Letter of Introduction

Dear all,

Welcome to ‘Seeds of Academic Writingʼ, my blog. As a blogger, I am a complete novice but I hope to use this corner of cyberspace to share my reflections upon education in general and ELT in particular.

This term I have begun studying English for Academic Purposes at the university and, as a student, I have been introduced to many different genres in academic writing. The most influential element in helping me sharpen my skills has undoubtedly been the invaluable opportunity to work collaboratively with two peers: Laura Reyes and Natalia Eberle. Honestly, keeping up with the course has been a major enterprise but a very gratifying and fecund one.

I sincerely believe in the importance and benefits of a strong, sustained critiquing process in order to produce better academic papers which do state my views on educational issues. Therefore, I embrace this blog as an opportunity to grow, learn and refine both as a scholarly writer and as educator under the critical eye and nurturing hand of other professionals who also feel the need to take this journey into academic writing. Anchors aweigh!

Kindly,

Paula

Letter of Introduction por Paula Gabriela Ferrari
se encuentra bajo una
Licencia Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional.

Comments

Prensky (2001)’s ¨Digital Native/Digital Immigrant¨ Concept Revisited: Are We Trapped in a Metaphor?

By Paula Gabriela Ferrari - Academic Summary - Prensky (2001)’s ¨Digital Native/Digital Immigrant¨ Concept Revisited: Are We Trapped in a Metaphor? In his critique entitled ¨ Review of Deconstructing Digital Natives ¨, Mark E. Nelson carefully examines the book ¨ Deconstructing Digital Natives ¨ and provides his own reflections on this controversial topic. Because the book itself centers on Marc Prensky’s metaphoric distinction between digital native/digital immigrant , Nelson begins by quoting Prensky’s words to define these concepts. According to Prensky (2001), digital natives are the people who have been daily interacting with digital technology since they were born. As opposed to this notion, the term digital immigrants makes reference to those people who have incorporated digital technology later in their lives. Nelson points out that the digital native metaphor (and its corollary, digital immigrant ) has triggere...

Genre-based Analysis of a Research Article Introduction

By Paula Gabriela Ferrari Genre-based Analysis of a Research Article Introduction In the fast-paced world of modern technology and science, the research world has expanded and thus academic publishing has become a major concern for most academicians. A possible reason for this is related to the researchers’ need to position themselves in their disciplinary communities by reaching publication before others (Hyland,2004,p.85). Consequently, scholarly writing has grown to such an extent that more and more ¨non-Anglophones¨ (Swales, 2004) produce Research Articles (RAs) alongside native-speaker academicians. According to Swales and Feak (2004), the Introduction Section (IS) of the RA genre is of outmost importance as it is the section where researchers highlight the centrality of their own research in the competition for both recognition among their peers and funding of their work (p.243). Although considerable research has...

Contrastive Analysis of Results and Discussion Sections in Medicine and Education Research Articles

By Paula Gabriela Ferrari In the last twenty years, the study of different text types in the light of genre- based analysis has become a central issue for linguists and English language teachers. This has been partly due to the dominant role of English as the language of international research literature and to the ¨North-South imbalance in the world¨ (Swales, 1987, p.43) by which nonnative speaker academicians from underdeveloped countries have not been able to actively participate in their discourse communities at an international level. Given these circumstances, many recent studies have focused on the analysis of the structure and linguistic features of the Research Article (RA). Even though most journals from diverse scientific fields have adopted the Introduction, Methods,Results and Discussion ( IMRAD) format for structuring their RAs, it is noteworthy that ¨scholarly discourse is not uniform and monolithic…. It is an outcome of a mu...

Seeds of Academic Writing

Search This Blog