Towards composing your lit review in progress
- 1. Towards Composing your Lit Review in Progress
- 2. The lit review A “dinner party” with your authors. What’s your place in your “dinner party”?
- 3. Literature Reviews are about… RELEVANCE to the research topic
- 4. Towards your Lit Review Writing 1. Review findings and main concepts of your article syntheses. Make sure you understand the findings and the concepts. 2. Compare research idea and questions with article findings. Determine RELEVANCE 3. Start composing your review. Think about a topic sentence that guides the reader to the study you will review.
- 5. Compare and Determine Relevance (1 hour) (On this side of paper) Research questions (On this side of paper) Findings from articles reviewed How do college EFL students acquire teaching-related vocabulary? What are the students’ perspectives on their own vocabulary acquisition process? (Howard & Field, 2008) •Children acquire new words through associations. •High school students consider vocabulary knowledge important for reading in an L2. (Nagy et al., 1993) • Young bilinguals can’t automatically transfer cognate knowledge •With some instruction, young bilinguals make connections between their languages.
- 6. An example • Topic: Example: reading comprehension among college students • Article: Nagy, Garcia, & Hancin-Bhatt (1993) • Important findings: – The Hispanic children (6th grade) did not always recognize cognate words in the English text because they could not recognize the cognate word in Spanish. -The researchers noticed that the children learned how to identify a cognate word after showing the children examples and after giving them simple instruction. The relevance: Cognates can be a great aid for reading comprehension.
- 7. Cognates are words that share an original root and that may have similar spelling and meaning across two languages. For example, the word “impecable” is a cognate word in English and Spanish. In EFL reading, cognate words are an important resource for readers to comprehend English text. Nevertheless, research has shown that for some students, cognate words are not always available to make meaning out of text. A study by Nagy, Garcia, & Hancin-Bhatt (1993) evidenced that 6th grade Spanish-English bilinguals do not always recognize cognates. In their study, Nagy et al. (1993) chose as participants 10 Hispanic children … (describe the methodology). The researchers found that ….(describe findings). These findings suggest that although cognate words seem easy to recognize, we cannot take for granted that students will always recognize them. For the young readers in the Nagy et al. (1993) study, the lack of Spanish vocabulary hindered their capacity to recognize cognate words in English.
- 8. Format for reporting studies in a lit review In a (qualitative/quantitative) study by (author/s, year) with (participants and context), the researchers found that (finding). This finding is relevant to the topic of this research because (reason). However, (question or gap).
- 9. Remember! At this point of your research process, everything is still tentative. However, your writing needs to fulfill the following requirements: – Research idea needs to make sense. It has to be possible to conduct. – Research questions need to be well formulated and possible to answer. Ask yourself what you’ll do to answer the question. – Your lit review-in-progress needs to be in general relevant to your research idea. Lit review needs to represent the articles accurately (don’t misinterpret the findings from studies!)
- 10. Remember! At this point of your research process, everything is still tentative. However, your writing needs to fulfill the following requirements: – Research idea needs to make sense. It has to be possible to conduct. – Research questions need to be well formulated and possible to answer. Ask yourself what you’ll do to answer the question. – Your lit review-in-progress needs to be in general relevant to your research idea. Lit review needs to represent the articles accurately (don’t misinterpret the findings from studies!)