Article
On Using the Results of the SWOT Analysis for Academic Writing Syllabus Design
The article looks into how the SWOT analysis can be used for educational purposes - namely for Academic writing course and course materials design. The introduction into the teaching process a specifically designed for the course textbook which has been tailored to the needs of a particular group of teachers and students can raise the level of attractiveness of a difficult course and facilitate the attainment of the course goal saving time and effort both for teachers and students.
Chapter 17 of the monograph is devoted to academic skills acquisition at a non-linguistic university in Russia. It provides the main purposes of students studying at a double (London University and the Higher School of Economics) Bachelor programme and various techniques.
To help graduate students write, a new service, Writing Support Circles, was implemented at a large southwestern state university in USA. The purpose of this paper is to share how challenges in the design of this service impacted writing self-efficacy of its participants.
The author presents the results of the recent study of project proposal presentations made by HSE graduates, and focuses largely on developing skills of academic writing. The materials presented can be useful for writing any type of an academic text.
The textbook is meant for students continuing to study English (levels B1-B2 according to the European Framework) and majoring in science. The exercises and tasks are aimed at developing speaking, writing and reading skills on the basis of authentic texts on the achievements of scientists rewarded the Nobel Prize in the years 2000-2014
Academic writing presumes its compliance with prevailing European and worldwide practice. The existence of various documentation styles (MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, Oscola etc.) proposes paying attention not only to the content of an academic work but also to its execution, which should be done according to the peculiarities of a certain documentation style and the work professional orientation.
Nowadays, when English has firmly established itself as a lingua franca (ELF) in academic settings, it is very important to study the features of texts written by L2 speakers who come from a variety of cultural and L1 backgrounds and who use ELF in their academic communication. The present study focuses on clusters of epistemic stance expressions used in research articles written by L2 speakers. The analysis of 20 papers from the SciELF corpus reveals the patterns in the use of epistemic stance clusters, their distribution in different sections of research articles and the functions the clusters perform at the textual level. The results show that there are many similarities in the distribution and functions of epistemic stance clusters in texts. It suggests that the way L2 speakers who are professionals in their fields express epistemic stance is more influenced by the norms of the genre and the discipline than by their L1 and cultural backgrounds.
Most students come to their graduate programs with academic writing skills insufficient to excel in their studies. A lack of academic writing skills among graduate students has been a problem in a college of education at a large southeastern public research university where the project described in this article was implemented. To address this lack of academic writing skills, a new service, Writing Support Circles (WSCs), was designed and implemented for a small group of Latina students supported by a grant as a pilot program. WSCs are a series of workshops intended to create a community of learners who work together on improving their academic writing with guidance of a facilitator. The purpose of this article is to share the author’s experiences with designing and implementing WSCs with adult learners in a nonformal education setting at a university.
Institutions affect investment decisions, including investments in human capital. Hence institutions are relevant for the allocation of talent. Good market-supporting institutions attract talent to productive value-creating activities, whereas poor ones raise the appeal of rent-seeking. We propose a theoretical model that predicts that more talented individuals are particularly sensitive in their career choices to the quality of institutions, and test these predictions on a sample of around 95 countries of the world. We find a strong positive association between the quality of institutions and graduation of college and university students in science, and an even stronger negative correlation with graduation in law. Our findings are robust to various specifications of empirical models, including smaller samples of former colonies and transition countries. The quality of human capital makes the distinction between educational choices under strong and weak institutions particularly sharp. We show that the allocation of talent is an important link between institutions and growth.