MLA vs APA

MLA and APA are two styles used (I suppose most in the US) for referencing, both for in-text citations and for the Works Cited List, i.e. the bibliography.

I haven't found many differences between the two; the APA requires the date of publication for all in-text citations, while the MLA doesn't. I found the APA website much clearer than the other one. For example because there was a division between the different cases of in-text citation: summary, paraphrase, direct quotation of short or long passages. Both styles require to provide the number of pages if you are not citing a whole work or the main idea of an author, but a specific passage of a work.

As for the bilbliographic referencing, the two styles slightly differ in punctuation, capital letters and other minor elements. However, in both the essential information is: name of the author, publication year, title of the article, title of the journal, volume number, pages.
It is interesting and useful to see how both websites dedicate a careful analysis of the different kind of sources that you may have to cite in an essay, including all sorts of online sources.

As for my BA thesis, I followed the instructions of my professor. I always had to provide the author's surname, the date of publication and the page:

Little (2006:167) identifies three reasons why...

In this perspective, when writing down his/her reflections (...) and reviews it in the freedom of not having to act on it in real time (Raya 2006: 131)

As Kohonen (2000:9) points out, “direct quotation."

the bibliographic reference was a mix of the two styles:

Little, D. (2006). “the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Content, purpose, origin, reception and impact”. Language Teaching 39, 167-190

I can conclude by saying that even though I find referencing annoying, it is a convention matter linked to IPR respect. The best thing to avoid freaking out when writing our eferencing is to choose since the beginning of our research a certain style to follow, and to bear in mind what its rules are.

Well, see you on Wednesday!

Francesca

Step 2: Make your writing readable

I chose an article about subtitling because last year I attended an interesting workshop during the French course. This article deals with the language learning possibilities linked to subtitling and captioning.

I am going to analyse its structure to see if the article is 'readable', that is, well structured, logical, cohesive, clear, precise, concise and coherent.

The essay does have an hourglass structure: as we immediately understand from the introduction, after an overview of the benefits and limitations of Audiovisual Material, the author moves to more detailed studies dealing with the relationship between second-language acquisition and captions. Finally, the essay broadens again to a more general perspective that is also a sort of conclusion.

There is a logical flow of ideas both in the macro-structure and inside the different parts of the body. When making a claim, there is always supporting detail conveying reliability and evidence.
For example:
"In addition to comprehension, captions can help with word recognition and
vocabulary building. [claim] Neuman and Koskinen conducted a nine-week experiment with 129 seventh and eighth grade ESL students..." (data)
Arguments are linked through metalinguistic signaling devices such as however, indeed, in addition, in short, thus etc.

The article is cohesive as it follows a reasoning and makes the effort of bringing the reader through this reasoning, so that he doesn't get lost. This is made possible thanks to references to previous ideas : "In spite of the beneficial aspects described above, captioning may not be suitable for..."
As for the logic, the metalinguistic segnaling devices are fundamental for a text to be cohesive. They can be found both inside and between sentences:
"All over the world access to vast amounts of culturally-rich, enjoyable material is
bound to increase with the expansion of satellite television and the Internet, as well
as the development of multimedia and DVDs. However, immersion in a flow of foreign
utterances, especially if they are far above the students’ listening comprehension
level, may do little to improve the viewers’ language skills."

The pattern 'claim-data' makes the text clear, without generalizations that usually make the reader cofused, especially if, as in this case, the text is an exposition of many different ideas.
Each paragraph introduces an idea and then develops it with supporting and/or opposing arguments.
The lexicon is precise, as it is supposed to be in academic (and then scientific) articles. The three main terms (subtitling, captioning and multimedia) are repeated when necessary and no synomyms are used.

The audience is composed of academic researchers dealing with pedagogical issues, especially with language acquisition. I can understand it from the lexicon, which is quite technical; from the references to specific authors and studies. Moreover, the author gives at the end some advice for further developments of her reasearch, addressing to the academic research community:
"It is hoped that current interest in multimedia will lead to the development of language curricula and self-learning programs integrating captions and subtitles while encouraging in-depth pedagogical research on their most effective use."

The article I chose is a good example of academic writing. I think however that those criteria should be applied to all kind of writing, even to blog posts. If we want our blogs to be readable, then we have to be concise, coherent and logic, otherwise our audience will get bored and above all confused. I personally will try to be more reader-oriented: I know that my audience are my peers, and that they know what we are talking about, what the subject is and what the tasks are. But I know that reading a post which is too long or that goes beyong the main theme can be annoying, so that we stop reading it even if there might have been something really interesting in it.
I'll do my best to make my posts as readable as possible :-)

Francesca.

Intellectual Property Rights: how to respect them.

