coursedescriptionAcademicReadingandEvaluation.docVIP

Applied Linguistics：Academic Reading and Evaluation “Academic Reading and Evaluation” is a two-credit course which lasts one semester. During this course, we will critically read 5 or 6 academic papers selected from the latest international journals. The aim of this course is to guide students through their critical reading of a research paper in the field of applied linguistics, to help them relate the basic knowledge they acquire during introductory courses on investigation in applied linguistics to their own independent reading of research papers. I. Course objectives The course will enable you to read academic papers skillfully and critically identify research areas through critical reading understand how to design a research and write a research paper give an effective presentaion as a pair or a group II. Teaching contents and procedures In the course, 5 or 6 representative academic papers (see appendix) published in international journals will be studied. Students will be shown ways of approaching the appraisal of the abstract and the introductory section of the study, both of which set the stage by describing the rationale as well as the objective of the work. They will be given ideas about how to assess the method and procedures section so that they can decide whether the research design was appropriate, and what precautions were taken to guard against threats of validity to the findings. They will be shown how to interpret results from commonly-used descriptive or inferential statistical procedures and check how appropriately these have been presented. Finally, they will be taught how to critically evaluate the researcher’s own interpretation of the findings in terms of the extent to which the conclusion is justified, can be generalised, and has limitations. Each paper normally takes two weeks. The section in the first week focuses on the research reported in a paper and the section in the second week on the critical evaluation of the paper. Specifi