No, citing is not easy at all!

I knew that writing is a hard task, but now I found out that citing is even worse! Oh my God, did you take a look at the websites Sarah provided us about the APA and MLA styles? Well, Americans take the matter of citing seriously. Wow, I'm surprised. : 0   I mean, I knew that there were some rules about citing, and I actually followed them in writing my BA thesis, but I didn't know there were different styles to do it and strict rules like the ones I just read. Ok, let's take a deep breath and start comparing the APA and the MLA styles, focusing on what I already knew and on what I didn't know at all. Let's see if my BA thesis is a complete disaster! ; )

The APA style is most used to cite sources within the social sciences. It gives you suggestions about footnotes, references and in-text citations. It gives you guidelines about the general layout and the structure of the text, that is, what the text should look like and the sections that it should have. Ok, I already knew these rules. The thing that strucked me the most was reading all the rules about the in-text citations. It's true that I already knew the majority of these rules, such as capitalizing proper nouns including initials, capitalizing all words that are four letters long and italicizing the titles of longer works. It's also true that I didn't know that shorter titles shouldn't be italicized and that the first word after a dash or colon should be capitalized. About the short and long quotations, I already knew that the long ones should be in a free-standing block in typewritten lines, omitting quotation marks. I knew that writing the page number in the in-text references is suggested, too. So, ok, I was quite prepared!

  

The MLA style focuses on the way in which references should be written. The MLA style requires that you provide brief parenthetical references directly in the text identifying the exact part of each work that is quoted or on which the ideas of your work are based. I didn't know this rule, in my BA thesis I just put the general references in the footnotes. The MLA style requires that you provide an alphabetical list of "Works Cited" at the end of the paper, too. The general format required by this style is the same I used in my BA thesis. About the material found online, I have to admit that in my BA thesis I didn't put too much attention in citing the websites in which I found the information I used. I just put a section called "Sitography" at the end of my paper, without specifying the information I found in each of them. One thing I liked about the MLA style is that it suggests you write "Works Consulted", "Works Cited" or "Annotated Works Cited" instead of "Bibliography" 'coz they're more specific. A thing that I didn't like about the MLA style is that it suggests you underline instead of using italics in writing the titles of the works you use. I personally think that using italics is more elegant than underlining, but maybe it's because using italics is part of the Italian way of writing. So, this time I was not so prepared...

To sum up, I can say that I was aware of the majority of the rules I read, but of course I didn't know all of them and the ones I knew were not so fixed in my mind. If I re-read my BA thesis, anyway, I can say it's not that bad regarding quotations. It lacks regarding the abstract and the "sitography", but I'm gonna follow the new rules I learnt in the next dissertation. Well, following all these rules is not easy at all, it seems a BIG effort to me, but I guess that complaining isn't going to change the situation... ; )

Readable, clear, concise, interesting, simple...what else??

Writing is a hard task, if you wanna do it in a proper way. It's not just a matter of putting on a piece of paper your thoughts, you have to organize your ideas and put them in a logical order, otherwise your reader isn't going to understand anything. This is true not only if you're writing an academic paper, but also if you're writing a blog post. 

An example of a well-written paper is the article I found, which is called "Motivation and Second Language Acquisition", by R.C. Gardner, University of Western Ontario. I have to point out I changed the article 'coz the previous one is not available online any more. Don't worry, this article is even more interesting than the other one. As you can easily get from the title of this new article, Gardner talks about the role of motivation in second language acquisition, distinguishing two types of motivations, language learning motivation and classroom motivation. 

Generally speaking, Gardner is really clear in the whole article. He provides many schemes of what he's explaining and he often points out what he's gonna say and demonstrate. For example, at the beginning of his article he says: "In this vein, I intend to direct my attention to the following four points:

a. Two motivational constructs

b. Stages of language acquisition

c. Cultural and educational contexts

d. Results from Spain". 

