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Academic writing : a study guideСтр 1 из 13Следующая ⇒
ACADEMIC WRITING: A STUDY GUIDE по дисциплине «Академическое письмо (иностранный язык)» Направление 38.04.01 Экономика
Квалификация: Магистр Б1.Б.5.
Казань 2015
Обсуждена на заседании кафедры иностранных языков в сфере экономики, бизнеса и финансов 4 марта 2015 года протокол № 7.
Составители: доц. кафедры иностранных языков в сфере экономики, бизнеса и финансов, к.пед.н. Валеева Л.А., доц. кафедры иностранных языков в сфере экономики, бизнеса и финансов, к.пед.н. Сиразеева А.Ф.
Рецензенты: Зав. кафедрой иностранных языков КНИТУ КАИ им. А.Н. Туполева, к. пед. н, доцент, профессор РАЕ Константинова Н.А.
Доцент кафедры иностранных языков в сфере экономики, бизнеса и финансов ИУЭиФ КФУ., к. социол. н., Исмагилова Л.Р.
ВВЕДЕНИЕ Сегодня перед студентами-магистрантами неязыкового вуза поставлена задача стать активными членами мирового научного сообщества, печататься в международных научных изданиях, что требует наличия определенных компетенций, от уровня развития которых зависит их конкурентоспособность в профессиональной среде и сфере международных научных коммуникаций. Публикации в ведущих научных журналах, входящих в глобальную базу данных цитирования Web of Science и Scopus, позволяют заявить о себе в международном академическом сообществе, повысить показатели цитируемости, установить научные связи с зарубежными коллегами, работающими по сходной тематике. Однако зачастую недостаточное знание формальных требований зарубежных изданий, ошибки в оформлении заявки и т.п. приводят к тому, что даже качественные научные работы отечественных исследователей не проходят даже первичный отбор. В связи с этим в современных условиях студенты-магистранты сталкиваются с проблемой освоения большого объема информации на английском языке. Наблюдается отсутствие необходимых навыков работы с письменным текстом на английском языке, как таковым (и, прежде всего, с научным). Академическое письмо обладает рядом характеристик, универсальных для любого языка и характеризуется формальным стилем изложения, что подразумевает использование академической лексики. Вопрос стиля особенно труден для изучающих английский, поскольку в ряде случаев грань между регистрами очень тонка. Как правило, письменные умения и навыки значительно отстают от уровня развития других видов речевой деятельности: чтения, говорения и аудирования. В связи с этим студенты испытывают серьезные трудности при написании научных статей в международных сборниках. Обучение академическому письму не должно быть направлено исключительно на развитие умений письменной речи в академической сфере, а должно включать комплекс задач, направленных на повышение академической грамотности обучающихся в целом.
Учебно-практическое издание ACADEMIC WRITING: A STUDY GUIDE направлено на развитие как когнитивных (выдвинуть гипотезу, предложить собственную мысль, проанализировать информацию, переработать и сжать композиционно-смысловую структуру текста, организовать и структурировать собственные идеи), так и языковых (реферирование, перефразирование, формулирование мысли и выражение ее с помощью языковых средств на уровне предложения, абзаца, текста) умений. Кроме того, предоставляет базовую информацию о шаблонах, форматах, нормах академического письма, типичных для оформления научного текста той или иной области знаний (общие рекомендации, написание аннотации, проблема плагиата и др.)
Учебно-практическое издание соответствует учебной программе ФГОС ВПО третьего+ поколения по дисциплине по дисциплине «Академическое письмо (иностранный язык)» по направлениям 38.04.01 Экономика. Учебно-практическое издание ACADEMIC WRITING: A STUDY GUIDE предназначено для использования на практических занятиях по английскому языку под контролем преподавателя студентами-магистрантами I курса очного и заочного обучения по направлению.
Настоящее издание включает пять разделов (modules): первый охватывает основные разделы второй раздел включает; третий
СОДЕРЖАНИЕ
MODULE 1 WRITING PROCESS Academic writing. Preview …………………………………… Questions/Assignment Briefs/Rubric……………………………….
