneous contributions to any newspapers and periodicals that would take his work. Often he did not know where the next five pounds was coming from. Isabella Thackeray gave birth to three daughters, the second of whom died in infancy, but after the birth of the third, in 1840, she became incurably insane, and had to be cared for away from her family for the rest of her long life—she outlived her husband by over thirty years.
[4] This tragedy deeply affected Thackeray. It was, too, an additional financial burden, and for some years he was forced to part with his daughters, who were brought up by his mother in France, while he struggled to make a living in London, still chiefly by journalism. His chances as a novelist seemed poor: his short novel Barry Lyndon, published serially in Fraser’s Magazine in 1844, made so little impression on the public that it was not published in book form until twelve years later.
[5] However, by December 1843 Thackeray had found a new source of income, as a regular staff contributor to the new magazine Punch, which paid double the rates of other periodicals. By 1846 he was able to leave his simple bachelor lodgings, lease a house in Young Street, Kensington, and reclaim his children.
(From Introduction by Catherine Peters, pp. vii-viii,
Vanity Fair, Everyman’s Library, 1991)
II. Commenting on a Book
1. Pride and Prejudice (by Jane Austen, 1813)
1) A brief comment
Of the six novels, it is this one that has become the popular favourite. This is largely thanks to the liveliness and the likeableness of its heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, and to the lovers’ duel that she fights throughout with Darcy, a rich and handsome gentleman who is the object of all eyes, and who knows it. Elizabeth and Darcy charm and resist each other from a spirited dislike to a love and understanding that is stronger for having been tested. The development is as satisfying for the reader as it is inevitable. There is much simple comedy, too, in this novel, most of it at the expense of the silly and ‘superior’ Mr Collins and Lady de Bourgh. Again, it is in the dialogue that Austen is at her lively and witty best.
(From British Fiction: A Student’s A—Z)
2) A longer comment
[1] Jane Austen (1775-1817), who was the daughter of a clergyman and never married, lived most of her life in a community much like the one we find in Pride and Prejudice. All of her six novels deal with “the business of getting married,” are comedies involving either solitary heroines or young women educated by events to cast aside their illusions. Her presentation of “personality,” of the individual consciousness and point of view, mark her as one of the first English novelists who project a world the “modern” reader can recognize as familiar. Pride and Prejudice was first written in 1796 as First Impressions. It was rewritten (and retitled) in 1812 and published in 1813. The change in titles indicates a change from the notion that first impressions cannot be trusted, to the moral cause of those mistaken impressions. The first thing that attracts the reader is the wonderfully vivid presentation of character—especially through the bright and witty conversation. Frequently, both the “simple” and the “intricate” characters are ironically ignorant of how they reveal themselves in their remarks. The many misunderstandings and partial misunderstandings, the cross-purposes, the schemings, the deception and self-deceptions are presented in dialogue and in carefully staged scenes.
[2] It is sometimes said that Jane Austen’s work is severely limited, and in a superficial sense this is true. Her settings and subjects are always similar. She is not interested in the extremes of emotion and thought, nor in the upper or lower reaches of society. But within her chosen area of experience there is a considerable variety of human types, and the issues are frequently those of moral life and death. When Charlotte Lucas marries Collins she exhibits a moral failure as surely, if not as spectacularly, as Lydia does when she lives with Wickham before marriage. And the action of the main plot is precariously on the edge of a minor tragedy of pride and stupidity. There are intensity of feeling and dramatic excitement in many scenes in the novel. The interest in Pride and Prejudice, thus, goes beyond the exposure and satire of human limitations as revealed in social behavior. After a century and a half, readers return to the novel because it increases their knowledge of the conditions necessary for retaining one’s moral balance, amid the temptations of pride and prejudice and greed, of self-will and self-love. It is the depiction of characters who make up analogies of moral failure and survival that gives this novel its importance.
[3] But with all the seriousness of Jane Austen’s moral concern, with all the moral ugliness, social crudities, bad manners, cruelty, and failure, Pride and Prejudice is a comedy. Though most of the characters are condemned to continue being their ignorant and unattractive (if ridiculous and comic) selves, Elizabeth’s “splendid intelligence” and steadfast morality redeem the world of the novel. These qualities account for the overriding “success.” More than her mother’s ludicrous vulgarity or the funny effusions of Collins and Lady Catherine—more even than Elizabeth’s charming sense of humor—her lively consciousness and her self-reflection, which purges her of pride and prejudice, make up the light of comic grace that leaves the reader in delight.
(From Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice)
3) A student’s comment
In a world which cares only about money and rank, Pride and Prejudice tells a love story, a Cinderella story. The bright, quick-minded, humorous heroine marries one of the wealthiest men in England. Something changes in this fairy tale. Elizabeth’s wicked stepsisters are her own sisters, and her wicked mother is her own mother. In this world Cinderella is seen as a fortune-hunter and defeats with wit as she dates her love for Darcy from her first sight of his beautiful grounds at Pemberley. When Elizabeth faces the wicked witch, Lady Catherine in a garden, the latter unexpectedly turns into a fairy godmother, managing through inadvertence to unite the lovers. Like Cinderella marrying the prince, Elizabeth finally marries the handsome young man with a large fortune.
(From A Cinderella Story: An Analysis of Pride and Prejudice)
2. Vanity Fair (by William Thackeray, 1847)
[1] Vanity Fair was Thackeray’s masterpiece. Subversive, funny, complex and serious, it is the work of an intellectual athlete at the height of his powers. It has been called ‘the only English novel [of the nineteenth century] which, in theme and range, challenges comparison with War and Peace’. Attempts to categorize the book and its author have been made repeatedly: they always fail, for the novel evades and transcends classification. Satire, realism, parody, history and morality tale; Vanity Fair includes them all, but is far too enjoyable to be trapped in any one genre. Part of the delight of reading it for the first time is the sense of discovery that each reader experiences.
…
[2] The structure of the novel’s plot is simple. Each girl becomes the focus for a set of overlapping characters, who revolve, with one set rising on the Wheel of Fortune as another goes down. The events of the lives of Amelia and Becky are paralleled or contrasted, until an uneasy equilibrium is reached at the close, when they meet by chance at a Charity Fair—the hypocritical Victorian version of Vanity Fair. This pattern admirably suited the publication in monthly parts, without seeming too obviously schematic when the book was seen as a whole.
[3] Thackeray concentrated on complexity of character, and narrative, rather than plot. The most naive reader is prevented from summing up any of the characters and resting in a comfortable certainty about them. Early readers and some reviewers objected to this. The bad characters, they complained, were too attractive, the good ones stupid and dreary; not only was there no hero, but one of the heroines had no heart and the other no head. Thackeray’s point was that in Vanity Fair very few are blameless, and not many are consistently wicked. He would have agreed with Oscar Wilde that if the good end happily and the bad unhappily, ‘That is what Fiction means.’ The attractiveness of Becky, the dullness of Amelia, therefore, and our reactions as readers to these qualities, are precisely engineered and carefully monitored in every chapter of the book.
(From Introduction to Vanity Fair)
3. Practice
1) Write a short biography, in about 100 words, of an author.
2) Write a comment of about 150 words on a novel or any other book you have read.
Unit Six Writing a Book Review
I. The Content of a Book Review
There are at least two reasons for reviewing a book or any other work:
1) to bring it to the attention of people who may not know of it or may not have considered it properly;
2) to offer an assessment of its worth and usefulness.
To meet readers’ needs under (1), a review needs to contain information about the work under consideration so that someone who does not know it will be clear about its stated objectives, its content, its length and scope, its appearance, etc. This may make it necessary for you to provide some discussion of the topics or issues the work deals with, or of the kind of teaching/learning it is designed to assist.
To help readers with (2), you will need to give an opinion of whether the work is likely to achieve its aims, and an assessment of its usefulness to its target audience and the various kinds of user/reader in the field of English language teaching and learning in different situations world-wide. So:
Include both information about the whole work (not forgetting such things as accompanying tapes, teacher’s book, etc.) and an assessment of usefulness.
Ensure that the opinions offered can be justified (even to the author if it comes to it!) and take into account a wide range of potential users/readers.
