Declining Grammar and Other Essays on the English Vocabulary - Annotated Bibliography

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In this Article, Mary R. Lea & Brian V. Street, explores the various issues concerned with academic writing in higher education.

The authors used information gained from a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. This project provided information regarding the conflicting presumptions of academic students and staff especially concerning the written assignments of undergraduate students.

The author research focuses on the contrasting perspectives of students and academic staff, debating what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘poor’ student writing. This article explores the elements that are valuable for understanding student writing evident in present-day higher education. It suggests that the complicated and contrasting nature of academic writing practices is due to academic literacy frameworks.

In particular, these concepts will be useful for my essay for it explores the opinion that standards of student literacy is deteriorating in higher education. This is a significant argument that I wish to include in my essay. Although this article is useful for analysis of the conflicting expectations of students and academic staff, its main limitation is that the study cannot represent a sample from which the whole of English higher education can be generalise.

ANNOTATION 4

Klímová, B. F. (2012). ‘Changes in the notion of academic writing.’ Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 47(1), 311-315. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.06.656

In this paper, Blanka Frydrychova Klimova argues that in academic writing, formal written language is no longer literate or as rigid as it previously was and hence discusses some changes as well as providing examples. The author discusses traditional as well as new approaches towards academic writing in sections.

The main ideas expressed in this paper concerns the complexity of the academic language. It explores the recent research in regard to challenging the rigid nature of language in academic language. The author argues that a typical academic piece no longer requires to possess traditional academic sections but also illustrations and passages with technical data.

Because the information provided in this paper is quite recent (2012) it provides are more modern insight to the evolving academic language notion. The paper successfully describes that academic writing is developing and not as explicit as encoded in textbooks. The main limitation of the paper is that there seems to be lacking in evidence of the information Klimova proposes. This paper will form the basis of my essay as my essay is an opinion piece.