Exercise 1 Understanding texts. Rhetorical functions in academic writing:descriptive/critical/reflective Exercise 1 Exercise 2
MODULE 2 TAKING NOTES…………………………………………………… Exercise 1 Exercise 2 Exercise 3
MODULE 1 WRITING PROCESS Academic writing. Preview Writing is necessary for all students in higher education. It is a process. It starts from understanding your task. It then goes on to doing the research and reading. The next stage is planning and writing various drafts. This is followed by proof-reading and editing. All this should lead to the final text. Writing is purposeful. The way you write something always depends on your purpose. You will be able to increase both your speed of reading and your comprehension if you can recognise some of the rhetorical functions that the writer is using. Writers use language, for example, to analyse, to describe, to report, to define, to instruct, to classify, to compare, to give examples, to explain, to give reasons, to argue and discuss and to draw conclusions. To understand the text it is necessary to understand what the writer's purpose is. It is important to remember who you are writing for. Being conscious of academic tone suggests that you are aware of your audience and respect the formality normally associated with academic writing. When writing academically, you must target a more general audience than just your lecturer and/or marker. You should assume that your readers will be intelligent thinking people, but they may not be specifically informed of your topic. Do not presume that your reader knows all the terms and concepts associated with your work.
Exercise 1 Look at the following questions/briefs/rubrics and try to decide the broad purpose of the piece of writing you are expected to do.
Understanding texts. Rhetorical functions in academic writing
Academic writing uses different rhetorical functions. Typical rhetorical functions, based on: Werlich (1976) and Lackstrom, Selinker & Trimble (1973), are: Descriptive 1. Describing objects, location, structure and direction 2. Reporting and narrating 3. Defining 4. Writing instructions 5. Describing function 6. Describing processes, developments and operations 7. Classifying / categorising
8. Giving examples 9. Including tables and charts Critical 10. Writing critically 11. Arguing and discussing 12. Evaluating other points of view 13. Comparing and contrasting: similarities and differences 14. Generalising 15. Expressing degrees of certainty 16. Expressing reasons and explanations / cause and effect 17. Analysing 18. Providing support 19. Application 20. Working with different voices and finding your own 21. Taking a stance 22. Introducing 23. Drawing conclusions 24. Recommendations Reflective 25. Writing reflectively Useful Language Past tense is common. Chronological order is also common, but when we are writing about past events, it is necessary to be explicit about the order in which things happened. To make the order clear, we mention dates and time, and we also use various links and connectives. Time In 1942,... During the 20th century,... Yesterday,... Twenty five years ago,... Sequence Before
Before this, … For the previous X years, … Prior to this, … Previously, … X years previously, … Before… … before which … … prior to which … After
For the following X years, … X years later, … After … Following this, … When … Subsequently, … Soon/Shortly/Immediately afterwards, … … following which … … after which … While
During this period, … Throughout this period, … … during which… … throughout which… 3) Defining In the following example, the term "lava" is being defined.
Useful Language X is... 4) Classifying The following example classifies, and also describes. The Classification of Species
Critical rhetorical function: 1) Comparing and contrasting: similarities and differences The following paragraph pattern is one in which several things are compared or contrasted. A one-million-fold increase in speed characterizes the development of machine computation over the past thirty years. The increase results from improvements in computer hardware. In the 1940s ENIAC, an early electronic computer, filled a room with its banks of vacuum tubes and miles of wiring. Today one can hold in the hand a computing device costing about $200 that is twenty times faster than ENIAC, has more components and a larger memory, is thousands of times more reliable, costs 1/10,000 the price, and consumes the power of a light bulb rather than that of a locomotive. 2) Expressing reasons and explanations / cause and effect In this type of pattern, the purpose is to explain cause and effect. One of the most important properties of a liquid is that its surface behaves like an elastic covering that is continually trying to decrease its area. A result of this tendency for the surface to contract is the formation of liquids into droplets as spherical as possible considering the constraint of the ever-present gravity force. Surface tension arises because the elastic attractive forces between molecules inside a liquid are symmetrical; molecules situated near the surface are attracted from the inside but not the outside. The surface molecules experience a net inward force; and consequently, moving a surface molecule out of the surface requires energy.
