"English for Academic Purposes" (EAP) is a big business and a daily challenge for students of English. To package information in an audience-/reader-specific, media-adapted and culturally acceptable form is however not only an "art", but also a "craft". In this course, students will learn secrets and strategies behind good writing and speaking in theory and try out "text optimisation" in practice. Linguistic concepts like theme - rheme, complexity, expliciteness and cohesion/coherence will be supplemented by discussions of style conventions and a critical analysis of common "research tools", like corpora and the WWW.
This block seminar will be in two parts: In the first part of the seminar we will discuss the role of writing (esp. our SPACE and Nordic Journal Corpora) and explain general principles of academic language using authentic texts. In the second part students will find their own academic texts (from various disciplines) and rewrite texts to increase their coherence, logical argumentation and reader-specific readability.
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Read the guidelines in this research colloquium: https://twiki.tu-chemnitz.de/bin/view/English/ResearchColloquiumEnglishLanguageAndCulture The SPACE Corpus (and the tool mentioned in the description below) is available here http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/chairs/linguist/documents/Complexana.zip A description can be found here: http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/02/schmied/
Topics for student papers on the 2nd meeting RH39 / 538 Friday/Saturday, June 13, 2-7 p.m./June 14, 8.30 a.m.-7 p.m.
(I have tried to find "interesting" or challenging titles, but they can still be changed; they are more useful for the introduction or conclusion than for the statistical analysis anyway).
Instructions for 15-minute seminar presentations and (later) 20-page papers
Generally it is better to analyse a small topic well on the basis of good data and discuss the problem of "operationalising"* thoroughly in methodology than present a wide spectrum of what other people wrote.
* to operationalise means generally, to make a concept "workable" in a certain context,
in our case, in empirical linguistics, to operationalise means to define a concept by means of a suitable (representative?) databases and variables that can be measured directly, so that the analysis fits the data and the results can be interpreted as convincingly (statistical significance is better than plausibility, but that depends on the topic) supporting an argument, falsifying a hypothesis or solving a problem.
0) Look at the models here: |