Include, preferably near the beginning, some discussion of the topic, methodological background, etc., to provide a context for your review.
Check all your facts carefully, and do not be influenced by any personal knowledge you may have of the author or publisher (though information about previous work by the author may, of course, be relevant).
Try to make your review useful in some way to readers who may never look at the work you review (even if you advise them to).
Don’t be afraid of being controversial, unconventional, or entertaining, and of warning your readers against ‘bad’ (though perhaps well-produced and well-publicized) works, even if they are by well-known and popular writers.
(From ELT Journal Reviewer’s Guide)
II. The Presentation of a Book Review
1. Heading
Supply full information about the work, presented according to the following style:
|Communicative Language Teaching: An Introduction |
|William Littlewood |
| |
|Cambridge University Press 1981 108pp. £7.50 |
|ISBN: 521 28154 7 |
2. Layout
Type with double spacing on A4 size paper (one side only), with no more than 65 characters per line and 28 lines per page; place any headings on the left and underline them.
3. References
a. to the publication under review: ensure you quote accurately, and place the page number(s) in brackets after each quotation or reference;
b. to other works: put the author’s name and the year of publication, and the page number if appropriate, in brackets; list these references at the end of your review with full bibliographical information, e.g.:
|Alptekin, C. 1993. ‘Target-language culture in EFL materials’. ELT Journal 47/2:136-143. |
|Brumfit, C., and K. Johnson (eds.) 1979. The Communicative Approach to Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University|
|Press. |
|Candlin, C. 1973. ‘The status of pedagogical grammars’, in C. Brumfit and K. Johnson (eds.) 1979. |
|Long, M. 1981. ‘Foreigner Talk Discourse’. Paper given at TESOL, Detroit. |
|Richards, K. 1980. ‘The Use of Overgeneralisation by Elementary Students of English as a Second Language’. |
|Unpublished MA thesis, University of Essex. |
|Swan, M. 1979a. Kaleidoscope. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. |
|Swan, M. 1979b. Spectrum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. |
|Widdowson, H. G. 1978. Teaching Language as Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press. |
4. Notes
Any notes you wish to make should be gathered at the end, before any list of references.
5. Name and biographical data
Put your name and affiliation at the end, as you would wish them to appear in print.
Please add a brief biographical note to your typescript, giving details (in not more than 100 words) of your present position, qualifications, relevant experience, and current interests. This note will be printed at the end of the review. It is your responsibility to up-date this biographical paragraph before publication, if necessary.
(From ELT Journal Reviewer’s Guide)
III. Sample Reviews
1. A favorable review
Linguistics
H. G. Widdowson
Oxford University Press 1996 134pp. £5.50
ISBN 0 19 437206 5
Linguistics, the first in the new series of Oxford Introductions to Language Study, is a much-awaited book. There are three main reasons for this. Firstly, many existing introductions (e.g. Crystal 1985, Brown 1984, Yule 1985) are intended for students of linguistics: guiding them through fundamental concepts and ideas and preparing them for more advanced studies in particular areas. Secondly, although language is an essential part of our everyday life, introductions to linguistics can make considerable academic demands on the reader. Thirdly, there are many people who are interested in how language works but are not concerned with a more serious study of linguistics.
In the Preface, Widdowson states two purposes for the present series of introductions: “(1) to provide a large-scale view of different areas of language study as the precondition for more particular enquiry” (p. ix), and “(2) to accommodate the broader interests of many people who take an interest in language without being academically engaged in linguistics per se so these books are meant to be introductions to language more generally as well as to linguistics as a discipline” (p. x).
Linguistics serves these two purposes. The book follows no particular theories or schools of linguistic analysis and does not go into technicalities on any particular subject (like phonology or syntax or semantics). The survey constitutes six chapters: 1. the nature of language; 2. the scope of linguistics; 3. principles and levels of analysis; 4. areas of enquiry: focus on form; 5. areas of enquiry: focus on meaning; 6. current issues.
The book consists of four sections: 1. Survey; 2. Readings; 3. References; and 4. Glossary. 77 pages are devoted to the survey and, though one third of the size of other introductions, touch upon the nature of language, the scope of linguistics, principles and levels of analysis, form, meaning, and current issues. Section 2 consists of 24 selections from original texts, accompanied by questions, to complement each of the survey chapters. Section 3 is an annotated bibliography, with indication of three levels of difficulty (introductory, more advanced and technical, and specialized and very demanding). Section 4 lists alphabetically 100 key concepts introduced in the book, and each is followed by a brief definition and page references to the Survey section.
The first chapter opens with the beginning of language and language as a distinctive characteristic of the human being and other animals. Normally, books of this kind would cite the Bible, discuss existing theories of possible origins of language, and describe experiments to show that human beings and animals are different. However, the author of this book cites the Talmud, Shakespeare and W. H. Auden, using his literary craft to give the reader a sense of freshness and urge her to read on.
In the second chapter, you even see a map of the London Underground (p. 19)! This is not an unfamiliar sight for many teachers of English as a foreign language who employ the communicative approach to language teaching. Nevertheless the purpose of such a map here is not to discuss CLT, but to use the relation of a map to the actual complex underground network to show that complex as language is, linguistics is there to provide models of language which reveal features which are not immediately apparent (p. 18). This is exactly the same point that Widdowson has made to language teachers (e.g. Widdowson, 1990). The chapter also discusses such fundamental issues in linguistics as langue and parole, competence and performance, and knowledge and ability.
The third chapter shows how analysis of language can be made at different levels, referring to such concepts as lexical items, phonetic and phonemic, syntagmatic and paradigmatic, constituent structure, graphology, phonology, morphology, syntax, text, cohesion, context, discourse, and pragmatics. The author shows the relations between these concepts in a smooth flow of language, naturally picking up samples of language from Shakespeare and the Oxford Handbook (q.v. p. 35).
Chapters Four and Five focus on the essential areas of linguistic enquiry: phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. These are the central areas of interest for linguists of today and it is thus particularly difficult to write briefly without following particular schools of thought. While most basic ideas in phonetics and phonology, morphology, semantics and pragmatics are common ground (and the theoretical issues frequently discussed and argued about by professional scholars are not the concern of the book anyway) in syntactic analysis, it is not always easy to shy away from current theoretical issues and approaches developed in the field of syntactic theories. However, in this part of the chapter, only the term constituent structure is introduced (pp. 50-2), and this, to me at least, is inadequate and out-dated.
Compared with Chapter 4, Chapter 5 deals with semantics and pragmatics in much more detail, and the author goes into issues in pragmatics in some depth.
Chapter 6, Current Issues, is not concerned with theoretical arguments in the field of linguistics, as these would not be appropriate here. Instead it outlines how linguistic study can be extended to wider horizons including psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, functional linguistics, formal linguistics, corpus linguistics, and applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA). It also touches upon error analysis and interlanguage, which is essential to SLA studies.
I would recommend this book highly to all trainee language teachers as an easily accessible introduction to the essential field of linguistics.
Shi Baohui, Department of Foreign Languages, Beijing Forestry University
References
Brown, E. K. 1984. Linguistics Today. London: Fontana.
Crystal, David. 1985. Linguistics (2nd edn.). London: Penguin.
Widdowson, H. G. 1990. Abstraction, actuality and the conditions of relevance. In Wang Zuoliang (ed.) ELT in China. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, pp. 39-46.
Yule, George. 1985. The Study of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The reviewer
Shi Baohui is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Foreign Languages at Beijing Forestry University, People’s Republic of China. He has an MA in Descriptive and Applied Linguistics from Essex University and his main interests are phonology, syntax and TEFL methodology.
(From ELT Journal, 52/1, 1998)
2. A critical review
Does This Man Ever Sleep?
(A book review of Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent
by Robert F. Barsky, MIT Press: 1997. Pp. 237. $27.50, £17.95)
Geoffrey K. Pullum
The world’s most cited living person is a theoretical linguist. Noam Chomsky has published about 70 books and more than 1,000 articles, shaken up the study of natural language syntax several times, and won the Kyoto Prize for Basic Sciences, while supervising scores of PhD students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), spending 20 hours a week on personal correspondence, lecturing all over the world, building a worldwide reputation as a radical critic of American foreign policy and media culture, and being father to three children. Does he ever sleep?
