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Unit Seven Concluding Research
Objectives:
─ Be clear about the significance of this section
─ Try to understand the importance of summarizing in academic writing ─ Learn to be skilled in paraphrasing in academic writing ─ Learn to restate your thesis statement ─ Learn to draw a conclusion
Contents:
─ Brief introduction to this section
─ Reading & Discussion: What information elements are usually involved in
writing a Conclusion section?
─ Language Focus: How to summarize and paraphrase ─ Writing Practice: How to restate your research objectives ─ Writing Project: How to outline your conclusion
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1. Reading Activity
The conclusion of a research paper reaffirms the thesis statement, discusses the issues, and reaches a final judgment. It is a belief based on your reasoning and on the evidence you have accumulated. This is the place for sharing with readers the conclusions you have reached because of your research. A conclusions is usually a shorter section of an academic text. It manifests the value of your research as well as your understanding of the material that you have presented. It should be a strong recapitulation of your major ideas.
1.1 Pre-reading Task
The following is the concluding section of a research article in the field of applied linguistics. Think about the following questions before reading the text and then have a discussion with your classmates:
1) What is the function of the concluding section in a research paper?
2) What information elements does a concluding section normally include?
1.2 Reading Passage
Our experiment indicated that learners better comprehended English idioms
sharing the same metaphoric themes as Chinese than those sharing different metaphoric themes, conforming to Boers & Demecheleer's (2001) study result with French-speaking subjects. NL (native language) played an important role, in that positive transfer appeared in most subjects' understanding of idioms with identical expressions and meanings in NL and TL (target language), and negative transfer appeared in the understanding of those with similar expressions and meanings or those with identical expressions but different meanings in NL and TL; besides, negative transfer occurred in the understanding of every kind of English idioms. Finally, though the idioms in the experiment were rated as having an intermediate level of semantic transparency and were listed without any contextual clues, 37% of the subjects’ responses were completely or partially correct, giving support to the point that a cognitive semantic view can facilitate the learning of idioms for non-native speakers.
This study has several implications for teaching idioms. Firstly, it is important to inform learners of the different metaphoric themes in the target culture. Secondly, more attention should be given to idioms without NL equivalents. Thirdly, overt comparisons can be made to show learners which idioms can be transferred from their NLs and which idioms are likely to cause interference, thus taking advantage of positive transfer while avoiding the occurrence of negative transfer. Fourthly, while helping learners realize the absurdity of the literal meanings of some English idioms, encourage them to tackle the semantics of the idiom as a problem-solving task, and
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teach them strategies for dealing with figurative language to take advantage of the semantic transparency of some idioms.
However, there was an obvious limitation in this study: the number of the idioms selected was too small. We expect more studies to be carried out in more aspects including the strategies used in idiom comprehension and production, EFL learners', EFL teachers' and English-speaking people's attitude towards English idiom learning and the treatment of them in the existing teaching materials.
( Liu, 2008 )
1.3 Reading Comprehension
1. Read the text carefully and decide what information elements a concluding section includes and how they function. Information Elements Function 2. What are the major findings of the experiment?
3. What verb tenses are mainly used in the text? What is the proportion of active voice verbs to passive voice verbs in this conclusion section?
2. Language Focus 2.1 Summarizing
There are three ways to include source material in your research paper writing:
summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting. Each of these strategies capitalizes on different types of information that can be useful. To summarize is to put in your own words a shortened version of written or spoken material, stating the main points and leaving out anything that is not essential. Summarizing is more than retelling; it involves analyzing information, distinguishing important elements from unimportant elements and transforming large chunks of information into a few short cohesive sentences.
Look at the following example.
Original
This effort to communicate--first through spoken messages, then through
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最新研究生学术英语写作教程Unit-7-Concluding-Research
