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One of the most important things in Academic English is to be able to refer to other people’s writing without copying. In fact, it is one of the essential skills at university.
I am interested in how universities can help students to adapt to university life and I found an article about how one university did some research into supporting students by texting them on their mobile phones. Think about that for a moment - would you like your teachers, tutors and administrative support staff to text you on your phone saying things like: “Don’t forget to hand your essay in!” or “Tomorrow’s lecture is in room 113″ ?
Here is a paragraph from that article:
“Our findings show that text messaging is the dominant mode of electronic communication amongst our student sample and that text messages from university staff, if used sensitively and sparingly, are viewed positively by students. We also found that text messaging is integral to students’ every day social relationships and provides peer support in two areas: support to help them negotiate administrative structures and emotional support. However, the interviews also show that, in both areas, during the period of transition to university, students need more support than that which peers are able to provide. ”
Harley D, Winn S, Pemberton S, and Wilcox P (2007) Using texting to support students’ transition to university, Innovation in Education and Teaching International, Vol 44, No 3, August 2007, pp229-241
I want to use these ideas in my writing so I need to paraphrase this material.
Step one: understand the material thoroughly before you paraphrase it. Sounds obvious to me, but I find sometimes that students write down some things that they don’t actually understand! You cannot put something into different words if you do not understand the original. Use a dictionary, make an appointment with your language support teacher and ask them questions. Ask a friend.
Step two: make notes. This means that you will isolate the important points. A paraphrase is usually shorter than the original, so it is often like a summary of the main points in your own words.
My notes from the paragraph above look like this:
1. texting = dominant mode of elect. comm. for sts
2. sts like texts fr staff
3. texting = integral to sts social relationships
4. texting = peer support = 1. in administrative structures 2. emotionally
5. sts need more support than just from peers
Step three: Look at your notes and try to put them into sentences. This is my first attempt:
Harley et al (2007) found that texting is the main way students communicate electronically and that students generally like getting texts from staff. Texting is essential for personal relationships and provides peer support for administrative and emotional matters. Students need more than peer support.
Step four: Compare your writing with the original. I wrote
text messaging is essential for personal relationships
the original was:
text messaging is integral to students’ everyday social relationships
Oops! Too close to the original - the sentence structure and many of the words are the same. I need to think again. Actually now I look at my writing I see that these ideas:
texting is the main way students communciate electronically
and
texting is essential for personal relationships
are very similar. In fact both these sentences are talking about how important texting is in students’ friendships. So, put these sentences together to get the idea:
Harley et al (2007) found that texting plays a vital role in students’ social lives.
Now we are getting somewhere! That’s a paraphrase - the essential meaning is drawn out but the words are totally different because I am not paraphrasing sentence by sentence.
Step five: Write your paraphrase again! This is my next attempt:
Harley et al (2007) found that texting plays a vital role in students’ social lives and that students generally welcome texts from university staff. Texting provides peer support for administrative and emotional matters. Peer support is not sufficient.
Step six: Check your paraphrase against the original again. I find that I am still unhappy with my phrase:
Texting provides peer support
because the original is:
text messaging….provides peer support
so I am going to try again:
Harley et al (2007) found that texting plays a vital role in students’ social lives and that students generally welcome texts from university staff. Students support each other in administrative and emotional matters through texting but this peer support is not sufficient.
Step seven: go and have a cup of tea, job well done.
I am a native speaker and it took me that long to get it right! It is a case of understanding, drafting, checking and redrafting. Slow and steady wins the race!
For more great input and further paraphrasing exercises visit that fantastic site The Online Writing Lab at Purdue University here.
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Whatever your subject you are going to have to read books and articles at university and refer to them in your work. I’m going to spend the next few posts saying some things about how to paraphrase well and my first piece of advice is to learn a few standard phrases to introduce your paraphrasing, get them right, and keep using them! You don’t win any medals in academic writing for being creative! If you read through academic texts you see the same phrases again and again. For paraphrasing these might be:
As Smith (2007) points out, November is the worst month of the year in the UK.