Robert Barsky’s book does not tell us. It offers hardly any clear glimpses of Chomsky’s personal life, despite being so rich in quotations from him that the blurb touts it as “the autobiography that Chomsky says he will never write.” It has the faults of autobiography but not the virtues—there are scattered subjective judgements and unverified anecdotes from Chomsky without any connected first-person narrative to give a sense of him as a person.
Barsky does not compensate by providing competent intellectual biography. His letters from Chomsky are basically his only primary source (although a few photographs appear here for the first time). Barsky does not mention undertaking any interviews with people significant in Chomsky’s life. He seems unacquainted not only with linguistics—references to Chomsky’s work are in vapid phrases such as “conducting linguistic research that could lead us to a better understanding of the mind/brain”—but also with linguists. Two linguists’ names (apart from Chomsky’s) appear in his acknowledgments, and one of those is misspelled. Most of Chomsky’s MIT colleagues—Bromberger, Flynn, Hale, Harris, Keyser, O’Neil—go unmentioned.
Barsky has simply not done the fact-checking and critical analysis that we expect from a biographer. The 1958 Texas conference at which Chomsky debated with leading establishment opponents is described by Chomsky in a letter written 37 years later; Barsky quotes no other participant. The section on “Chomsky as a teacher” cites no discussions with any of his 60 or so doctoral students. Barsky just recycles three quotations from women graduates about whether Chomsky is a sexist, taken from a 1988 magazine article.
Interesting questions about Chomsky’s career remain for a conscientious intellectual biographer to explore; for example, the almost total absence of refereed journal papers from his voluminous publications (essentially all his work seems to be published by invitation), or his baffling insistence that he has been shunned and ignored throughout his career. (In truth he has been welcomed worldwide as a political speaker and has increasingly dominated formal linguistics—more than 80 per cent of the theoretical syntax papers at the last two conferences of the Linguistic Society of America were Chomskyan.) One will not find these topics examined in Barsky’s book.
The writing is pretentiously sycophantic, from the opening sentence (“The task of writing a biography of Noam Chomsky gives new meaning to the word daunting”) to the final verbless encomium (“Noam Chomsky, sixty-eight years old, institute professor, linguist, philosopher, grandfather, champion of ordinary people”). Between these bookends of cliche( lie 215 pages of narrative ranging from soporifics such as “they were determined to provide a serene and comfortable life for their young children” to ludicrous verbiage such as “Humboldt and other enlightenment thinkers don’t join the intellectual milieu surrounding and influencing Chomsky, they were always already there, waiting to be reilluminated.”
Barsky does not even reilluminate the chronology of major events in Chomsky’s life. The section called “The founding of MIT’s graduate program in linguistics” forgets to tell us when the programme was founded (1959 or earlier is implied; actually the first regular graduate class entered in 1961). Events such as the 1975 Royaumont debate with Piaget or Chomsky’s pivotal 1979 sabbatical in Pisa are overlooked completely.
Chomsky’s political life dominates Barsky’s perspective. Vastly more is said about Chomsky’s links to radical leftist groups and Jewish political organizations than about his academic work. But, even in the political arena, his life story is not adequately chronicled. The reader cannot find out from this book when it was (some time during the Vietnam War) that Chomsky visited Hanoi—or even that he went there at all. Nor can we find out from the section called “Chomsky and Montreal” whether he ever visited that city. Omitting the one fact that we might have expected, the section drifts off mysteriously into a discussion of Quebec fascism in 1942.
The most serious of Barsky’s omissions is his failure to check Chomsky’s recollections for accuracy or consistency. Chomsky’s testimony about his celebrated academic war against “generative semantics” (GS), roughly from 1967 to 1975, amounts to denying that he even participated in it, which is an astonishing historical claim, even from a victor. Chomsky adds that “every single appointment” made in his department in the relevant period was of a GS practitioner. The idea that Chomsky, with his enormous prestige, could not have ensured the appointment of the colleagues he wanted cannot be taken seriously. He cited Paul Postal as an example of a GS hiring; but Postal left MIT in 1965, years before the battle over GS began.
Furthermore, Chomsky omits mention of Joan Bresnan—a major opponent of GS who was hired during 1974-75 with Chomsky’s strong support. Then, in a later section, where a charge of running a patriarchal department is being discussed, he offers in defence his successful advocacy of Bresnan’s appointment. Barsky does not explore the conflict between these passages (and fails to mention Bresnan in his index).
If Chomsky never writes an autobiography, and this amateurish cut-and-paste hack job is his biography, then the life of the most lionized intellectual of the twentieth century and most famous linguist in history will remain largely terra incognita.
Geoffrey K. Pullum is in the Department of Linguistics, University of
California, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA
(email: pullum@cats.ucsc.edu).
(From Nature, Vol. 386, 24 April 1997, p. 776)
IV. Practice
Write a review of a specialist/non-fiction book that you have read or studied as a textbook. Your review should be about 1,500 words in length.
Unit Seven Mechanics of the Research Paper
I. Writing the Introduction
1. Water Quality
[1] Over the last 20 years a number of methods have been developed to assess water quality (Gaufin and Tarzwell 1955, 1956; APHA 1975). Originally, only chemical surveys were employed; however, it was recognized that chemical surveys indicate stream conditions only at the time of sampling (Farrell 1931; Wilhm and Dorris 1966; Wilhm 1967, 1972).
[2] Recently, emphasis has been placed on the biological diversity of water systems to indicate water quality because the living component of the system in question is indicative of both past and present environmental conditions. Even a short term exposure to water of poor quality may destroy intolerant organisms and change the community structure (Cairns and Dickson 1971). It is for this reason that aquatic organisms are being used more frequently to evaluate conditions in streams. Bottom organisms are particularly suitable for such studies because their habitat reference and low motility cause them to be affected directly by substances which enter the environment (Wilhm 1967; APHA 1975).
[3] The importance of aquatic biota as indicative of stream quality does not diminish the importance of the chemical and physical parameters. There are certain important physical and chemical parameters such as pH, oxygen saturation, discharge, etc. that are highly indicative of stream quality and knowledge of these parameters in the water system in question is essential to elucidating the water quality.
[4] Certain factors are known to influence the biological, chemical, and physical characteristics of a stream. Among these are degree of urbanization and stream order (see Horton 1945). The purpose of this study is to assess the effects of these two factors on the water quality of six streams in Fayette County, Kentucky.
(From How to Write Term Papers and Reports)
2. Translation
Translation, which in its word form does not seem at all complicated, has developed into a more and more heated subject in recent years. Among those controversial topics concerning translation, the criteria of translation are frequently picked up by theorists and translators because of its significance in guiding the translating practice and evaluating translated works. Talking of the importance and double function of the criteria for translation, Liu (1991) suggested that the criteria for translation function as a plumb-line for measuring the professional level of translation and as a target set for translators to strive after. Since Yan Fu, an erudite and experienced translator, put forward his three-Chinese-character principle in the late 19th century, the debate over translation criteria has been flourishing in China. Though to date no agreement has been reached as a result, we can still roughly classify them into three groups of opinion. Specifically speaking, one group holds high the three requirements as formulated by Yan Fu, which are practically too difficult to fulfill in the course of translation, i.e. faithfulness, comprehensibility (or expressiveness) and elegance. Other people think highly of the principles of accuracy and smoothness (e.g. Zhang et al., 1983) while still others tend to appreciate the theory of equivalence which was advocated by the American scholar, Eugene A. Nida (1992). It is not so easy a thing as to simply say which group is correct or wrong. As a matter of fact, all of the criteria mentioned above have their points to make. In this paper, I attempt to provide a critical analysis of available theories and formulate a means of probing into the issue of translation criteria.
(Student)
3. Word Meaning and Context
When we read, it is useful to bear in mind that the structure of a text may be analyzed into levels of presentation as outlined in the following hierarchy:
(1) A text consists of more than one sentence.
A sentence consists of one or more than one clause.
A clause consists of one or more than one phrase.
A phrase consists of one or more than one word.