By reading this scheme, the reader is ready from the very beginning to follow Gardner's flow of ideas, which is really logical. In fact, there is an intro, a body and a conclusion. The intro is the abstract, which briefly explains what the research consists of and the conclusions it drew. The body consists of four brief paragraphs with a title each, and the conclusion is the last paragraph. This clear structure makes the article readable and easy to get. The reader is able to follow Gardner's discourse without getting lost in his thoughts. Moreover, Gardner uses a simple language and short sentences, which help the reader not to get bored. For example, when he has to explain what the initial stage in second language acquisition is, he simply says: "The initial stage is Elemental. In this stage the individual is learning the basics of the language, vocabulary, grammar, pronunciations, etc. (what Lambert would term the vocabulary cluster). We see this in the development of one’s first language when the toddler learns new words, begins to put words together, mispronounces some words but corrects them later, etc... With the second language student, we see the same process when initial vocabulary is learned, equivalents with the first language are recognized, simple declarative sentences are memorized,etc." As you can notice, the explanation is easy to understand, with no specific terms. The text is cohesive, too. For example, after analysing the four stages in language acquisition, Gardner says that "This analysis is not meant to be definitive as to the stages of language acquisition, but it does serve to highlight what is meant by “learning” the language, and to emphasize that it has different meanings at different stages of the learning process." The word "this" is pointing back to what he explains before. About the audience, I think this article is written for students 'coz, as I said before, it's really simple and readable.

Well, certainly our blog posts should be like this. I mean, of course a blog post has to be concise, but it should be cohesive, logical and clear as a well-written academic article. I think writing a good blog post isn't as easy as people think. On the contrary, it's more difficult to write a good blog post than a good article 'coz you have to say something interesting in few sentences, but you still have to pay attention to the structure of the text you're writing. A blog post has to have an intro, a body and a conclusion, too, just like an article, but it has to be more concise. This is not easy at all!

Big brother is watching you!

"If you don't tell whose work it is, you are pretending the work is your own. This pretending is called 'plagiarism,' and it is just like cheating. It's not fair. It's not nice. It isn't OK. It's stealing." 

(Simpson, 2005, p. 180)

Hey, this is not plagiarism, I put the reference! ; ) I started with this sentence 'coz I think that it clearly and briefly explains what plagiarism is. Yeah, it's stealing, that's bad. Plagiarism has to be avoided.

Plagiarism... I have to admit I didn't care too much about it in the past. I often put some sentences I found on the web or in books in my papers pretending they were mine. I thought it was pretty normal and that it was not so bad, but now I know I have to feel ashamed... as an excuse, I can say that Italian people in general don't care much about plagiarism, but I know this isn't a good reason not to respect IPR. ; ) ; ) Probably Italian people like cheating, as Sarah said. No, I don't think this is the reason, I think we're just not informed, just a bit ingenuous. ; )

 

However, as Sarah explained us, IPR are really important to Americans. American students committing plagiarism can be expelled from university and American workers can loose their job. This sounds incredible to me, but I have to admit that copying material that it isn't ours it's irresponsible and not respectful to the person who created it. Plagiarism is a really serious issue.

I found lots of websites of different American universities talking about plagiarism. I saved some websites in delicious, especially those that give suggestions and tips in order to avoid plagiarism, which isn't so easy as we can think, the reason being we have to pay attention to anything. Even a picture can be protected by copyright! 

So, what can we, poor Italian students, do? Well, it's better to use our own material, and, if we'd like to take other people's material, we have to check if it's public domain or if there are some restrictions to use it. In every case, if we use other people's material, we have to put the reference! Pay attention guys, BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU!!!

P.S. The only thing I didn't get too much is why Italians don't care about IPR. Nobody check if the material we're using it's ours or not. Well, it's a matter of being honest or not, ok, I'm not gonna cheat any more, this is a promise! : ) 

I finally gave up...

Hi there!

Ok, I definitely gave up in trying to change the template of my blog. I tried everything my classmates suggested me do, but nothing worked. So, let's enjoy my blog as it is. : (

I forgot...

Sorry, I forgot to say it was easy to answer some questions, such as "who was the researcher?" or "what was the goal of the research?", whereas it was quite hard to answer some questions like "what kind of study was it and how was data collected?". The fact is that some data are clearly written, while some others are in the middle of the abstract and you have to identify them in the discourse. 

The questions I answered about the research articles are really similar to the ones posed in e-tivity 5 'coz they all establish some criteria in order to understand if a website is reliable or not. 

About the way to keep track of the sources I find, I guess I can save the websites I found in Delicious, right? ; ) 

Ok, that's all for now! 

Is it rubbish??

Hi everybody!!

So, we were supposed to search for a reliable research article, right? I have to admit it was not an easy task, the reason being that some websites seemed reliable at the beginning, but after trying to answer the questions that Sarah gave us I found out they weren't. Sometimes I could answer only to 3 or 4 questions, which I guess it's not enough. The conclusion is that now I'm aware of the fact that surfing in the Web is not as funny as I thought. Just kidding!!! Seriously, now I know that there are some criteria to use if we want to take advantage of the information we find, and this is a great discover 'coz we're gonna loose less time with our next researches. The thing that I like most is that simply reading the abstract we can understand if reading the whole article is worth or not. 