3) Working with different voices and finding your own The following paragraphs give arguments for and against. One of the first men to make a commercial success of food conservation was Henry John Heinz. He started by bottling horseradish, and he was so successful that in 1869 he founded a company in Pittsburgh, USA. Like other Americans of his generation, Heinz made his name a household word throughout the western world. At last, man seems to have discovered how to preserve food without considerably altering its taste. The tins of food (Heinz tins!) which Captain Scott abandoned in the Antarctic were opened 47 years after his death, and the contents were not only edible, but pleasant. The main argument against conserved foods is not that the canning of food makes it taste different; rather, people complain that the recipes which the canning chefs dream up are tedious or tasteless when it is eaten in great quantities. And a company like Heinz can only produce something if it is going to be eaten in great quantities. The tomato is very pleasant to eat when it is freshly picked. A regular diet of tomatoes alone could well prove tedious. The canning companies try to cook the tomato in as many ways as possible. The Heinz factories in Britain use millions and millions of tomatoes every year. They claim that if all the tomatoes were loaded on to 15-ton lorries, the line of lorries would stretch for 60 miles. But there are many people who do not like to eat food out of season. They like their food to be fresh, and they like to cook it themselves in "the old-fashioned way". But it is very difficult for modern man to realise what it is like to live without the advantages of pre-packageded and canned food. European society in its present form could not cope without modern methods of food processing. Imagine your local supermarket without all the cans of pre-packaged foods. There wouldn't be much variety left, and what was left would have to be increased enormously in order to give the same amount of food. The supermarket would turn into a chaos of rotting vegetables, stale bread and unhealthy meat. The health problems would be insurmountable, unless we all went into the country to support ourselves. So next time you reject canned food as being tasteless or unimaginative, remember that you can only afford to eat fresh food because canned food exists. 4) Introducing The purpose of the introduction is to show your reader what you are doing in your writing. It is also helpful to explain why you are doing it and how you are doing it. In many parts of your writing - but especially in introductions - you may need to provide background information and introduce new concepts or ideas and provide a description of how you are going to proceed in the rest of your writing. In the following text, after giving some background information to justify the research, sentence 10 introduces the rest of the report:
Useful phrases are: · The purpose of this paper is to... · The purpose of this investigation is to... · The aim of this paper is to... · This paper reports on the results obtained.... · This study was designed to... · In this paper, we give results of... · In this paper, we argue that.... · This paper argues that.... · We have organise the rest of this paper in the following way.... · This paper is structured as follows.... · The remainder of this paper is divided into five sections.... Exercise 1 “Classifying / categorizing” Read the following texts and complete the tree diagram with the words given below:
Начало формы Конец формы Exercise 2 “Taking a stance” Read the following text and identify words that show the author's position:
MODULE 2 TAKING NOTES Taking notes is an important part of the life of every student. There are two main reasons why note-taking is important: 1. When you are reading or listening, taking notes helps you concentrate. In order to take notes - to write something sensible - you must understand the text. As listening and reading are interactive tasks, taking notes help you make sense of the text. Taking notes does not mean writing down every word you hear; you need to actively decide what is important and how is related to what you have already written. 2. Notes help you to maintain a permanent record of what you have read or listened to. Good notes should be accurate, clear and concise. They should show the organisation of the text, and this should show the relationship between the ideas. How to take notes When you're reading, first survey the text to find the main points and how they are related. Then read for the subsidiary points; see how they are related to the main points and to each other. Then, reduce the points to notes. Make sure links and relationships between the ideas are shown. Good notes need to be organised appropriately. There are two main methods for this: List The topic is summarised one point after another, using numbers and letters and indentation to organise information in order of importance. The numbers and letters can be used by themselves or in combination. I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,8, 9, 10, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, Or using decimals: 1.1, 1.2, 1.2.1, 1.2.2, 1.3, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 