According to Smith (2007), November is the worst month of the year in the UK.
Smith (2007) claims that November is the worst month of the year in the UK.
As far as Smith (2007) is concerned, November is the worst month of the year in the UK.
In fact, depending on your level of English those four patterns might be enough! Students often get into problems because they have seen so many of these phrases that they start mixing them up and come up with things like:
According to Smith (2007) states that November is the worst month of the year in the UK.
which is not only wrong but horrible too! The student has mixed up two different patterns. If your English is very good then you will know that this is grammatically impossible, however there are plenty of students who produce sentences like this. I know it is natural to make mistakes while you are learning but one thing you can do to cut down on mistakes is to make use of common academic phrases. Learn those four phrases above to introduce your paraphrase. Learn which ones use a comma and which ones don’t and use the same few all the time. If you vary the verb that you use in the same pattern this will not look too repetitive. Keep it simple!
On the theme of simplicity here is a simple list of reporting verbs from Glasgow Caledonian University.
(Did you guess that I’m fed up with the weather??)
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The other day I read this sentence in a student’s piece of work:
The number of cars was risen 10% over the last five years….
You are right if you think this looks wrong - it is wrong! But it is not unusual to see sentences like this. The general structure of the sentence is sound (word order, use of articles etc) but the student doesn’t know how to build up compound verbs properly. (The correct version is: The number of cars has risen / has been rising over the last five years..) I know that things get pretty difficult with auxiliary verbs and when a sentence is in the passive voice - a new bridge has been built in the city centre - there are even more things to get wrong with building up compound verbs. However, guys, don’t just guess! There are only a few possibilities that you can use. Take a look again at the sentence:
The number of cars was risen 10% over the last five years….
Once you have decided that the subject of the sentence is singular (the number) and the verb is active then the grammatical possibilities for the verb are:
1. The number of cars rises over the last five years….
2. The number of cars is rising over the last five years….
3. The number of cars has risen over the last five years….
4. The number of cars has been rising over the last five years….
5. The number of cars rose over the last five years….
6. The number of cars was rising over the last five years….
7. The number of cars had risen over the last five years….
8. The number of cars had been rising over the last five years….
Any of these sentences, even the wrong ones, read far better than the original sentence that I gave you. It is also suprising that actually a fair number of them are acceptable and would not upset the reader too much! If you are not sure of the possible verb forms take a look at a verb chart like the one here on Englishpage.com. When you follow the link scroll down the page to the VERB TENSE OVERVIEW table towards the bottom of the page. You can see all the tenses laid out. Use what you think is the most appropriate one and make sure you make your verb agree with the subject of the sentence. Even if you choose the wrong tense your writing will be far more acceptable than if you put something grammatically impossible!
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The temperature in the UK has plummeted so that now we are having the coldest October days for 34 years! It seems that we are always breaking records with the weather.
Today’s post is about REFLECTIVE WRITING. Reflective writing is becoming more and more common in universities because it is seen as such a useful learning process. It is particularly popular in courses where students gain some practical experience (eg teaching, care work) and are then asked to reflect on their experience. The greatest danger is that students write a description of what happened. Simply writing about what happened to you is not reflection, it is a narrative account and you will not get good marks. The important thing about reflective writing is to think about what you have learned from the experience you had. The reason your university gives you practical work is to build up your experience, but an experience which is not reflected upon is not a useful one. You wouldn’t want to make the same mistakes again, would you? So you need to choose the most important aspects of your experience to talk about because otherwise your writing will degenerate into a descriptive account of what happened. Of course the most important things in your experience are often the worst things! It is important to show your feelings and concerns in reflective writing - but again be careful of simply describing how you felt at the time because description is not reflection. You should also be careful about writing a reflection too soon after an experience has happened. Imagine you do something (eg give a presentation) and immediately you are asked to write about it. If it went badly you are likely to have a very negative reflection and if it went well you would be so relieved that your reflection would say how great your presentation was. It is a good idea to make some notes immediately after your experience without writing the final reflection. After a few days of mulling things over (yes, that means thinking about it for a few days) look back at your notes and think of your experience again. Think about what you wrote - think about what you thought when you wrote the notes. Do you still feel the same? Now you might think your presentation wasn’t quite so bad. If you can show that you have reflected upon your thoughts and feelings then you are getting there. Very importantly, what will you differently next time to do it better? What have you learned?
