Begnning of question 3 and question 4 (completed) -- Work Group Two

[ Show ]

Support VoyForums

[ Shrink ]

VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: [1] ]

Subject: Begnning of question 3 and question 4 (completed)

Author:
Ludmila

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 12:42:54 08/20/10 Fri

Hi people, what's up with you all?

Well, I'm sending you questions 3 and 4. As you will notice,about question 3, I had just started and it needs further information (not much, just we need to examine the citations that both authors used to validate their work) I can do that without any problem. I've sent you incomplete in order to get a feedback from you all, ok!? And by the way, question four is completely done, so please tell me what do you think so far? Talk to you all later and i'm waiting for your suggestions, replies, etc..

In order to validate their thoughts and conclusion, the authors of both articles had performed some action steps, following a method to perform the research itself and also quoted other authors that were influent in the same field and had previously done some similar research in the same subject.

The description of procedure and method that was chosen in the research was very important in both articles. First it was to clarify to the academic world and to the readers what was being done, the importance of their work, and also to validate and to prove how they had reached those results.

In �A case study on foreign English teacher�s challenges in Taiwanese elementary schools�, that was a research based on the qualitative study, in other words, it was a work that was concerned to examine a small group and to obtain the results or to take conclusions, after observing the behavior of those people. The authors of this article had selected and followed three elementary school teachers, who came from South Africa to teach English. The data collection had begun in August of 2006 and lasted until June of 2007. For obtaining this data, it was used different methods such as; interviews, questionnaires, classroom observation, fieldnotes, research journal and document inspection. The study focused on the three teachers� performance in their classroom, their background information and their previous professional experience, and to verify the challenges that those foreign English teachers had in Taiwan.

With the data collected the authors could then conclude that the common problem suffered by those three South African teachers, was their doubt on their accent. The data collected was also able to show how ironic was the hiring procedure of Taiwanese Schools. Because although those three teachers were hired for being considered as native speakers of English language, they had also suffered for not sounding genuine native speakers, in other words, the only conception accepted by Taiwanese people was that English speakers need to sound like Americans. The final conclusion that the authors had taken, is that in order for students in Taiwan benefit from this program (which hires foreign English teachers) the teachers should more prepared to deal with unfamiliar situations in a new environment.

In Article 2 �Reading strategy awareness of Arabic-speaking medical students studying in English�, the author had also showed all the procedures and data used to obtain the final results on this research, although the method used was different than the other article presented above (Article 1). In this article Diane Malcom had used the quantitative study, which is scientific results obtained trough measuring statistic and quantitative data. With this research the author chose 160 medical students at a University in Bahrain and gave to them some questionnaires. Those forms that they had to answer it, was able to measure what kind of strategies they were using while reading.

Trough all the Methodology part of this article, the author had presented all the details of procedures and steps taken to achieve the final conclusion. It was given a general description of the students� body that participated on the research, it was explained what procedure used to collect the data (in this research it was used an Arabic version of the SORS- Survey of reading strategy) with those questionnaires students had to answer what strategies they used while reading academic material, like their biology textbook. The students were also divided into two groups: Year one, that were medical students who were in the first year of academic study, and Year four, who were medical students on the fourth year of their academic work.

The research was divided in two parts that tried to answer to these questions proposed by the author: �Are there differences in the reported use of academic reading strategies among Arabic-speaking medical students studying through the medium of English at different years of instruction?� and �Do students of low initial English language proficiency repot using different reading strategies than students with high initial proficiency in English?�. The first results obtained was that nineteen out of 30 reading strategies were used by Year one students, and the same number for Year four students, although they were not the same reading strategies. Overall, Year four students reported higher use of metacognitive strategies higher than Year one students. The second part of the research concluded that there were not too many differences in the reported reading strategy use, among students with low or high English proficiency.

After this part, the author compares the ranking of reported reading strategies by these Year one and four students, which according to her is quite similar and distinguished only by the frequency that these two groups use them. In other words, students of Year one tend to translate from English to Arabic language and think about this information, more often than students from Year four. To finish the article, the author concludes with the idea that the research was made and able to show the reports in this specific situation, but further investigation is needed in order to verify and to confirm how often and reading strategies are used when reading academic material.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]