(Zhang & Zhang, 1995: 3)
This hierarchy indicates that it is far from sufficient just to know the meanings of unconnected words. In order to understand a text, we need to comprehend at a combination of all these levels and the relation between the meaning of a word and the context in which it is used becomes paramount. Sometimes the sense of one word may affect or be affected by a paragraph, or an entire passage. That is to say, the meaning of a word interacts with the context, and the relationship between meaning and context determines our understanding of the article. In this paper I am going to discuss the relationship between word meaning and context.
(Student)
4. Needs Assessment
[1] This paper is about how teachers and others involved in language teaching programme planning can describe the language needs of prospective learners and about the tools they may employ to fashion their descriptions. It is also about the conceptual baggage planners inevitably bring to the planning situation—often unclarified beliefs and positions about learning and teaching which translate eventually into positions about learners’ needs, needs assessment processes and syllabus design.
[2] I want to examine the juncture between theory and practice in language needs assessment first by outlining what I think are some essential concepts in educational planning which do not ordinarily receive the credit they deserve for influencing the ways language programme planners undertake language needs assessment. Next I will try to relate general concepts and methodologies in educational needs assessment to our particular concern with needs assessment in applied linguistics. Finally, in my conclusion, I will try to isolate several key variables in the needs assessment process which planners in institutional situations will want to consider before they are overwhelmed by the forces of a large-scale language needs assessment. Throughout the discussion I will stress that language needs assessment is shaped by the local work environment and especially by the commonsense thinking of practising teachers about their work.
[3] Ultimately my goal is to move beyond the aspects of methodology which ordinarily dominate needs assessments and to suggest what factors—largely subjective in nature—influence the interpretation and use of data during the assessment process.
(From The Second Language Curriculum)
5. Forest Science in Canada
[1] Forest science has changed drastically in Canada in recent years, reflecting an even more drastic change in the operating context of the forest sector. Several factors have driven this rapid evolution.
[2] Fiscal restraint has significantly modified the funding and options available to respond to shifting priorities. This has led to a reduction of research capacity in most provinces. Restraint has also favoured regulatory roles for governments with delegation of responsibilities for management implementation to industry, changing the client base for research programs.
[3] The major shift in management philosophy from sustained yield to sustainable development and the ever increasing social and political acceptance, nationally and internationally, of that shift has developed concerns in a range of activities from biodiversity to forest practices codes to marketing of forest products. These concerns have, in turn, dictated changes in research priorities, programs and philosophies.
[4] Rapid advances in computer technology have directly affected forest research by both increasingly research capacity and by creating new opportunities for research in areas such as remote sensing and decision-support systems. Simultaneously, electronic publishing and distribution of scientific information is transforming the conventional world of libraries and scientific journals by introducing new dimensions of speed and complexity.
[5] Further, national and international accords and agreements and the debate accompanying their development and implementation are demanding new information and imposing new direction on forest science and technology priorities.
[6] This paper briefly explores these often conflicting factors and their implications for forest science and technology in Canada which will extend into the new millennium.
(From International Symposium on Forestry Towards the 21st Century)
II. Graphics
1. Tables
1)
[pic]
2)
[pic]
2. Figures
1)
[pic]
2)
3)
3. Other
Photographs, plates, drawings, etc. (omitted).
Unit Eight Notes
I. Footnotes
Below are some notes that accompany the title of an article. Read the notes and answer the questions after them.
|Silviculture and wildlife relationships in the boreal forest of |
|Interior Alaska1 |
|by D. A. Haggstrom2 and D. G. Kelleyhouse3 |
| |
|… |
| |
|____________________________________________________ |
|1 A paper presented at the Silviculture, Forest Ecology and Genetics technical session at the Society of American Foresters |
|and Canadian Institute of Forestry National Convention held at Anchorage, Alaska, on 18-22 September 1994. |
|2 Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Division of Wildlife Conservation, 1300 College Road, Fairbanks, AK 99701. |
|3 Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Division of Wildlife Conservation, 1300 College Road, Fairbanks, AK 99701. |
1) Note 1 tells where this paper had appeared before it was published here. (True/False)
2) The paper was presented at an academic conference in 1994. (True/False)
3) The authors of this article work in different organizations. (True/False)
4) Notes 2 and 3 can be combined as one note. (True/False)
II. Endnotes
Read the extract on the next page, from ‘The Beginning of Wood Science’, and answer these questions:
1) Theophrastus wrote many books but we can only see two of them now. (True/False)
2) We can’t see all of Theophrastus’ books because most of them are lost. (True/False)
3) Theophrastus was named “father of Botany” because of two books he wrote. (True/False)
4) The author of the article only read the fifth chapter of the first book. (True/False)
5) The author thinks that the fifth chapter of the first book is important. (True/False)
6) The author of the article agrees with Theophrastus on the best times for felling trees. (True/False)
7) Briefly answer this question: What do the notes tell us?
The beginning of wood science
George Tsoumis, Emeritus Professor of Forest Utilization, Department of Forestry and Natural Environment, Aristotelian University, Thessaloniki, Greece
INTRODUCTION
Wood science started in ancient Greece and the originator was Theophrastus (372-287 B.C.). He was the first to write about the nature (the structure and properties) of wood and its uses. Aristotle also commented on wood structure, but Theophrastus’ account is more comprehensive.
Theophrastus was born in the Aegean island of Lesbos. He was a student of Plato and Aristotle, and himself a philosopher, natural scientist, teacher and prolific writer. He wrote on various subjects (philosophy, metaphysics, natural sciences, ethics, religion and poetry), but most of his works have been lost. Of those that survive the main works are:
1) “Enquiry into Plants”1
2) “On the Causes of Plants”2
The former, for which the actual title is “On the History of Plants”, is descriptive and concerns their classification, geographical distribution and products. The latter deals with physiology of plants.
On the basis of the above works, Theophrastus was named “father of Botany”. However, a detailed reading reveals that in the fifth book (chapter) of the “Enquiry into Plants”, and scattered in other chapters of both works, there is a wealth of information about wood. That information starts in the forests with a discussion of the quality of wood as affected by the season in which the trees are felled.
Overall, the general coverage of wood, and other forest products, e.g. pine resin, corresponds to the present day concept of Forest Utilization. Forest Utilization (Forstbenutzung)3 is the forerunner of Wood Science and Technology,4 the modern field that deals in depth with structure, technical properties and industrial utilization of wood ( but does not include harvesting.
While this article is based mainly on the fifth chapter, other sources are specifically mentioned.
HARVESTING AND WOOD QUALITY
According to Theophrastus, harvesting may influence the following characteristics of wood quality: discoloration, resistance to decay and insects, and hardness.
He suggests that trees producing logs to be (hand) debarked, mainly pine and fir, should be felled during the period of tree growth (spring and early summer); otherwise, he says, debarking is difficult and the wood becomes discolored (obviously meaning the appearance of blue stain).4,5 Oak is cut later in winter time; if cut during the season of growth it decays fast and is attacked by insects, which develop under the bark and inscribe galleries whereas if felled at the proper time, such attacks are avoided and the wood is hard and dense throughout. Theophrastus writes that such marked pieces of wood were used as seals. In general, he continues, such effects are also derived from the phase of the moon at the time of felling; woods are harder and more resistant to decay when trees are felled during the period of moonless nights! However, there is no foundation for these contentions. The quality of wood, its hardness and other properties, are formed during tree growth, i.e. before felling, and resistance to fungi and insect attack may be affected by environmental conditions after felling.4,5 ...
REFERENCES
1 THEOPHRASTUS. Enquiry into Plants. (Original text and English translation by A. Hort. Heinemann-Harvard University Press, 1916).
2 THEOPHRASTUS. De Causis Plantarum, I. (Original text and English translation by E.D. Dengler, Philadelphia, 1927, private edition).
3 KNIGGE, W. u. H. Schulz. 1966. Grundriss der Forstbenutzung, P. Parey, Hamburg/Berlin.
4 TSOUMIS, G. 1991. Science and Technology of Wood. Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York.
5 TSOUMIS, G. 1992. Harvesting Forest Products. Stobart Davies Ltd., Hertford, England.
III. Endnotes and References
Here is another selection that contains some notes. Answer these two questions:
What do the notes tell us?