Read the following text and study the example below: Oils There are three main groups of oils: animal, vegetable and mineral. Great quantities of animal oil come from whales, those enormous creatures of the sea which are the largest remaining animals in the world. To protect the whale from the cold of the Arctic seas, nature has provided it with a thick covering of fat called blubber. When the whale is killed, the blubber is stripped off and boiled down, either on board ship or on shore. It produces a great quantity of oil which can be made into food for human consumption. A few other creatures yield oil, but none so much as the whale. The livers of the cod and the halibut, two kinds of fish, yield nourishing oil. Both cod liver oil and halibut liver oil are given to sick children and other invalids who need certain vitamins. These oils may be bought at any chemist's. Vegetable oil has been known from antiquity. No household can get on without it, for it is used in cooking. Perfumes may be made from the oils of certain flowers. Soaps are made from vegetable and animal oils. To the ordinary man, one kind of oil may be as important as another. But when the politician or the engineer refers to oil, he almost always means mineral oil, the oil that drives tanks, aeroplanes and warships, motor-cars and diesel locomotives; the oil that is used to lubricate all kinds of machinery. This is the oil that has changed the life of the common man. When it is refined into petrol it is used to drive the internal combustion engine. To it we owe the existence of the motorcar, which has replaced the private carriage drawn by the horse. To it we owe the possibility of flying. It has changed the methods of warfare on land and sea. This kind of oil comes out of the earth. Because it burns well, it is used as fuel and in some ways it is superior to coal in this respect. Many big ships now burn oil instead of coal. Because it burns brightly, it is used for illumination; countless homes are still illuminated with oil-burning lamps. Because it is very slippery, it is used for lubrication. Two metal surfaces rubbing together cause friction and heat; but if they are separated by a thin film of oil, the friction and heat are reduced. No machine would work for long if it were not properly lubricated. The oil used for this purpose must be of the correct thickness; if it is too thin it will not give sufficient lubrication, and if it is too thick it will not reach all parts that must be lubricated. (From Power and Progress by G. C. Thornley (Longman)) Notes Oils | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| I. animal | A. from | 1. mainly whales - fat called blubber  protect from cold 2. also livers of cod and halibut
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| B. use | 1. given to e.g. sick children etc. who need vitamins. 2. soap | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| II. vegetable | A. known from antiquity | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| B. use | 1. in cooking 2. oils of certain flowers perfumes 3. for soap
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| III. mineral | A. most common - mineral oil | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| B. from earth | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| C. use | 1. for tanks, aeroplanes and warships, motor-cars and diesel locomotives 2. to lubricate all kinds of machinery 3. owe the existence of the motorcar, possibility of flying | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| D. properties | 1. burns well fuel 2. burns brightly illumination 3. slippery lubrication
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Diagram
A diagram of the information shows how the main ideas are related and reflects the organisation of the information. You can use flow charts, tables, tree diagrams, diagrams, mind maps (Buzan, 1974) etc. You can also include circles, arrows, lines, boxes, etc.
1) Read the following text and study the example below:
Grammar
The way we are using the word grammar differs in another way from its most common meaning. In our sense, the grammar includes everything speakers know about their language - the sound system, called phonology, the system of meanings, called semantics, the rules of word formation, called morphology, and the rules of sentence formation, called syntax. It also of course includes the vocabulary of words - the dictionary or lexicon. Many people think of the grammar of a language as referring solely to the syntactic rules. This latter sense is what students usually mean when they talk about their class in "English grammar.".
(From An introduction to language by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman (Holt-Saunders))
| Notes | 
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2) Read the following text and study the notes below:
One Child's Meat
When Andrew Tallis was just a toddler sitting in a supermarket trolley, he asked a friend of his mother's who was pushing him round, what all that stuff in the freezer was. Thinking his mother would want him to be given an honest answer, the friend said it was chopped-up dead pigs and dead chicken and that's what people ate. Andrew, who is now eight years old, has been a strict vegetarians ever since.
