Adrian Slater - Too Many Rights and Not Enough Resolution

Adrian Slater - “Too many rights and not enough resolution” from PlagiarismAdvice on Vimeo.

Jude Carroll - Plagiarism is an international issue

Jude Carroll - ‘Plagiarism is an International Issue’ from PlagiarismAdvice on Vimeo.

Adrian Slater - Going on a plagiarist "outing"

Adrian Slater - Going on a plagiarist "outing" - Nudge, judge, and sue from PlagiarismAdvice on Vimeo.

ESAP at the IA

The purpose of this post is to provide backup for my talk "ESAP at the IA" for the Azeri group of visitors to the International Academy. The following are links to teaching and learning resources:

• My Skydrive with some sample teaching materials
• my online learning resources blog
• Online Ethics Centre for Engineering Research
• Our sadly neglected Graduate Diploma EAP Blog

The Essentials of Academic Writing

Thematics: Interdisciplinary Studies

Using Corpora to Explore Linguistic Variation

Vocabulary-related links

Five links to online resources related to vocabulary development are below.  We have looked at all of these together in class:

- The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary
- The Oxford Collocations Dictionary
- The Academic Word List Highlighter
- Google Fight
- Wordle

Graduate Diploma Week One : Suggested Sources for Reading Diaries

The Economist, Financial Times, and New Scientist websites are good sources of texts for students to use for reading diaries. Articles you might find interesting from the Economist website right now are:

• Hot spots and blind spots : The mounting human costs of Japan's nuclear disaster.
• Not just rubies and polyester shirts : an article about the Indian economy
• Now is the time - an article about "women and the Arab awakening"

And from New Scientist (which isn't just for scientists):

• Drowning a sea of misinformation - about problems that museums face
• Cops on trail of crimes that haven't happened - about some computer software designed to identify places where crimes might be committed

You could also visit the BBC, Guardian, Independent, or Telegraph websites for current news stories.  The Guardian, for example, has a story about how rents in Britain have become unaffordable for many families and a bizarre tale of a man who somehow managed to use a shark as a surfboard.

Reading lists from the university module directory are also a good indicator of the types of texts students need to deal with in their postgraduate studies.  For more general news from the University,Essex Quarterly is an interesting publication with short articles, primarily about research conducted at the university.

Error correction : choosing the active or passive voice

The problems in the following examples relate to your choice of either the passive or active voice for your verb phrases.  Can you identify the problems and suggest corrections as comments below?

1. The Olympic Games with its long history has always been attracted by people as an entertaining and social event

2. 44,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer annually in the UK

3. Protein foods are advised to be included in your breakfast since it provides sustained energy and takes longer to digest

4. Skipping breakfast become an issue to be widely discussed

5. missions are always taken place in the most difficult situations.  

6. it is not justified for the government to provide more funding for dementia

Error correction : referencing

Can you see any problems with the following examples from your writing?  Look for examples of ACCORDING TO in an article you are reading for your project and tell me (via comments below) what you think is wrong with these examples.  How would you correct them?

1. According to (Essex Quarterly, 2011) over 44,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer annually in the UK, while 12,500 women die every year from the disease.

2. According to the research published in Essex Quarterly, the study was conducted on more than 4,000 children by looking at key factors contributing to their general health included weight and physical activity.

3.According to “fighting the demon of dementia”, the author states that 820,000 people in the UK suffer from dementia and the number will increase to one million in 2025 and two billion in 2050.

New Month, New Season...same old mistakes?

In class we looked at noun phrases and collocations.  In terms of collocations, we decided identified some good, bad, and funny expressions, but with some correction we arrived at the following beautiful examples:

- provide Halal chicken monthly

- repair a badly broken camera

- desperately need unconditional love

- ask a terrible question

- smell fresh flowers

- found an international organisation

- decorate a Christmas tree

- boycott drive-through McDonalds

- punish a (not particularly) smart thief

We also attempted to correct some collocation errors from your writing.  Can you suggest any better alternatives than the following?  Write your suggestions as comments underneath:

1. Go through a challenge
2. Opinionated questions
3. Manage harder
4. Wrong habitual eating styles
5. Very necessary
6. Before I received my first child
7. Less quality alternative
8. Make more research

From the sewers of Paris to polished complex sentences

 

TASK ONE:

Nineteen rings and three sets of earrings were dug up from a drain.

The drain was at a house.

The house is in a suburb.

The suburb is called Seine-Saint-Denis.

The suburb is a working-class area.

One of the pairs of earrings has a value of £14m.

All of this information comes from the police.

CREATE A COMPLEX SENTENCE (aim for 31 words)

TASK TWO:

Nine people were charged over the robbery.

The house belonged to a person.

The person was one of the robbers.

CREATE A COMPLEX SENTENCE (aim for 13 words)

TASK THREE:

The Harry Winston boutique is on a street

The street is off the Champs-Elysées Avenue

The Champs-Elysees Avenue is dotted with fashion houses.

The Champs-Elysees Avenue is dotted with cafes.