1) The author uses many abbreviated forms of words in his notes. What do they mean?
A Tilting Wind Tunnel for Fire Behavior Studies
David R. Weise
Wind velocity and topography are important factors affecting many aspects of land fire. Research examining the effects of wind and slope on fire behavior has been conducted since at least the late 1930s.1 The research has been both field and laboratory based. Field-based research programs have been extensively used in many countries including Canada and Australia.2 Advantages of the field-based approach are that wildland fire behavior is studied on a scale that is very close to the actual phenomenon. A disadvantage to this approach is that control over experimental conditions is difficult to achieve and isolation of the effects of individual factors may not be obtainable.3
Laboratory-based research has been widely used in the United States to isolate and examine the individual factors affecting fire behavior. A potential disadvantage of laboratory-based research is that scale effects may exist. For example, the ratio of radiative and convective heat transfer in a laboratory study may not be equal to the ratio observed in full-scale wildland fires. The theory of similitude and scaling relationships have been widely used in fire modeling as well as other disciplines with success.4,5,6,7 Laboratory results must be validated at near-field scale to ensure against any scaling effects if similitude has not been preserved.
Laboratory studies of wind effects on fire behavior have traditionally been studied in wind tunnels or similar devices capable of inducing wind. Ten wind tunnels of various types, the majority of which were located in the United States, that have been used for fire research have been described.8 Three of these tunnels are part of the two USDA Forest Service forest fire laboratories in Macon, Georgia and Missoula, Montana. Other smaller wind tunnels have been constructed to examine various fire behavior phenomena.9,10,11
Studies of the effects of slope on fire behavior range from examining fire spread along single fuel particles to field-scale tests.12 Laboratory tests using constructed fuel beds have commonly been used to study slope effects on fire spread.13,14,15 However, these experiments have examined only the effects of slope and thus were conducted under calm air conditions. The combined effects of wind and slope on fire behavior have not been examined in a laboratory setting.
To examine wind and slope effects concurrently under controlled conditions, a wind tunnel that can be tilted is necessary. The wind tunnels that are housed at the Forest Service combustion laboratories are fixed in the buildings and cannot be tilted. Small wind tunnels can be tilted and can be used to examine wind and slope effects concurrently.10,11,16 Most wind tunnels are simply long boxes consisting of four rigid, immovable sides. For a fire of sufficient size, the buoyancy exhibited by the flame could be influenced by the presence of a roof.17 A fixed position wind tunnel with a moving ...
END NOTES AND REFERENCES
1 Fons, W.L. 1946. Analysis of fire spread in light forest fuels. Journal of Agricultural Research 72(3): 93-121.
2 McAlpine, R.S.; Stocks, B.J.; Van Wagner, C.E.; Lawson, B.D.; Alexander, M.E.; Lynham, T.J. 1990. Forest fire research in Canada. In: International Conference on Forest Fire Research, Paper A.02, 1990 November 19-22; Coimbra, Portugal.
3 Van Wagner, C.E. 1971. Two solitudes in forest fire research. Information Rep. PS-X-29. Chalk River, Ontario: Petawawa Forest Experiment Station. Canadian Forestry Service; 7 p.
4 Hottel, H.C. 1961. Fire modeling. In: Berl, W.G., ed. International Symposium on the Use of Models in Fire Research. Publication 786, Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences - National Research Council; 32-47.
5 Spalding, D.B. 1963. The art of partial modeling. In: 9th Symposium (International) on Combustion Institute; 1963 Aug. 27 - Sept. 1; Ithaca, NY. New York: Academic Press; 833-843.
6 Byram, George M. 1966. Scaling laws for modeling mass fires. Pyrodynamics 4: 271-284.
7 Byram, G.M.; Nelson, R.M., Jr. 1971. The modeling of pulsating fires. Fire Technology 6(2): 102-110.
8 Pitts, W.M. 1989. Assessment of need for and design requirements of a wind tunnel facility to study fire effects of interest to DNA. Report NISTIR 89-4049. Gaithersburg, MD: Center for Fire Research, National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Dept. of Commerce; 197 p.
9 Martin, Robert E.; Sapsis, David B. 1987. A method for measuring flame sustainability of live fuels. In Proc. 9th Conference on Fire and Forest Meteorology. 1987 April 21-24; San Diego, CA. Boston, MA: American Meteorology Society; 71-74.
10 Martin, Robert E.; Finney, Mark A.; Molina, Domingo M.; Sapsis, David B.; Stephens, Scott L.; Scott, Joe H.; Weise, David R. 1991. Dimensional analysis of flame angles versus wind speed. In: Andrews, P.L.; Potts, D.F., eds. Proc. 11th Conf. Fire and Forest Meteorology, 1991 April 16-19, Missoula, MT. Bethesda, MD: Society of American Foresters Publ. 91-04: 212-217.
11 Viegas, D.X.; Neto, L.P.C. 1991. Wall shear-stress as a parameter to correlate the rate of spread of a wind induced forest fire. International Journal of Wildland Fire 1(3): 177-188.
12 Weber, R.O. 1990. The most strand and the burning bed. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 20: 845-848.
13 Byram, G.M.; Clements, H.B.; Bishop, M.E.; Nelson, R.M., Jr. 1966. Final report - PROJECT FIRE MODEL: An exploratory study of model fires. Office of Civil Defense Contract OCD-PS-65-40. Asheville, NC: Southeastern Forest Experiment Station, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture; 46p.
14 Rothermel, R.C. 1972. A mathematical model for predicting fire spread in wildland fuels. Res. Paper INT-115. Ogden, UT: Intermountain Forest and Range Experiment Station, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture; 40p.
15 Van Wagner, C.E. 1988. Effect of slope on fires spreading downhill. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 18(6): 818-820.
16 Sato, K.; Miki, K.; Hirano, T. 1984. Flame spread over paper in an air stream with a velocity change. Journal of Heat Transfer 106: 707-712.
17 Taylor, G.I. 1961. Fire under the influence of natural convection. In: Berl, W.G., ed. International Symposium on the Use of Models in Fire Research. Publication 786, Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences - National Research Council; 10-31.
IV. Notes for Additional Discussion
The notes given in the following passage are different from the extracts above. What do they tell us? Read the extract and answer these questions:
1) Which philosopher does the author cite in her discussion of logical positivism? Does the author agree with him?
2) Look at the notes. What do notes 6-11 tell us? What does “Ibid.” mean?
3) What is the function of notes 12 and 13? What do we learn from them?
Logical Positivism
Helen E. Longino
Logical positivist philosophy of science was radical empiricist epistemology applied to science. Epistemology is prescriptive in the sense that it lays down rules for what is to count as knowledge and what is to count as meaningful discourse. in the version of empiricism developed by the positivists that which is meaningful (statements, sentences, et cetera) is that whose content is true and experienced or derived from known experiential (observational or basic) statements in a rule-governed way. These sketchily presented fundamental notions were given elaborate formal expression in the writings of philosophers like Rudolph Carnap, Carl Hempel, and Karl Popper (though the latter would not call himself a positivist.
The assumption in positivists’ writings is not only that they are prescribing the correct methods for acquiring knowledge but that they are at the same time describing how science is done. For example, it is a consequence of their accounts of concept formation and theory confirmation that scientific knowledge develops in a cumulative fashion. According to the cumulative model, successive theories in a field differ only in accounting for a wider and wider range of phenomena and are consistent with earlier theories accounting for the same data. Their references to the history of science indicate that they believe cumulativity to characterize the actual development of science. Their writings include very little case study work to support their assumption of the congruity of prescription and description in their analyses. The assumption seems supported, instead, by something like the following argument. Since science has provided knowledge of the natural world, and since the natural sciences are empirical, that is, rely on observation and experiment, the logical positivist prescriptions must be just clearer and more formal expressions (“logical reconstructions”) of what scientists do. Both premises require deeper exploration. One can ask in what sense the sciences have provided knowledge of the natural world. One can also ask whether the empirical nature of the natural sciences means that they rely exclusively on observation and experiment, as they would have to for the conclusion to follow. These questions acquire some urgency in light of the problems encountered by positivist attempts to analyze evidential relations, or what they called “confirmation.” I shall discuss the most famous of these.