So, first of all, I went to Google Scholar, as we were required to find a research article. I surfed a bit before finding a good one, but then I managed to find an article that I consider reliable. You can find it here: http://slr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/21/3/199

As you can see, the date of the research, that is, 2005, is immediately written. Then there's the title of the article and the name of the researcher, which is Silvina Montrul. It's written she belongs to  the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. You can see that her e-mail address is written, too. Then the abstract begins. I like it 'coz I find it short and straight to the point. The goal of the research is immediately pointed out: it's the comparison between the linguistic knowledge of adult second language (L2) learners, who learned the L2 after puberty, and the potential "eroded" first language (L1) grammars of adult early bilinguals who were exposed to the target language since birth and learnt the other language simultaneously, or early in childhood (before age 5). The findings of the research are clearly explained, too. The author writes "I make two main claims: (1) that the L1 grammar of bilingual [...] resembles the incomplete [...] grammars typical of intermediate and advanced stages in L2 acquisition; and (2) that [...] early bilinguals are better than the L2 learners, probably due to exposure to primary linguistic input early in childhood." The author explains the way in which she carried out her research, that is, how she collected data, explaining she conducted it with English-speaking L2 learners and English-dominant Spanish heritage living in the USA (small scale). She adds she discussed "how input, use and age may explain differences and similarities in the linguistic attainment of the two groups." As you can notice, I answered almost all the questions Sarah provided us. I couldn't say if the research was short or long term and if there were reservations or limitations on the research 'coz the writer didn't mention them, but I think that this is a good and reliable article as well. If you have the chance, take a look at it and tell me your opinion about it!

Technology I HATE you!

Mmmm... I downloaded Internet Explorer 8, but still, I'm not able to modify the HTML. Ok, I'm not fond of technology... no, actually, I hate it, but I thought I could manage to change the layout of my blog... no... : (   Sooooooooo sad! I need help!! Tomorrow I'm gonna ask someone!

HTML I hate you!

Uff... I'm angry!!! Like Sara, I can't modify the HTML of my blog 'coz I'm not using Internet Explorer 8. : ( : ( I'm gonna try to download it right now 'coz I really hate my blog, it's just plain! If I'm not gonna succeed, I'm gonna ask Sarah what I'm supposed to do. Let's try... 

The Internet: this big stranger...

Here we go again. Hello everybody!!

Last lesson Sarah asked us to tell her the criteria we use to judge the websites we find during our Internet researches. In other words, why do we consider a website reliable and useful? Well, we listed all our criteria and I think we did a good job. We took a look at some websites where there are some suggestions about surfing on the Web that other universities (e.g. the University of Essex) make for their students, and there was nothing really relevant to add to our list. We're smart, guys! ; ) 

Sarah made us discover some other tools we can use to "filter" information on the Internet, too, such as Google Blogs, Google Books and Google Scholar. We searched for "personal learning environment" in the 3 of them, and I have to admit it was very interesting 'coz we really could find what we were looking for in reliable sources. Google blogs is similar to Technorati, as it searches tags in blogs on the Internet. It was funny 'coz I found an American teacher's blog and, reading a bit through it, I got she's doing exactly the same that Sarah is doing with us with her students. I mean, her students are required to have a blog and write posts regularly and so on. I guess it's because American teachers are really aware of the importance of the Internet nowadays and are trying to help their students be updated with the new technological devices. Google Books is again really helpful 'coz even if we can't download books, we can at least read their abstracts and some pages of them to see if we're interested in buying them. Google Scholar is specific 'coz it searches tags in online academic texts that is really useful in our case, as we're University students. The thing that strucked me the most is that there are a lot of free online texts available on the Web, it's not that we have to pay for everything. Good to know! Finding the site we're looking for and finding out it's not free is annoying, isn't it? 

I took a look at the sites that Sarah provided us, too, that is, http://e-language.wikispaces.com/ and http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Siemens and now I can say I agree with her, not all wikis are Wikipedia. Wikipedia isn't reliable in most cases, but these 2 websites seem to be reliable. I mean, their graphics is good, there is no advertisement, they're clear and well-structured, and, more importantly, it's immediately written what we're gonna find reading them. Sarah said this is a criteria we can use to jugde a website positively so I can say these 2 websites are reliable. 

What's more? I think I can conclude saying that every lesson is a discover! This course is helping me a lot understand the Internet better, and I think the things I'm learning now are gonna be extremely useful in writing my thesis. Good job, Sarah! : )