Academic Writing: A means to a voice

Warwick, L. (2016, November). The use of assessment criteria in classroom speaking tasks.  Research Notes: The 2015      Cambridge English/English Uk Action Research Scheme,   66 , 16-21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This paper describes an action research project carried out with nine 18 to 43 year old international students of English that were at level A2 of proficiency. The aim of the project was to ascertain whether the use of assessment criteria could contribute to students’ enhancement of both speaking and self-assessment skills. The study consisted of two phases: in the first one, students completed a self-assessment form  after  doing a speaking task. In the second part, students were given the same form but  before  doing the speaking task.  The results showed that the use of self-assessment   criteria to self-monitor students’ speaking performance in class has a positive outcome on students’ perform...

The theory and practice of online teaching and learning: A guide for academic professionals is a compendium of six excerpts from different specialized titles in the field of online teaching. Each chapter provides “a peek at some of what is at stake in online teaching” (Routledge, n.d, p. 4) to give readers a broader idea of how to work with technological resources for educational purposes. This compilation is aimed for academic professionals and offers a smooth progression from approachable to more challenging notions as chapters advance. The first chapter “Online teaching: The basics” lays the ground for the rest of the book. It introduces key concepts and presents the notion that “teaching online heightens our awareness of what we are actually doing in the classroom” (Ko, n.d., p. 13). This informal and reader-friendly extract gives prospective online instructors a feeling of attainment of the online teaching endeavour, emphasising that were a teacher interested in working onli...

By: María de los Ángeles Marqui Drago and María Inés Córdoba Steve Jobs shared three life stories with Stanford graduates in 2005. The purpose of this paper is to summarize those three stories. The first story, which he explained was about “C onnecting the dots” (Stanford, 2012, 0:58) took us from before his birth to the time when he had founded Apple. He chose different moments of his life (dots) that seemed random as he experienced them but once he could look back on them, he perceived them as being connected. We learned that Steve Job’s adoptive parents were his biological mother’s second choice for she had decided he had to be adopted by college graduates. These undergraduates could only adopt him on condition that he was going to be sent to college, which he was, but after six months he decided to quit because he was not sure about what he wanted from life. He claimed dropping out was one of the best decisions he had ever made given that not having the obligation to atte...

When writing for academic purposes, acknowledging sources of inspiration for ideas or citing other authors’ words is of overriding concern. Failing to do so, can be considered plagiarism, which is a serious academic offence. In the following paragraphs, an analysis of in-text citations in an academic article will be conducted. The theory used in this analysis is the one in the American Psychological Association Manual, 6 th edition. The article by Dolk and den Hertog (2008) uses in-text or parenthetical citations to refer to the sources they have consulted and read in order to conduct their research and produce their paper. The type of citations they use the most are paraphrased ideas in which they do not copy word for word material from another author’s work but they change the terms keeping the meaning the author wanted to express. For instance: “Similarly, we can characterize design research as the learning process of the research team, and we would argue that this learning proc...

        Teacher education involves many processes. The transformation from student to teacher is not automatic, does not occur instantaneously and implies learning about theoretical aspects and training in practical ones. Student teachers often experience a mismatch between the theories they study and real practice in the classroom. As Dolk and den Hertog (2008) state, “For many student-teachers theory is what is taught at teacher Education College and what they need to know for their examinations; practice is what classroom teachers do and talk about” (p. 215). Bridging the gap between theory and practice is considered to be paramount in order to better teacher education. One approach towards doing so is the practice of developing narratives of classroom situations that student teachers can observe in a multimedia classroom. “In the MILE (multimedia interactive learning environment) environments student teachers are asked to observe a small fragment of a lesson,...

Welcome, everyone! I am María Inés Córdoba and I've been teaching English for more than ten years.  Nowadays, I'm teaching English at high school level, I teach children and adolescents at a language school and young adults at the University of Buenos Aires in the school of Exact and Natural Sciences. I am a Cambridge ESOL speaking examiner and I sometimes deliver seminars for teacher development. One of the things I love about my profession is the possibility of exploring different fields of work and being in contact with people of all ages and walks of life. The fact that this job can be so eclectic keeps me on my toes and opens my mind to new challenges such as opening a blog! This blog "Academic Writing: A means to a voice" is part of my pursuit of a BA degree in English Language Teaching at CAECE University. I will be posting written productions from the "English for Academic Purposes" class. On a less professional note, I love reading, watching...