In his celebrated essay “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation,”6 Hempel is engaged in a search for “general objective criteria determining whether ... a hypothesis H may be said to be corroborated by a given body of evidence E.”7 His aim in the essay is to provide definitions of the concepts of confirmation and disconfirmation that characterize those relations in a purely formal way: the criteria of confirmation “should contain no reference to the specific subject matter of the hypothesis.”8 For Hempel one ought to be able to tell simply by looking at the logical forms of a hypothesis sentence and an evidence sentence whether the confirmation relation holds between them, just as one can tell simply by inspecting the logical forms of premise sentences and conclusion sentences whether the implication relation holds between them. The search, then, is for formal syntactic criteria of confirmation analogues to the formal criteria for the validity of deductive arguments.
The requirements developed by Hempel are met by his satisfaction criterion of confirmation. The relation of direct confirmation is characterized thus:
An observation report B directly confirms H if B entails the development of H for the class of objects mentioned in B.9
And the relation of confirmation is as follows:
An observation report B confirms a hypothesis H if H is entailed by a class of sentences each of which is directly confirmed by B.10
This definition provides the syntactic, formal criterion for which Hempel was searching since we need only check to see that certain entailment relations hold in order to determine whether a given sentence confirm another. The question, however, is: Can this definition of the conformation relation be the source of a description of the relation between evidence and hypothesis?
The situation seems from an epistemological point of view ideal: the justification of hypothesis becomes a very straightforward matter, and philosophers have only to solve the problem of induction in order to finish tidying the house of science. Reality, however, has a habit of eluding the ideal, in this instance no less than in others, for actual evidential relations in science are not captured by the analysis of confirmation. To see this one need only consider arguments Hempel himself has advanced in a different context. In the course of arguing against the inductive view of the formulation of hypothesis, that is, the view that hypotheses are formulated, or developed, by being inferred inductively from observations, he remarks:
Take a scientific theory such as the atomic theory of matter. The evidence on which it rests may be described in terms of referring to directly observable phenomena, namely to certain macroscopic aspects of the various experimental and observational data which are relevant to the theory. On the other hand, the theory itself contains a large number of abstract, non-observational terms such as ‘atom,’ ‘electron,’ ‘nucleus,’ ‘dissociation,’ ‘valence’ and others, none of which figures in the description of the observational data.11
In other words, scientific hypotheses are about underlying processes involving such putative items as atoms, neutrinos, quarks, et cetera. The evidence for such statements is not described in statements about “observation reports” of individual atoms but in statements about cloud chambers, lines observed in spectrographic analysis, et cetera. Hempel takes this as showing that it is impossible to devise rules that would enable one to infer new hypothesis from observations, as the inductivists hoped. As this is patently not the case, such rules cannot be constructed.
The implications of this state of affairs are, however, equally devastating for Hempel’s analysis of confirmation, if intended as a description of the evidential relation. The analysis he provides is of a formal, syntactic relation between sentences. This relation holds only between sentences containing the same predicates: the development of a hypothesis for a class contains only those predicates occurring in the hypothesis, and as an observation report only confirms a hypothesis of it entails its development for the class of objects mentioned in the observation report, it too must contain at least one of the predicates occurring in the hypothesis.12 That is, the confirmation relation as Hempel conceives it makes the same impossible demand upon science as does the inductivist conception. Hypotheses forming part of the atomic theory of matter are not evidentially supported by statements about atoms, by statements containing the same terms as occur in the hypothesis, but by statements containing quite different kinds of terms. The same is true for most, if not all, interesting scientific theories. Thus Hempel was right in claiming that one could not, from scrutiny of observations alone, develop in a rule-governed way hypotheses that would account for or explain the observations, but he was wrong in his implicit claim that one could, simply by scrutinizing a hypothesis once developed, determine in a rule-governed way the observation reports that would confirm the hypothesis.13 As an account of evidential relations that could form the basis for an account of scientific reasoning, this analysis of confirmation won’t do. Scientific reasoning somehow crosses the gulfs identified in Hempel’s critique of an inductivist logic of discovery. The epistemological foundation offered by traditional positivism for the natural sciences is, therefore, inadequate.
________________________________________
6 Hempel (1965), pp. 3-51.
7 Ibid., p. 6.
8 Ibid., p. 10.
9 Ibid., p. 37.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., p. 6.
12 While an observation report may contain predicates not occurring in the hypothesis, only those occurring in both observation report and hypothesis are relevant to confirmation; compare ibid., pp. 37-38n. Because Hempel was an adherent to the theoretical term/observational term dichotomy, it is important to notice that his argument here depends not on that distinction but simply on the fact that hypothesis contain different descriptive (i.e., nonlogical) terms than the sentences describing potential evidence for them. Thus, a rejection of the empiricist version of the theoretical/observational distinction cannot save the analysis of confirmation.
13 The use of “bridge principles” to leap over the gap between experimental/ observational and theoretical language is subject to well-known objections and in this context seems highly ad hoc. Hempel has, in recent work, retreated from the position discussed here and adopted the Duhemian view that a test or experiment never conclusively confirms or disconfirms or falsifies a hypothesis but rather is relevant to the hypothesis in conjunction with certain assumptions. As Hempel discusses them in his Philosophy of Natural Science (1966), they are assumptions about the experimental instruments and measuring devices used to generate observations and data. I shall argue for the necessity of more interpretative assumptions in Chapter Three.
V. Referencing
The passage below is special in giving referencing notes. How are they given and what do they tell?
Cognitive Science Research
JON M. SLACK
The theoretical foundations of cognitive science are rooted in logic and computation theory (Brainerd & Landweber, 1974; Minsky, 1967) from which Newell and Simon (1976) have derived their notion of “physical symbol systems.” This notion defines a general class of systems that have the capacity to hold and transform symbols, or more generally, symbolic structures, but exist as physical entities. Human beings and computers are the prime examples of such systems. The idea formalizes, to a certain extent, the philosophy that binds cognitive science as a discipline. Within this metatheory, human cognition is the product of a system that has the characteristics of a physical symbol system, and the main endeavour of cognitive science is the investigation of such systems. Cognitive scientists believe that the notion of a physical symbol system is as fundamental to cognitive science as the theory of evolution is to all biology. This metatheory totally constrains the form of the expression of theories within cognitive science.
Norman (1980) outlines a set of twelve issues that he believes provide a comprehensive definition of the field. But these issues cannot be studied as isolated domains; knowledge of a wide range of behaviour and the underlying interactions is the key to understanding cognition.
We need to study a wide range of behaviour before we can hope to understand a single class. Cognitive sciences as a whole ought to make more use of evidence from the neuro-sciences, from brain damage and mental illness, from cognitive sociology and anthropology, and from clinical studies of the human. These must be accompanied, of course, with the study of language, of the psychological aspects of human processing structures, and of artificially intelligent mechanisms. The study of Cognitive Science requires a complex interaction among different issues of concern, an interaction that will not be properly understood until all parts are understood, with no part independent of the others, the whole requiring the parts, and the parts the whole. (Norman, 1980, p. 1)
This view of the cognitive scientist puts the emphasis on the skills of being able to build theories through the integration of evidence from a diversity of sources and the ability to “communicate” within a variety of disparate disciplines.
Once the essence of a theory has emerged, it develops through the interplay of empirical work and theory building. The original ideas are transformed into hypotheses that have to be potentially falsifiable. The researcher then constructs controlled situations within which these hypotheses can be tested. The results of the research mould the theory into shape. As the body of empirical findings grows, the original theory is required to account for more and more behavioural data. To do this the original theory invariably needs to be extended or modified. Changes to the theory stimulate further empirical work that may lead to further changes in the theory. In this way the theory is “bootstrapped up” from its original core propositions to produce a complex set of interrelated hypotheses.
