Author: Sanchez C Ana

I am a teacher educator. I enjoy teaching TESOL and related areas. I like working with teachers.

Feedback and Final Grades

Sanchez C Ana

Hello everybody,

Here are some general comments about your papers and the final grades for the course. 

First, I must say I am disappointed on most of the papers I read because the most striking and prevailing feature was laziness: it was evident all you did was hitting CTRL + C and CTRL + V from internet sources, many of them unreliable. Some of you even failed to modify the excerpt so the whole document had the same appearance. Consequently, your documents looked like a piece of patchwork, which is not academic or professional. I would say it is disrespectful to hand in a paper that looks like that, and it is also a reflection of you as a person, as a student and as a professional.

It was also evident that some of you paid for the paper to be done and the people who did it had no idea about APA style. The margins, page numbers headings, indention, flushing, and title page were wrong. If you had taken some time to check the APA tutorial I provided in class, maybe your papers would have been more accurate. Here is the link again, in case you want to see why your papers were not right.

 http://flash1r.apa.org/apastyle/basics/index.htm

Some quick ideas: 

Please work on the use of passive voice

Avoid abbreviations and informal language

Avoid 20 headings in a 12-page research paper

Work on grammar, spelling and use of English in general. It is one thing to be able to communicate with others informally; it is a whole different thing to create a cohesive, coherent and academically strong paper. You need to work on your writing. 

As I told you in class, your paper needs a certain organization. I saw definition after definition, but you did not bother to explain how those ideas were connected or how they contributed to attaining the initial goal of your research paper. 

Before you graduate, please take some time to make sure you know the name of the teacher, the name of the department you belong to, and the name of the school the department belongs to. You should know by now how to write the name of the Department.

Here are your grades. They are not as low as they should be because, as I said before, the problem is laziness, not lack of knowledge. You have the potential to write interesting papers, but you need to stop slacking and take things more seriously. 

Writing Research Papers Final Grades Semester B 2015

Feedback on your Presentations

Sanchez C Ana

Hello all, 

Here is the feedback for the final presentation you did today in class and your grades so far. I hope you use these comments for the real presentation you will do in a year. 😉 

I will attach my specific comments to your papers. You will be able to see them when I give them back. 

You focused too much on reciting concepts, less on convincing people of the importance of your topic or, most importantly, telling your audience about the PURPOSE of your paper.

Do not distort the ideas of the authors you cite, do not use their ideas out of context. 

Don’t rely so much on memory, you are the expert on the topic, so explain the ideas you have grasped.

Power Point slides are free. Create as many as you need and make sure the text is big enough to be seen by your audience.

Be careful with accuracy in pronunciation and grammar. At this point you should not make any mistakes, especially if you are doing an academic presentation. The title of your papers should have no mistakes. Correct those titles ASAP.

Do not say become in, researches, according to X, he says that…, be careful with subject- verb agreement, about of, determinate, importance, good morning TO everybody, it makes students TO learn.  

Correct the proununciation of foreign, language, thousand, paper, focus, learning, instruction, direction, encourage, acquisition, develop, identify, PURPOSE, authentic.

Make sure the purpose of the paper is developed or tackled by means of the subsequent sections of your paper, and that the title, the purpose and the conclusions are clearly connected.

The title of your paper should not have more than 11 words.

If you have slides, why reading from papers? At this point you should not use papers at all. It does not look professional.

You provided justification for the topic you chose, but you did not provide reasons why your paper should be written and read. 

Writing Research Paper Partial Grades December 2015

If a grade is wrong or if you submitted a task and the grade is not registered you have until today at noon to send me again the tasks. 

That’s all, thank you and have a Merry Christmas 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prospectus Due Tomorrow

Sanchez C Ana

Hello all,

As you know you need to hand in your prospectus tomorrow. It is just a prospectus, so it will contain just an introduction and the paper itself. The prospectus also needs to include the references you have collected so far and everything needs to be formatted following APA Style.

Tomorrow we will be working on peer assessment. It means that you need to exchange your papers and read your classmates’ paper, evaluate it and give a grade based on a checklist I will provide. 

See you tomorrow and good luck!

Ana C.

Here is a link where you can find a checklist to self-assess your paper so far. 

http://www.collierschools.com/research/5%20%20Finalize%20Research%20Paper/5-1a%20RESEARCH%20PAPER%20CHECKLIST.pdf