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...