Unit Nine Bibliography and References
I. Bibliography and References
Fill the blanks in the following passage with the words in the box.
|and are be differ from identical in (2) means of only relevant same sciences the was which writing |
|(2) year |
A bibliography lists all of the works that a writer has found relevant in ________ (1) the text. A list of references includes ________ (2) works specifically mentioned in the text or ________ (3) which a particular quotation or piece of information ________ (4) taken. In all other respects, bibliographies and lists of references are ________ (5). They both appear at the end of an article, chapter, or book, where they list sources of information ________ (6) to the text. They are punctuated and capitalized in the ________ (7) way. They both differ from a section ________ (8) bibliographic endnotes in that their entries are arranged alphabetically ________ (9) use different patterns of indention and punctuation.
Two styles of bibliographies can ________ (10) recognized, one used in the humanities and general ________ (11), the other standard in the social and natural ________ (12).
In general, bibliographic stylings used in the sciences ________ (13) from those used in general writing in that (1) the author's first and middle names ________ (14) expressed with initials only, (2) the date, ________ (15) is important in scientific writings, immediately follows ________ (16) author's name, (3) less capitalization is used, (4) titles of articles are not enclosed ________ (17) quotation marks, (5) dates are usually written in the order day-month-________ (18), and (6) more abbreviations are used.
The examples used in this unit by no ________ (19) exhaust the possible variations on these two basic systems. Other alternatives are found ________ (20) print, several of them recommended by various professional organizations and academic disciplines within the social and natural sciences. For example, in the sciences the author's first and middle initials are often closed up without any punctuation, and the book or periodical title may be unitalicized.
II. Understanding Bibliographies and References
1) Answer questions based on the following bibliographic entry.
|Ellis, R. 1985. Understanding Second Language Acquisition. |
|Oxford: Oxford University Press. |
a. Who is the author?
b. When was the book published?
c. What is the title of the book?
d. Where was the book published?
e. Which publisher published the book?
2) Answer questions based on the following bibliographic entry.
|Robinson, G.L.N. 1987. Culturally diverse speech styles. In Rivers, |
|W.M. (ed.) 1987. Interactive Language Teaching. Cambridge: |
|Cambridge University Press. |
f. ‘Culturally diverse speech styles’ is _____
(a) a book.
(b) an article in a book.
(c) an article in a journal/magazine.
(d) an article in a website.
Its author is _____
(a) Robinson G.L.N. (b) Rivers W.M.
(c) G.L.N. Robinson. (d) W.M. Rivers.
g. ‘ed.’ means _____________________________ .
h. The title of the book is _____
(a) Culturally diverse speech styles.
(b) Interactive Language Teaching.
3) Answer questions based on the following entry.
|Swan, M. 1985. A critical look at the communicative approach. ELT |
|Journal 39, 1-2. |
i. ‘ELT Journal’ is a(n) _____
(a) academic magazine.
(b) book.
(c) collection of articles.
j. ‘39, 1-2’ means ____________________ .
4) Answer questions based on the following entry.
|Abbott, Gerry, John Greenwood, Douglas McKeating & Peter |
|Wingard. 1981. The Teaching of English as an International |
|Language. Glasgow: Collins. |
k. How many people wrote this book?
l. How are the authors' names written?
III. Samples of Bibliographies and References
Journals often have slightly different styles in the way references are presented and printed. When you submit your papers to a particular journal, bear in mind that your style of references confirm to the style of the journal. Below are four lists of references adapted from the end of published scientific papers. Compare and discuss what information is included and in what ways they are identical or different.
1) REFERENCES
Brockhaus J., Fox L. and Tosta N., 1991. Using a geographic information system to classify forest productivity in northwestern California. Ecological Land Classification: Applications to Identify the Productive Potential of Southern Forests. United States Department of Agriculture-Forest Service, Southeastern Forest Experiment Station, General Technical Report SE-68.
Ciesla W., 1989. Aerial photos for assessment of forest decline ( a multinational overview. Journal of Forestry 1 (2): 37-41.
Dilworth J. and Bell J., 1971. Variable Probability Sampling. Oregon State University Book Stores Inc.
Hildebrandt G., 1979. Remote sensing in German forestry ( practical applications and new research results. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Remote Sensing for Natural Resources, Moscow, Idaho, 10-14 September, 1979; 109-125.
Paine D., 1981. Aerial Photography and Image Interpretation for Resource Management. John Wiley and Sons, New York.
Townshend J., Justice C., Choudhury B., Tucker C., Kalb V. and Goff T., 1989. A comparison of SMMR and AVHRR data for continental land cover characterization. International Journal of Remote Sensing 10 (10): 1633-1642.
2) References
Buckley, G.P. 1988 Soil transfer as a means of relocating woodland. Channel Link Studies Report No 4. Wye College, University of London.
Down, G.S. and Morton, A.J. 1989 A case study of whole woodland transplanting. In Biological Habitat Reconstruction. G.P. Buckley (ed.). Belhaven Press, London, 251-257.
Helliwell, D.R. 1989a Tree roots and the stability of trees. Arboric. J. 13, 243-248.
Helliwell, D.R. 1989b Soil transfer as a means of moving grassland and marshland vegetation. In Biological Habitat Reconstruction. G.P. Buckley (ed.). Belhaven Press, London, 258-263.
Helliwell, D.R. 1989c Moving semi-natural vegetation. Landscape Design 186, 36-38.
Nature Conservancy Council 1984 Inventory of Ancient Woodlands in Kent. Nature Conservancy Council, Peterborough.
Prigmore, D.S. 1987 The role of habitat transplanting in the conservation of semi-natural communities. M.Sc. Thesis, Imperial College, London.
Rodwell, J.S. (ed.) 1991 British Plant Communities. Volume 1: Woodlands and Scrub. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Scott, D., Greenwood, R.D., Moffat, J.D. and Tregay, R.J. 1986 Warrington New Town: an ecological approach to landscape design and management. In Ecology and Design in Landscape. A.D. Bradshaw, D.A. Goode and E. Thorp (eds.). Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford, 143-160.
Wade, S. 1994 Moving hedges. Landscape Design 227, 31-33.
3) References
Blanchard, K., W. Oncken, and H. Burrows. 1990. The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey. London: Collins.
Garratt, B. 1987. The Learning Organisation. London: Fontana/Collins.
Peter, L. J. 1969. The Peter Principle. London: Pan Books.
Rogers, C. and R. Farson. 1979. ‘Active listening’ in D.A. Kolb, I.M. Rubin, and J.M. McIntyre (eds.). Organizational Psychology: a Book of Readings. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
4) References
Butler, J. 1992. Canadian boreal forests: the great unknown. In: W. Can. Wilderness Comm., Alberta Branch Educ. Rep. 11(7). 8 p.
Daniel, T.W., J.A. Helms and F.S. Baker. 1979. Principles of silviculture. McGraw-Hill Book Co. New York. 500 p.
Jones, G. and K. Baltgailis. 1993. A new leaf. W. Can. Wilderness Comm., Edmonton, AB. 55 min. video.
Scaife, B. 1980. The impact of forestry practices on moose (Alces alces) in north-central Manitoba. M.S. Thesis, University of Manitoba, Winnepeg, MB. 70 p.
Thompson, I.D. 1994. Marten populations in uncut and logged boreal forests in Ontario. J. Wildl. Mgmt. 58(2): 272-280.
Welbourn, M.L. 1983. Ecologically based forest policy analysis: fire management and land disposals in the Tanana River Basin, Alaska. Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY. 230 p.