There are lots of useful links out there on reflective writing and I am going to point you to two. The first one is a very nice straightforward introduction from the University of Portsmouth. The beauty of this one is that it contains lots of useful phrases for overseas students such as: This demonstrates that… and Most importantly I have learned that… . The second link, with rather more thought provoking material, comes from the University of Exeter and is written by Jenny Moon who has written a lot about Reflective Writing. Go here for the Portsmouth link (thanks to Kasia for the tip) and here for the Exeter one.
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I have noticed how much it has been raining recently - the reason I’ve noticed is that the windscreen wiper on my car is broken and I can’t see properly when it’s raining! (Not sure what windscreen wiper means? Don’t reach for your dictionary but use the context to work it out - yes, it’s the thing on the front window of the car which wipes the rain away!) The problem is that I only notice that it isn’t working when it’s raining which means of course I have to pull over to the side of the road and stand in the rain trying to fix it. I fix it a little, and then forget about it, until the next time it rains! I think that international students are often like this - they don’t worry about their English until they have to hand in their work! Then it is too late. You have to work on your English even when it’s not raining!
I get lots of students in my office with assignments which include writing about tables and charts. Describing graphs and charts can be difficult and that’s why I have got a link to a really good website to help you write about these things. The phrases that you often need are things like: Since 2007 the rate of inflation has increased.. and many students have difficulty with these verb forms and the particular vocabulary that you can use to describe charts, graphs and tables. These writing activities are often included in IELTS examinations so this link will be particularly useful for students preparing to take their IELTS writing paper. The link comes from Leeds University Langauge Centre and you can follow it here.
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It must be autumn because I have taken my boat out of the water for the winter and there has been a stock market crash!
The SQ3R is a strategy for effective academic reading which has been around for decades. It is all about standing back and looking at the outline of the text you are going to read, preparing for the reading by getting some questions ready, looking for answers as you read, remembering what you read and then reviewing what you’ve read so you don’t forget it. All these techniques lead to ACTIVE reading and reading with a DEEP APPROACH which I have mentioned before. It is completely different to the casual reading that you do in your spare time. You might be thinking ‘That sounds like hard work!’ and you would be right - it is WORK. Rather like an athelete who has to put the hours in to become fit enough to win a competition, students have to put the hours in to learn their subject and polish their academic skills so they can do well in their studies.
SQ3R stands for:
SURVEY:
Survey the text you are going to read. This means reading the title and thinking about what it means. Look through the text and look at the sub-headings and the summary. Look at any diagrams or pictures. After your survey you should have a good idea about what the text is about.
QUESTION
Before you start reading carefully look at the first heading and think of some questions that you think will be answered in this section of the text. If the text is ‘THE STORY OF COCA COLA’ and the first section has the heading ‘Beginnings’ then you might note down some questions such as:
When was the company started?
Where was it started?
Who started it?
Now you have a reason to read! Your reading should be focused with an aim.
READ
Now read that first section of the text and look for the answers to the questions that you wrote. You may not find all the answers, but what is important is that you are reading for a good reason and you will try to understand everything you read because you are looking for particular information. You may find other important information that you didn’t think of asking about. MARK YOUR TEXT! Underline things, write things in the margin!
RECALL
When you have finished reading that section stop! Can you now say what the most important parts of the text that you read are? Can you look at the questions that you wrote earlier and say the answers out loud without reading the text? This RECALL is sometimes referred to as RECITE which means ‘to say something from you memory’. If you can’t recall or recite the main points of what you’ve read then it hasn’t made an impression on you!