"I tried to coax him out of it at first" says his mother, Mary Tallis, 28, a student at Manchester Polytechnic. "Then I believed it was something that would pass, but when he was three I bought a packet of fish fingers, because all children liked those, and he point-blank refused to eat any. Then he started to ask me what was in any packet or tinned food I bought. When he learned to read at five he checked himself.
"Now, I'm a vegetarian, too, because it was just too much bother preparing two meals, although my husband James still eats meat that he cooks for himself."
Andrew is not so unusual. Small children often turn a tortured face from plate to parent when they make the connection between meat and animals. Mealtimes are a notorious breeding ground for conflict, for most parents try their best to accommodate children whatever their latest food fad is - and today's parent is concerned with health, not power.
What families are increasingly having to cope with now is pressure from the new generation of highly articulate teenagers who are being made to think about the advantages and disadvantages of meat eating and meat production as butchers and vegetarians lobby for their support.
A Gallup survey conducted at the end of last year on behalf of the Realeat Company which makes vege burgers and vege bangers showed that one-third of this country's 4.3 million non-meat eaters are now children under 16. And a survey to be published next week by the Vegetarian Society indicates that because of pressure from students, 95 per cent of British universities, colleges and polytechnics are now providing vegetarian meals. In some student restaurants, more than one in five of the meals served are vegetarian.
The trend towards vegetarianism us being led by women, who are now twice as likely to be non-meat eating as men. But for non-vegetarian parents the arguments impressionable children bring home ignite a little time bomb that is ticking away in the kitchen. Even if parents have sympathy with the arguments, what they worry about is whether giving up protein-rich meat is safe for a body that still has a lot of growing to do.
According to Dr. Tom Sanders, lecturer in nutrition at King's College, London and an authority on the growth and development of vegetarian children, we need not worry if our offspring suddenly take it into their heads to give up meat. "One starts off life as a vegetarian, taking in only milk and cereal; so long as there are dairy products and a variety of other foods in the diet, vegetarian children can grow up just as healthy as omnivores."
Sanders, a meat-eater himself, says: "Problems come about when children go on to veganism and want to cut out milk and cheese altogether - then they have to avoid Vitamin B12 deficiency by taking supplements. Vegan children can still grow ok, although they are small in size and light in weight, but I'm not going to say that is harmful."
A collaborative study of the effects of the fibre contents of diet on bowel function and health in general by Professor John Dickerson, head of the division of nutrition and food science in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Surrey, and Dr. Jill Davies, a senior lecturer in the Home Economics and Consumer Studies Department at South Bank Polytechnic, showed that lifelong vegetarians are healthier than meat-eaten.
"We discovered that certain diseases, like appendicitis, irritable bowel syndrome, haemorrhoids, varicose veins and constipation occurred more often among omnivores, and that the age at which they occurred was much earlier than in vegetarians," Davies says.
"Compared with omnivores, vegetarians had made only 22 per cent of the visits to hospital out-patients and had spent a similar proportion of the time in hospital. Converted into economic terms, the lifelong vegetarians we studied cost the NHS �12,340 compared with the omnivores" �58,062."
Davies adds: "I am not a vegetarian, but what our study showed us that vegetarianism is very healthy and would be good for children so long as their diet is very carefully planned. People often speak defensively about vegetarianism and a lot of nonsense is talked about vitamin deficiency. Take iron - most of it comes from plant sources, and because vegetarians eat a lot of fruit their intake of vitamin C will increase their ability to absorb iron."
Dr. Michael Turner, the former director general of the British Nutrition Foundation and now a consultant nutritionist, worries that teenagers may not have enough nutritional knowledge to ensure that a new regime has adequate nutrients, "I think parents should insist that their children make the change gradually to give them time to find out what are the right things to eat so that the body can adjust." Janet Lambert, a nutritionist with the Meat and Livestock Commission, claims that "In terms of 100 calories consumed, you get a lot more nutrients from meat than other foods. Evidence of the number of children who are becoming vegetarian is a bit vague. You're not allowed to interview children so the Gallup survey has come from parents."