IV. Practice
1) Following are the title page and the copyright page from a real book. Write a bibliographical entry based on the information provided.
| | | |
|Fundamental Concepts of | |Oxford University Press |
|Language Teaching | |Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6DP |
| | | |
|H. H. Stern | |London New York Toronto |
| | |Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi |
| | |Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo |
| | |Nairobi Dar Es Salaam Cape Town |
| | |Melbourne Auckland |
| | | |
| | |and associated companies in |
| | |Beirut Berlin Ibadan Mexico City Nicosia |
|Oxford University Press | | |
| | |OXFORD is a trade mark of Oxford University |
| | |Press |
| | | |
| | |ISBN 0 19 437065 8 |
| | |H.H.Stern 1983 |
| | | |
| | |First Published 1983 |
| | |Second impression 1984 |
2) Here is another one:
| | | |
|Science as | |Copyright(1990 by Princeton University Press |
|Social Knowledge | |Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William |
|______________________________________________| |Street, |
|__________________ | |Princeton, New Jersey 08540 |
| | |In the United Kingsom: Princeton University Press, |
|Values and Objectivity in | |Oxford |
|Scientific Inquiry | | |
| | |All Rights Reserved |
|HELEN E. LONGINO | | |
| | |Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data |
| | |Longino, Helen E. |
| | |Science as Knowledge: values and objectivity in |
| | |scientific inquiry / Helen E. Longino. |
| | |p. cm. |
|princeton university press | |Bibliography: p. |
|princeton, new jersey | |Includes index. |
| | |ISBN 0-691-07342-2 (alk. paper) |
| | |ISBN 0-691-02051-5 (pbk.) |
| | |I. Science(Methodology. 2. Women’s |
| | |studies(Methodology. I. Title. |
| | |Q175.L655 1990 |
| | |301’.01(dc20 89-34623 |
| | | |
| | |Printed in the United States of America by |
| | |Princeton University Press, |
| | |Princeton, New Jersey |
3) Write a bibliographic entry based on the following title page of an academic article in a scientific journal:
|Journal of World Forest Resource Management, 1992, Vol. 6, pp. 139-154 139 |
|021-4286/92 $10 |
|1992 A B Academic Publishers Printed in Great Britain |
| |
|SPATIAL CHARACTERIZATION OF FUELWOOD |
|RESOURCES IN THE US SEMI-ARID |
|MEDITERRANEAN GEOGRAPHIC ZONE |
| |
|JOHN A. BROCKHAUS |
|Forestry Department, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, |
|North Carolina 27695-8002, USA |
| |
|NORMAN H. PILLSBURY |
|Natural Resources Management Department, California Polytechnic State University, |
|San Luis Obispo, California 93407, USA |
| |
|Summary |
|… |
4) The following bibliography contains all kinds of errors. Try to find where the mistakes are and see if you can correct them. Some errors can be corrected easily by the editor; others, however, are non-recoverable.
Bibliography
Brumfit, C.J. 1981a. Accuracy and fluency: a fundamental distinction for communicative teaching methodology.
C.J. Brumfit & K. Johnson (eds.). 1979. The Communicative Approach to Language Teaching.
Brumfit C.J. 1985. Language and Literature Teaching. Pergamon.
Brumfit, C.J. (eds.). 1986. The Practice of Communicative Teaching.
A. Hopkins, & J. Potter. 1994. Look Ahead. Vols. 1-4. Longman & BBC.
Corder, S. Pit. 1979. Introducing Applied Linguistics. London.
Doff, A., C. Jones & K. Mitchell. 1983. Meanings into Words (Intermediate).
Doff, Jones & Mitchell. 1984. Meanings into Words (Upper-Intermediate). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Larsen-Freeman, D. 1986. Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ellis, R. 1985. Understanding Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ellis, R. Informal and formal approaches to communicative language teaching. In ELT Journal 36, 2.
Hymes, D.H. 1971. On Communicative Competence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Excerpts reprinted in Brumfit & Johnson (eds.) (1979).
Finocchiaro, M. & C.J. Brumfit. 1983. The Functional-Notional Approach. Oxford University Press.
Johnson, Keith & Keith Morrow (eds.). 1981. Communication in the Classroom. Harlow: Longman.
Littlewood, W. 1981. Communicative Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Littlewood, W. 1984. Foreign and Second Language Learning.
M. Celce-Murcia & L. McIntosh (eds.). 1979. Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.
Morrow, Keith. 1981. Principles of communicative methodology. In Johnson & Morrow (eds.) (1981).
Li Xiaoju. 1984. In defense of the communicative approach. In ELT Journal 38, 1. Reprinted in Rossner & Bolitho (eds.) (1990).
Nessa Wolfson, 1989. Perspectives: Sociolinguistics and TESOL. New York: Newbury House.
S.D. Krashen, 1982. Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon.
Noam Chomsky. 1957. The Hague: Mouton.
Rivers, W.M. (eds.). 1987. Interactive Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Robinson, G.L.N. 1987. Culturally diverse speech styles. In Rivers (eds.)
Rossner, R. & R. Bolitho (eds.). 1990. Currents of Change in English Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
S.D. Krashen, 1981. Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Oxford.
Stern, H.H. 1983. Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Valdes, J.K. (ed.). 1986. Culture Bound: Bridging the Cultural Gap in Language Teaching. New York: Cambridge University Press.
史宝辉, 1997. 交际式语言教学25年。《外语教学与研究》。
桂诗春,《应用语言学》。湖南教育出版社。
李筱菊主编, 1988.《交际英语教程》。上海。
胡文仲主编,《文化与交际》。
5) An appropriate version should look like this:
Bibliography
Brumfit, C.J. 1981a. Accuracy and fluency: a fundamental distinction for communicative teaching methodology. Practical English Teacher 1, 3. Reprinted in Brumfit (1985).
Brumfit, C.J. 1981b. Teaching the ‘general’ student. In Johnson & Morrow (1981).
Brumfit, C.J. 1985. Language and Literature Teaching: From Practice to Principle. Oxford: Pergamon.
Brumfit, C.J. (ed.). 1986. The Practice of Communicative Teaching. Oxford: Pergamon.
Brumfit, C.J. & K. Johnson (eds.). 1979. The Communicative Approach to Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Celce-Murcia, M. & L. McIntosh (eds.). 1979. Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.
Chomsky, N. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
Corder, S.P. 1979. Introducing Applied Linguistics. London: Penguin.
Doff, A., C. Jones & K. Mitchell. 1983. Meanings into Words (Intermediate). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Doff, A., C. Jones & K. Mitchell. 1984. Meanings into Words (Upper-Intermediate). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ellis, R. 1982. Informal and formal approaches to communicative language teaching. ELT Journal 36, 2.
Ellis, R. 1985. Understanding Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Finocchiaro, M. & C.J. Brumfit. 1983. The Functional-Notional Approach. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hopkins, A. & J. Potter. 1994. Look Ahead. Vols. 1-4. London: Longman & BBC.
Hymes, D.H. 1971. On Communicative Competence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Excerpts reprinted in Brumfit & Johnson (eds.) (1979).
Johnson, K. & K. Morrow (eds.). 1981. Communication in the Classroom. Harlow: Longman.
Krashen, S.D. 1981. Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Oxford: Pergamon.
Krashen, S.D. 1982. Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon.
Larsen-Freeman, D. 1986. Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching. New York: Oxford University Press.
Li Xiaoju. 1984. In defense of the communicative approach. ELT Journal 38, 1. Reprinted in Rossner & Bolitho (eds.) (1990).
Littlewood, W. 1981. Communicative Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Littlewood, W. 1984. Foreign and Second Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morrow, K. 1981. Principles of communicative methodology. Johnson & Morrow (eds.) (1981).
Rivers, W.M. (ed.). 1987. Interactive Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Robinson, G.L.N. 1987. Culturally diverse speech styles. Rivers (ed.) (1987).
Rossner, R. & R. Bolitho (eds.). 1990. Currents of Change in English Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stern, H.H. 1983. Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Valdes, J.K. (ed.). 1986. Culture Bound: Bridging the Cultural Gap in Language Teaching. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wolfson, N. 1989. Perspectives: Sociolinguistics and TESOL. New York: Newbury House.
桂诗春, 1988.《应用语言学》。长沙：湖南教育出版社。
胡文仲主编, 1994.《文化与交际》。北京：外语教学与研究出版社。
李筱菊主编, 1988.《交际英语教程》。上海：上海外语教育出版社。
史宝辉, 1997. 交际式语言教学25年。《外语教学与研究》第3期。
V. Some Common Erros
1)
Wrong:
Albert C. Baugh & Thomas Cable, A History of The English Language (Third Edition, 1975) Routledg & Kegan Raul, London Boston, and Hasty
Correct:
Baugh, Albert C. & Thomas Cable. 1975. A History of the English Language. 3rd ed. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
(List by surname of first author, mind the spellings)
2)
Wrong:
Randolph Quirk, 1972, A Grammar of Contemporary English, Longman Group Limited London.
Correct:
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, & Jan Svartvik. 1972. A Grammar of Contemporary English. London: Longman.
(Include all authors in the list of references)
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