REVIEW
When you have worked through the whole text this way you need to review what you have read. But not just once at the end of your reading. If you never looked at this text again, it is unlikely that you would remember the content of what you read very well. Can you say what the main points of the text are the next day? If you reviewed your reading by recalling the main points of the sections of the text the following day then you would be helping this information get into your long-term memory. It is not a case of memorising sentences word for word, but a case of reviewing the main points so that you can articulate them in your own words.
There are any number of good web resources which give further information about SQ3R, just google SQ3R and you will find plenty. You should always use a number of different sources to gain a proper understanding of something. Birbeck College, University of London, have some great learning resources. You can see the list via today’s link. Scroll down to READING SKILLS and follow the link for ‘Reading Academic Texts: SQ3R’. Here it is.
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I’ve been talking a lot about academic reading recently, and I promise I am going to return to that topic in my next post. But I thought I’d say something about the present perfect tense because I have noticed how many students have difficulty in using it properly. This is when everyone groans ‘not the present perfect tense again!’ I know you know the grammatical rules! I know you know that you have to use ‘have’ and the past participle. However even though many other languages build up tenses in a similar way it does not mean that the English present perfect is used in the same way. There are even differences in how Americans and British use the tense system! Americans are more likely to use the past simple tense in the question ‘Did you eat yet? whereas Brits would say ‘Have you eaten yet?’ When I meet a new class I often ask students to find out about each other and I have heard a lot of sentences like ‘How long are you in Plymouth?’ and ‘How long are you living here?’ from students whose English is pretty fluent. The correct questions are How long have you been here? and How long have you lived here? (Or How long have you been living here?) If you look in a grammar book it may not help you much - the explanations are often so difficult and long that you close the book feeling completely fed up long before you have finished the section! You need something clear and simple to explain just the main uses and I have a link which does that for you. This simple explanation and accompanying online exercises come from the English Language Centre at the University of Victoria in Canada who have lots of great online stuff here.
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Thanks to students who are emailing me. I am always pleased to hear from you even if it takes me a long time to reply. Unfortunately I cannot give everyone individual advice because I also have a full time job! Do remember that you can sign up to receive my posts by email. That means that you don’t have to keep coming here to see if there is a new post!
Quasar sounds like a really cool thing. Whenever I see or hear this word I think of young boys running around in the dark wearing special jackets shooting each other. That’s because ‘Quasar’ is a place in Torquay where you do just this and my sons have been there on a number of occasions for birthday parties. It is also the name of a system for reading:
QU - question
A - be Active
S - systems
A - analyse
R - reflect
There is an excellent study guide from the University of Southampton which I am going to point you to which explains this method of reading and it also has a number of excellent awareness raising activities too. This particular resource is not specially designed for international students, but it is intended to support all students needing to improve their academic reading skills. The resource needs more than one sitting! Don’t just read it all through and then forget about it. In fact, if you did that then you would be doing exactly what it is telling you NOT to do! The whole point is to read it with a deep approach so that you understand and reflect on what you read. You might be used to reading things from start to finish, to get SURFACE information from a text that you can memorise and then use in assessments. International students who continue with this SURFACE approach to study at university in English speaking countries will not do well. Don’t take my word for it, have a look at the study guide from Southampton University. The link takes you to a collection of study guides and you should follow the link ‘Reading Academically’ which is the third on the page. As I said, there is a lot of information and you should read a bit of it, and then act on it. It would be a good idea to read the introduction to the study guide, and then read sections 1.0 , 1.1 and 1.2. You can read these here.
When you have read those sections you should be thinking carefully about whether you read with a SURFACE or a DEEP approach, and the importance of a deep approach. So when you’ve read the sections, done the exercises and thought about it, go and do some deep reading around your subject!
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It’s exciting to see all the new students walking around the campus! I hope that wherever you are you find some useful tips and links on this site. Remember you can sign up for e mails of my new posts by using the form on the right of the page and that way you don’t need to keep coming back to see if you have missed anything. You will not be spammed if you subscribe - your e mail address will only be used to deliver these posts, I hate junk mail as much as anyone!