The Vegetarian Society is currently running a campaign called SCREAM, School Campaign for Reaction Against Meat, which the campaign co-ordinator, Graham Clarke, claims was launched as an antidote to the meat industry's Adopt a Butcher advertising. Part of the campaign is a powerful half-hour video, which shows the inside of an abattoir and a cow being shot in the head.
It is hardly surprising that after this short, sharp, shock treatment many youngsters announce their conversion. Typical of what tends to happen next is explained by Barbara Humber, headmistress of Glendower Prep School in South Kensington: "My daughter Nicki decided to become a vegetarian when she was 14, but my husband and I remain carnivores. It can be a bit of a bore making two separate meals."
The accusation that the Vegetarian Society is bent on indoctrinating children is dismissed as patronizing by 17-year-old Chris Davies, a pupil at Bromsgrove High School in Worcestershire, and a vegetarian. "I don't think people of my generation can be indoctrinated that easily," he says. "I think it is healthier to be a vegetarian. I used to drink milk and eat cheese and eggs until I read an article recently about the cruelty inherent in milk production. Now I've given all those up, too, but I'm still very healthy."
Healthy, but only because his mother, teacher Margot Davies, has taken a lot of time and trouble to find out about the right alternative foods for him. "We were quite worried at first when he announced it, not because of the inconvenience, but about whether he would be getting the right sort of protein." she says. "You have to be prepared to do quite a bit of forward planning - particularly when you're a full-time working mother.
"Vegetarian cheese is very expensive, and soya milk costs more than ordinary milk and we can't get it delivered. Chris is entitled to his views and I don't want mealtimes turned into a battleground. He hasn't tried to convert us, but when we go out for a meal now we choose a vegetarian restaurant."
The Times, 25th February, 1988.
Notes
The text shows arguments for and against vegetarianism. A table is therefore a useful way to make notes.
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In both ways, you can use headings, underlining, colours, and white space to make the relationships clear. There is no generally best layout - it depends on what you like and your purpose. Some ways of taking notes are more appropriate for some topics. A description of a process suits a flow chart and a classification is shown clearly using a tree diagram. It is important to show how the ideas are the connected and how the information is organised.
Make sure you write down where your notes have been taken from. It will save you time when you need to check your facts or write a bibliography. In lecture notes, make sure you write down the name of anyone quoted and where the quote has been taken from. You can then find it if you want to make more detailed use of the information.
Abbreviations and symbols
Notes are a summary and should therefore be much shorter than the original. Thus, abbreviations and symbols can be used whenever possible. The table below shows some conventional English symbols and abbreviations. You will need specific ones for your own subject.
| and | & |
| and others (people) | et. al. |
| and other things | etc. |
| answer | A |
| approximately |  , approx., c.
|
| at | @ |
| because | 
|
| before example | : |
| centimetre | cm |
| century | C |
| chapter | ch. |
| compare | cf. |
| correct | 
|
| decreases, falls | 
|
| degrees | � |
| department | dept. |
| divided by | � |
| east | E |
| equal to | = |
| equivalent to | 
|
| especially | esp. |
| for example | e.g. |
| government | govt. |
| greater than | > |
| grows, increases | 
|
| important | N.B. |
| in one year | p.a. |
| information | info. |
| kilogram | kg |
| less than | < |
| maximum | max. |
| minimum | min. |
| minus | - |
| much greater than | >> |
| much less than | << |
| multiplied by | � |
| north | N |
| not come from | 
|
| not equal | 
|
| not lead to | 
|
| not proportional to | 
|
| number | No. or # |
| page | p. |
| pages | pp. |
| percent | % |
| plus | + |
| possibly | poss. |
| probably | prob. |
| proportional to | 
|
| question | Q |
| results from | 
|
| results in, leads to | 
|
| same as above | " |
| similar to |
|
| that is to say, in other words | i.e. |
| therefore | 
|
| south | S |
| unlikely | ?? |
| uncertain, not sure | ? |
| very | v. |
| with reference to | re. |
| wrong | X |
| west | W |
| year | yr. |
Exercise 1
Read the following text and make notes:
HOW CHILDREN FAIL
Most children in school fail.