The issue of IPR and blogs is quite controversial to me. For example, it's common use taking pictures from the web and posting them on a personal blog, on Facebook, anywhere. In such a case, I think those who really think about copyright and plagiarism are very few, especially in Italy, where this problem is not regarded as relevant. I have to admit that I'm not really aware of the problem either. At least I wasn't until this experience with blogs and wikis. On the one hand I think that if someone puts somethig on the web it's because they want to share it. So why prohibiting other people from using it? On the other hand, I started viewing the problem from another perspective as I read this:
"We bloggers generally pride ourselves on uniqueness and creativity. We get a rush when we see others linking to our posts and reading our feeds, since it usually means that they find value in what we have to say. Unfortunately, not everyone who reads your blog does so for legitimate reasons. Some unscrupulous individuals in the blogosphere are only out to scrape your content for their own websites, ripping off your material and claiming it as their own." (DailyBlogTips. Retrieved from http://www.dailyblogtips.com/blog-plagiarism-qa/ on April 19, 2009)
The new perspective I was talking about is MY perspective, that of the blogger who creates something. As the passage above states, I would be very proud of seeing my blog appreciated and used for some purposes, but in a legitimate way. This means that there should be the aknowledgement that I am the author and so a clear reference to my blog.
I think then that respecting the so called Intellectual Property Rights guarantees the 'fair play' in the blogoshpere. As I whish to be a fair user I need to know the rules to avoid plagiarism. I know that referencing is fundamental to give aknowledgment to the original source. This is the case for quotations, paraphases and summaries of written texts.
Things get a little more complicated with pictures and videos. Indeed, I still have a doubt: if these contents are covered by copyright, is it totally forbidden using them or can I use them if I provide a clear reference of the source? The question is rather trikcy. However, I am discovering helpful tools. For example last semester I got to know Creative Commons. Now when I need some pictures to put on the web I always look, usually in flickr :-), for pictures covered by cc licence.
I think the general rule to avoid plagiarism is trying to make most by ourselves, to be creative, to use the blog as place where we can express ourselves, our ideas and our reflections. What we find in the web is of course fundamental because we are interacting with the other web users. As fair users we have to be respectful towards each other.

Can I trust you or not?

We began this week's lesson with a reflection on a comment written by a teacher on a blog. The question is: is this comment authoritative? who is this person? is she an expert in her field? Moreover, is this blog a reliable source of information? For some this is not the case, for example for Andrew Keen. He argues in fact that Web 2.0 is not a source of reliable knowledge because from his perpective knowledge is only produced by authoritative people. I think this idea is not totally wrong because we need to know who says what, and sometimes we don't in the Internet. But this doesn't mean that what is not written on paper and in strictly academic or formal contexts cannot be considered authoritative. We need criteria to evaluate. If we apply these criteria to the material we find in the web, we will have at our disposal an almost infinite online library for our researches.
While looking for articles on Personal Learning Environmemts I found a very interesting one entitled "Learning networks and Connective Kowledge". In the abstract the author (-itative?) states that his idea of e-learning is based on the theory of Connectivism. I think this is somehow the opposite view of Keen: connectivism, which asserts that knowledge -and therefore the learning of knowledge - is distributive, that is, not located in any given place (and therefore not 'transferred' or 'transacted' per se) but rather consists of the network of connections formed from experience and interactions with a knowing community. (Stephen Downes,
Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge. October 16, 2006)
This idea of knowledge is realized in the Internet, especially in blogs and wikies. As for all sources it's up to the reader selecting reliable and authoritative information.

Francesca

Delicious Bookmarking

Another technological tool to make our life easier. I think delicious is good because it helps to organize what we find in the web and, what is more, it is a good way to SHARE what we think might be interesting for other people too. Indeed, rather than starting exploring the vastness of the web, it is sometimes easier considering what other people have found when making our same reaserch. We can find very interesting websites that we wouldn't probably have found by ourselves.
There's also the possibility of creating a network with the people we know or that have our same interests. The members of my network bookmarked some useful websites:
Sarah saved the bookmark of a web-based journal on English for specific purposes, where you can find a lot of authoritative articles about the English language used in specific fields.
Chiara bookmarked a website about job interviews, which is very useful for me in this moment because I have to prepare a job interview for my English course. Here I can find a lot of tips.
Elisa also suggested me a very good website about English for academic purposes. It is a guide for students in higher education, as it my case. It is well done because there are examples and also practical exercises.

Francesca

RSS and feeds...the discovery of a new world.

I don't know if you already knew RSS and feeds aggegators, but for me it was a sort of 'revelation'! It is a very useful tool I think, because it allows you to keep track of blogs or websites you're interested in. You save a lot of time, and it is extremely efficient, because you get only the updates. I, for example, created a playlist with 3 italian newpaper websites, so that I can receive the news as titles, or, if I prefer to, as titles with a short explanation. I think onlines newspapers are a good way to get informed, but you don't always have the time to go into the websites, looking for the real news, as there's usually a lot of advertisement, dossiers, gossip and so on. Actually, if you're interested in gossip you can subscribe to the "gossip" RSS feed of that website ;-).
I have to say that there are a lot of useful resources to use the web in a more effective way. Unfortunately, I don't know most of them, and I think that in general they are not really exploited. We are all Internet users, but probably not very conscious ones!

Francesca

Language learning target

Unfortunately I couldn't attend our first thursday lesson, but I thought by myself about my language targets for this semester, which, by the way, is also supposed to be my last semester!
I think I need to be more accurate in structuring clauses and in the use of punctuation. So grammar is always there until the end!!! When I hear someone saying that English grammar is easy, you know, I always smile by myself :-) The difficult thing is that I'm always influenced by Italian clause structures...probably because I am surrounded by Italian. I think, then, that the blogosphere could be very usesful to plunge into English.
I often have the impression that my lexicon is quite limited. Or, better said, the words and the expressions that I know, that is, that I can recognize and understand when listening and reading, are at this stage quite a lot. The problem is, that I actually use very few of them in my oral and written productions. Another target is then trying to enrich and vary my use of language.
As I already pointed out in our initial presentations to the course, as a more general target I want to improve my oral skills: I need to be more fluent. For this purpose, our thursday lectures are particularly useful, as we have the opportunity to speak. We all learnt in our first year "Linguistica" exam that spoken language has priority over written language. It's a pitty that our university course didn't take into account this priority. It's up to us now looking for occasions to practice!


Francesca