CREATE A COMPLEX SENTENCE (aim for 20 words)

Post your answers as comments below and I will get back to you...

Complex sentence exploration : relative clauses

All of the following sentences were given to me as examples of relative clauses.  Leave a comment if you think any of them DO NOT contain a relative clause:

1. The importance of information technology (IT), especially of the World Wide Web, in tourism has increased tremendously over the past years.
2. The former wanted the convention amended to oblige states to submit nomination lists containing candidates from both sexes.
3. Each Convention Party nominates three candidates, whom it considers satisfy the criteria for office laid down by Article 21 of the Convention.
4. What is new is the accelerating speed with which it occurs and the growing outreach of its implications.
5. The information from the contracting parties disclosed that only three had legislation requiring egalitarian representation of both sexes in their highest courts.
6. Each Convention Party nominates three candidates, whom it considers satisfy the criteria for office laid down by Article 21 of the Convention.
7. They are only true about the teachers I have interviewed and the high school classes I have observed.

Complex sentence exploration : miscellaneous

Students found some interesting complex sentences in their reading.  Some were difficult to categorise, and some were just plain difficult.  Read the 5 examples below, and leave a comment telling me a) what types of complex structure you find in each sentence, and b) if you think any of these sentences are particularly difficult to understand.

1. Nowhere in the convention is it stipulated that one candidate belonging to the sex which is under-represented in the court must feature in the list.
2. Several protestors, former Conservative voters, declared themselves as having been “pushed to the left” by their experiences.
3. Others mentioned the issue of live exports as only one of the reasons why they felt they had to be there.
4. Foreign language educationalists and cultural linguists believe that foreign language learning cannot occur properly unless the socio-cultural aspect of the foreign language is learnt simultaneously because the mere acquisition of linguistic competence is not enough.
5. This study also hypothesizes that raising high school EFL teachers’ awareness of the autonomous and ideological concepts of communicative competence is likely to help them see their teaching activities lean towards the autonomous model of communicative competence.

Complex sentence exploration : wh- noun clauses

I'm finding it hard to forget Hakan's "it's a mystery; why?", but in class we produced some good examples of wh- noun clauses like "It's a mystery why nobody likes English food" and "Everybody knows who won the women's world cup this year".  Look at the following examples students found in their reading texts, and leave a comment if you think any are NOT good examples of wh- noun clauses:

1. Most of the problems organizations face today when designing and implementing online strategies stem from trying to fit everything into existing structures and models.
2. The assembly decides to investigate at national and European level what obstacles currently exist to the nomination of women candidates, what measures could be taken to encourage female applicants, and to consider setting targets for achieving greater gender equality in the composition of the court.
3. Empirical data on how these camps affect…
4. The primary issue for the Grand Chamber was whether the questions posed were within its Advisory Opinion jurisdiction
5. The participants were male and non-native speakers of English, two of whom had a BA degree and one had an MA degree in TEFL.

Complex sentence exploration : To

In class, we looked at sentences like "I came here to study" and "Shatha came to the UK to perfect her English" as examples of infinitive clauses.  "To study" and "to perfect her English" explain the purpose of the main clause of the sentence.  My students found lots of examples in their reading, but not all of them are quite the same.  Have a look at the following examples I was sent:

1. Organizations continue to broadcast information instead of letting the consumer interact with the Web site content.
2. Online advertising offers the opportunity to precisely target an audience to deliver advertisements that are customized to the user’s particular interest and taste.
3. Nominees to the full-time court are asked to submit standardized CVs and be interviewed by members of a sub-committee of the parliamentary assembly.
4. A key element of the resolution was the Parliamentary Assembly’s desire to increase the proportion of female judges on the court.
5. The protestors should join us in attempting to persuade other European publics and governments to abandon these cruel practices.

I think that sentence 2 is a very different example to all the others.  Can you see why?  Please post your suggestions below as comments.

Complex sentence exploration : a challenge

Canan found this sentence in the article she read for her presessional project:


In 2004, the Grand Chamber held that a request for an Advisory Opinion concerning the status of the complaints system set up by members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, following the collapse of the former USSR, to which some parties to the ECHR belong, fell outside the Court's jurisdiction.

I count 50 words in there.  Can you find a longer, more complex sentence than this?  Please copy and paste it as a comment...

Error correction

Can you correct any of the following sentences?  Leave a comment with your suggestions!

1. I attempted to figure out what is the average amount of money in our pockets.  Therefore, I must ask all my classmates about how much they have in their wallet.
2. The answer of these questions lead to determine who is the laziest person
3. Students in the class have nearly the same answer
4. The biggest amount of sleep was 8 hours daily according to MeeMee’s answers
5. Someone who is most intelligent in this classroom
6. Souod and Ayman was a top in their school or university
7. He answered my question politically 
8. I tried to find out who is the best cooker in this room
9. He think women is the best in cooking

A Logic Quiz

This arm-chair logic test is not too taxing, but my brain exploded after reading the first question on this logic test from Hypography (looks too much like maths to me).