Crtical Reading and Writing for Postgraduates.pdf

FINAL TASK SCIENTIFIC, 2024

The passage delves into the far-reaching effects of globalization and marketization on higher education, honing in on the heightened international competition fueled by global university rankings. This competition has spawned policies like the 'publish or no degree' directive, intensifying the pressure on graduate students, particularly in master's programs, to produce research outcomes for their degrees. In response, higher education institutions in Indonesia are implementing strategies such as writing groups, grounded in the concepts of "communities of practice" and "legitimate peripheral participation," to support master's students, especially those in English education who grapple with publishing in English as a second language. Through a qualitative descriptive case study employing Yin's approach, the research explores the experiences of fifteen Indonesian master's students engaging in scholarly writing within a community of practice. The findings reveal a holistic research model encompassing group sessions, individual writing components, and seminars, resulting in a perceived transformation in participants' development as scholarly writers within Wenger's Community of Practice theory. The study highlights the effectiveness of the writing group model in reshaping participants' identities and perceptions of scholarly writing, demystifying the publication process, and providing tangible benefits such as heightened awareness and efficiency. The discussion underscores the broader significance of writing for publication, impacting not only students but also faculty members and researchers, contributing valuable insights to the literature on writing groups and offering a nuanced understanding of their impact on master's students' scholarly writing experiences within a specific educational context.

The literature is a multiplicity of voices. With each voice agendas emerge. Each text is itself a framing of voices and their agendas, shaped to present a debate slanted towards a conclusion. Within that debate can often be detected the friends, the strangers, the guests, the hosts and the enemies that are entertained by the writer. So, there is a problem. It is that whilst acts of framing bring and impose order, those very processes of ordering and categorisation select and edit so that some things are chosen to be foregrounded, others to be background and yet others to be excluded. In the writing task, agenda setting and framing pin possibilities and options down to what is regarded as 'realistic', 'plausible', 'do-able', 'true'. However, there has to be a moment when the literature appears like the vertigo experienced over a sheer and endless drop. Engagement with the literature is the essential step in widening out, indeed seeing the limitless possibilities for open debate with a public extending over centuries, even millennia. Making a voice map of the public space of debate is a way of trying to locate what is at stake in adopting a given way of framing the world and its agendas. Getting a sense of the historical development of major debates, discovering the tributaries, the dead-ends, the forgotten, the overlooked is all a part of the gradual sense of knowing where you are, where you stand, in relation to others. In particular, who claims to know what and why? What kinds of arguments are being made, and why? What are the assumptions at the back of explanations and theories? What happens if the assumptions are challenged or changed? From a review of the literature it is possible to sketch and fill out the details of the problematic, that is, the knot of problems, issues, concerns, interests that each of the voices in the literature have historically addressed. In determining how they address their chosen problems, the outlines of their methodologies can be formulated. Then it is a question of what is at stake expressed by each voice in the choices they make in exploring, examining and forming their conclusions using their chosen methodologies in relation to the problems they address. Which voices have they included in their own reviews of the debates, which have they excluded and why? By asking such questions as these a literature review then can be designed specifically to increase the power of a given argument, set of findings, recommendations and conclusions that have implications for action.

Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos, 2022

The present book is divided into eight different chapters preceded by a list of tables and a preface and then followed by appendices, notes, references and the index. The first two chapters are dedicated to the introduction and the literature review. In the former, the author clearly states the aim of the book which is to explore how critical thinking is communicated through written text. The author also defines the terminology he is going to use throughout the book and specifically addresses what he understands by critical thinking, "the […] process of the communication" (11) of this evaluative judgement, text and discourse, which are the main terms he refers to in the next sections. However, not only does he define these terms in Chapter 1, but he also reminds them to the readers in the following chapters for the sake of cohesion and outmost relevance. Chapter 2 presents previous studies on critical thinking and illustrates how the author's book contributes to this area by departing from them but taking a whole different analytical method. Then, five chapters are devoted to the case-studies, which are five different writing genres: the university essay, PhD discussion chapters, research article literature reviews, corporate disclosure communication and journalistic commentary. The last chapter serves the purpose of summarising all the findings and re-analysing them in terms of how they differ from genre to genre.

1998

Critical reflection is seen as an integral part of research, particularly action research. This may take the form of group discussion among collaborative researchers who also act as critical friends. However, group processes are complex and critical thinking of the kind expected in PhD theses, is not guaranteed. Another way is through personal journal writing, but because of its personal nature, the methodology of critical reflective writing remains a mystery to many potential users. This paper represents a case study of the many forms of personal writing used by the author to develop and change her thinking over the course of her PhD.

Writing Instructor, 2004