For a great many this failure is avowed and absolute. Close to forty per cent of those who begin high school drop out before they finish. For college the figure is one in three.
Many others fail in fact if not in name. They complete their schooling only because we have agreed to push them up through the grades and out of the schools, whether they know anything or not. There are many more such children than we think. If we 'raise our standards' much higher, as some would have us do, we will find out very soon just how many there are. Our classrooms will bulge with kids who can't pass the test to get into the next class.
But there is a more important sense in which almost all children fail: except for a handful, who may or may not be good students, they fail to develop more than a tiny part of the tremendous capacity for learning, understanding, and creating with which they were born and of which they made full use during the first two or three years of their lives.
Why do they fail?
They fail because they are afraid, bored, and confused.
They are afraid, above all else, of failing, of disappointing or displeasing the many anxious adults around them, whose limitless hopes and expectations for them hang over their heads like a cloud.
They are bored because the things they are given and told to do in school are so trivial, so dull, and make such limited and narrow demands on the wide spectrum of their intelligence, capabilities, and talents.
They are confused because most of the torrent of words that pours over them in school makes little or no sense. It often flatly contradicts other things they have been told, and hardly ever has any relation to what they really know - to the rough model of reality that they carry around in their minds.
How does this mass failure take place? What really goes on in the classroom? What are these children who fail doing? What goes on in their heads? Why don't they make use of more of their capacity?
This book is the rough and partial record of a search for answers to these questions. It began as a series of memos written in the evenings to my colleague and friend Bill Hull, whose fifth-grade class I observed and taught in during the day. Later these memos were sent to other interested teachers and parents. A small number of these memos make up this book. They have not been much rewritten, but they have been edited and rearranged under four major topics: Strategy; Fear and Failure; Real Learning; and How Schools Fail. Strategy deals with the ways in which children try to meet, or dodge, the demands that adults make on them in school. Fear and Failure deals with the interaction in children of fear and failure, and the effect of this on strategy and learning. Real Learning deals with the difference between what children appear to know or are expected to know, and what they really know. How Schools Fail analyses the ways in which schools foster bad strategies, raise children's fears, produce learning which is usually fragmentary, distorted, and short-lived, and generally fail to meet the real needs of children.
These four topics are clearly not exclusive. They tend to overlap and blend into each other. They are, at most, different ways of looking at and thinking about the thinking and behaviour of children.
It must be made clear that the book is not about unusually bad schools or backward children. The schools in which the experiences described here took place are private schools of the highest standards and reputation. With very few exceptions, the children whose work is described are well above the average in intelligence and are, to all outward appearances, successful, and on their way to 'good' secondary schools and colleges. Friends and colleagues, who understand what I am trying to say about the harmful effect of today's schooling on the character and intellect of children, and who have visited many more schools than I have, tell me that the schools I have not seen are not a bit better than those I have, and very often are worse.
How children fail by John Holt, Pitman, 1965
Exercise 2
Read the following text and make notes:
COFFEE AND ITS PROCESSING
The coffee plant, an evergreen shrub or small tree of African origin, begins to produce fruit 3 or 4 years after being planted. The fruit is hand-gathered when it is fully ripe and a reddish purple in colour. The ripened fruits of the coffee shrubs are processed where they are produced to separate the coffee seeds from their covering and from the pulp. Two different techniques are in use: a wet process and a dry process.
The wet process First the fresh fruit is pulped by a pulping machine. Some pulp still clings to the coffee, however, and this residue is removed by fermentation in tanks. The few remaining traces of pulp are then removed by washing. The coffee seeds are then dried to a moisture content of about 12 per cent either by exposure to the sun or by hot-air driers. If dried in the sun, they must be turned by hand several times a day for even drying.
The dry process In the dry process the fruits are immediately placed to dry either in the sun or in hot-air driers. Considerably more time and equipment is needed for drying than in the wet process. When the fruits have been dried to a water content of about 12 per cent the seeds are mechanically freed from their coverings.
