Sujata S. Kathpalia

Literature reviews in student project reports

Writing project reports is an important part of the engineering curriculum at Singapore universities. One important section of the formal report is the literature review. Most universities around the world provide guidelines on writing reviews, emphasizing that plagiarism is unethical. However, these guidelines do not offer explicit training on how to avoid plagiarism. In order to write academically acceptable reviews while avoiding copying from source materials, students face a major challenge and resort to employing various strategies to cope with the task. In this study, we examined the literature review sections of final year project reports to find out how engineering undergraduates in a Singapore university cope with writing reviews and to suggest ways in which they can extend their skills to improve their literature reviews.

Metaphorical Competence in ESL Student Writing

In language teaching, emphasis is usually placed on grammatical competence rather than metaphorical competence to improve a learner’s proficiency in the target language. Research has shown that figurative language poses a problem for second language learners whether it is in their ability to interpret, process, or produce metaphors. This affects communication as metaphors are not only restricted to formal texts but are a common feature of everyday language through which individual’s conceptualize and describe the world. To gauge students’ metaphorical competence, this paper aims to analyze student writing to identify the type of problems second language writers have with collocations and to convince teachers of the importance of promoting the development of metaphoric language among language learners. The findings revealed that although students attempt to use a range of metaphors such as grammatical, textual, illocutionary, and sociolinguistic in their writing, these tend to be unidiomatic and need to be developed further for fluency in the target language.

Cross-Cultural Variation in Professional Genres: A Comparative Study of Book Blurbs.

Although cross-cultural variation in spoken interaction has been dealt with extensively in discourse studies, very little research has been reported in the case of academic and professional written genres. The importance of this work is highlighted by the findings that writers from different cultures organize and develop ideas differently in expository writing tasks (Hinds, 1990) and that professional genres like business letters (The Geok Suan, 1986; Bhatia and Tay, 1987), job applications (Bhatia, 1989) and some legal genres (Bhatia, 1993) are sensitive to socio-cultural constraints. In order to gain a better understanding of the role played by socio-cultural factors in shaping a genre, the present paper examines, through a genre-based comparison, the cross-cultural differences between book blurbs of international publishers and local Singapore-based publishers. It is hoped that such a study will demonstrate the fact that genres are socio-culturally dependent communicative events and their success, in part, depends upon their pragmatic value in a specific business/professional environment. An attempt will also be made to relate the findings of this analysis to the dual and conflicting notions of ‘linguistic creativity’ on the one hand and ‘linguistic orthodoxy’ on the other. It is hoped that a comparative study of this nature will sensitize researchers/teachers to the cultural factors that are responsible for constraining/shaping genres in particular socio-cultural contexts.

Discourse strategies for ensuring involvement in electronic lectures

Research on online education seems to focus on participatory and learner-controlled activities rather than teacher-initiated activities such as e-lectures. In this paper, the discourse strategies used in a classroom lecture and an e-lecture were examined. It was found that there are interesting variations in the strategies used in e-lectures to simulate a sense of classroom community.

Argumentation and Floor Management in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning

Previous studies have demonstrated that floor management is determined by various factors – topic, communicative action and participants’ interpretations of the immediate interactional context (Edelsky, Lang Soc 10:383–421, 1981), institutional roles (Mehan 1979), sociocultural norms (Jones and Thornborrow, Lang Soc 33:399–423, 2004) and participatory structures (Jenks 2007). Jenks claimed that when discussants share the same task-based referential knowledge in two-way participatory structures, floor management is flexible and can go in any direction. However, correlates underlying floor variations despite shared referential information were not investigated. This study fills this research gap by analysing online knowledge construction in multi-party quasisynchronous chat (QSC) using Weinberger and Fischer’s (Comput Educ 46:71–95, 2006) multi-dimensional framework. Based on a QSC corpus consisting of online student discussions, the key finding is that argumentation influences floor management in a more predictive manner than shared referential information ipso facto. This association between argumentation and floor management provides a deeper insight into the dynamics of online discussions within a structured chat interaction among students.

Writing centre tutoring sessions: addressing students’ concerns

Abstract The guiding principle behind university writing centres is to focus on the process of writing rather than the finished product, prioritising higher order concerns related to organisation and argumentation of texts rather than lower order concerns of grammar and punctuation. Using survey-based data, this paper examines students’ concerns regarding written texts in English and analyses whether there is a correlation between students’ and peer-tutors’ perceptions of help received/provided in the writing centre at Nanyang Technological University. The aggregate findings show that there is a significant correlation between their perceptions but a further sub-analysis that pairs individual student and peer-tutor responses reveals that there are discrepancies between their perceptions of the type of help received and provided. These findings not only reveal the type of feedback students prefer, whether global or local, but also whether there is a good fit between student needs and tutoring approach based on students’ nationality and English proficiency.