To return to the subject of Academic Reading, the most important thing is for you to be aware of different strategies that are available to you and to use the correct one in the correct situation. Today I am going to talk about skimming and scanning. In later posts I’ll think about reading for detail and SQ3R and QUASAR methods for helping you read efficiently. It is really a bad habit to start to read an academic text just by going right to the beginning and then continuing to read every sentence one after the other, looking up every word you don’t know in a dictionary. Imagine you want to move to a new house, or you want to buy a new car and you go to see this new house/car to see if you want it. What is the first thing you do? Well, I think the first thing you do is look at it from the outside to see if it is what you want. Don’t you stand back and look at it from different angles to see if it meets your needs? If it looks OK, then you go inside and start to investigate it carefully. Similarly with an academic text you have to make sure that it is what you want before you go inside it - that is, before you start reading it carefully. The ‘stand back and look at it from different angles’ is essential. This is when you look at the title, the author, when it was written (what we sometimes calling ’surveying’ the text) and you skim and scan it. When you scan a text you are looking through it quickly to find key words or information. After scanning a text you should know if it has references to things you want to know about. Skimming is looking quickly through a text to gain a general impression of what it is about. You can often do this by reading only the title and sub-titles of a text, and the first sentence of each paragraph. You can do all this type of reading without using a dictionary! Remember the house - you haven’t stepped inside it yet, you are still looking at it from the outside. Surveying the text (title, author, date, etc) and skimming and scanning are essential academic reading skills for you and for native English speakers too who also need to develop these skills. The trick is to have the confidence to jump through a text ignoring whole bits of it. It may seem strange to you to do this. It may even feel like you are cheating! But it is an essential element to being an ACTIVE reader. Read more about surveying a text, skimming and scanning and improve these skills at Andy Gillett’s University of Hertfordshire website.
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I saw an interesting headline for an article in a British newspaper: ‘Chinese students continue to choose British universities‘. This headline makes it sound like Chinese students choose British universities rather than universities in other countries. However, after some surfing around the subject, I found an article in an Australian newspaper (published on the same day!) with the title: ‘High university cost fails to deter university students’. The Australian article says that the number of Chinese students has risen by 22.8% this year in Australia. Going back to the British newspaper, I learned that the number of Chinese students at British universities has only increased by 14.7%! Perhaps the headline for the British newspaper should have been ‘Chinese students prefer Australia!’ (Read The Guardian article in the UK here and The Australian Higher Education article here.)
Wherever you come from I wish you every success in your studies. It is likely that you are going to read a lot for your course so developing your reading skills should be a priority for you. For that reason I am going to say some things about reading over the next couple of posts. The first thing to say about reading is that it is not the same activity each time you do it! When I read my novel in bed before switching the light off at the end of the day I read ’passively’ - I start at the top of the page and read the story steadily at the same speed (I sometimes even get to the bottom of the page before I fall asleep!). This type of reading for pleasure is often called ‘extensive reading’ by teachers. What is important about this type of reading is that you choose the book and you don’t worry too much about difficult words you come across. Your extensive reading may be ‘readers’ (shorter simpler versions of real novels) or more authentic materials written for any reader. You may not ‘enjoy’ the reading at first but (rather like taking exercise) you will see the benefits in the long run. But I actually wanted to think more about the other type of reading which you do academically, for study, and when you read for study you are an ACTIVE reader. There is nothing passive about reading for study! If you start at the first word and read steadily through the text it is unlikely that you are going to achieve your goals. What are your goals for reading the text? Are you sure you want to read the text at all? How do you know if it will be useful for you? What parts of the text will be useful? What point is the writer making? What notes will you make? What are your notes for? All these questions make you into an ACTIVE READER as you employ a variety of strategies to help you meet your goals and over the next few posts I’d like to give you some tips on how to start developing or continue improving your reading strategies. The starting point is to raise your awareness of the topic of academic reading and for that I am pointing you to this page on Study Advice and Learning Development from the University of Reading. This page gives you an overview of the issue of academic reading and you can read it here.
