Patterns of thought in scientific writing: A course in information structuring for engineering students

Literature reviews in student project reports

“…From our analysis of student literature reviews, we found that students tend to produce "alienated and incoherent" [1] reviews that are vaguely related to the research topic. Although Allison describes this phenomena as "a largely unmotivated listing of reviews of different studies" [13, p. 68], it is in fact a coping strategy that needs to be developed further so that the relation between the summaries is made apparent.…”

“…The literature review helps situate one's project or research in the broader framework of knowledge in a particular field. A review of existing studies enhances the credibility of one's academic scholarship and provides "authoritative support for statements or claims that might otherwise be interpreted by a reader as a mere uncorroborated opinion" [1]. Despite the fact that the literature review is important in their research, students, irrespective of whether they are native or nonnative speakers of English, have great difficulty composing this part of the report.…”

“…However, in other countries, such as the U.K. and parts of Asia, universities offer specific guidelines for documentation. These guidelines are usually limited to end-of-text references; those that provide in-text references concentrate only on formatting conventions [1], [2]. Universities also caution students about academic integrity in using or quoting other people's work.…”

Communicative Language Teaching in ESP Contexts

“…In learning to analyze roles, language uses, and procedures, they are learning to survive the rites de passage of new discourse communities. Different but roughly comparable attempts at "compensatory" language education for non-native speakers are described in Hall, et al (1986) and Swales (1987). Hall, et al endeavor to have students discover the secrets of information-structuring in Engineering texts, while Swales attempts to demystify the processes and products of research writing for heterogeneous groups of graduate students.…”

Análisis contrastivo inglés-español de los manuales de instrucciones de electrodomésticos = English-Spanish contrastive analysis of instruction manuals for household appliances

“…Se trata de integrar el estudio tanto de la gramática oracional como del discurso y su significado global (Hutchinson y Waters 1987), también llamada micro y macrocohesión (Hall et al 1986) o microlenguaje y superestructura (Voracek 1987), además de la visión de que las estructuras mayores determinan el uso de las estructuras menores (Ewer y Hughes-Davies 1988), siendo el papel de la retórica determinante a la hora de dar cohesión y coherencia al discurso (Halliday y Hasan 1976 (Huckin 2003, Carver 1983, Hutchinson y Waters 1987, Dudley-Evans y St. John 1998. En cuanto al grado de especificidad que se debe proporcionar existen dos tendencias llamadas narrow y wide angle (Jordan 1997).…”