An Analytical Summary from EAP 507 Courses
An Analytical Summary of Phillips (2014):
In this article, Phillips (2014) examined the strategies Chozin, a multilingual graduate writer, used to overcome the difficulty in academic writing at graduate school. As we can see from the article, Russell and Foster (2002) stated that Chozin’s lack of writing instruction before entering the US academy is more likely to be the rule than the exception among multilingual writers, making their task of succeeding in the academy-and doing so at the graduate level-even more difficult. (p.74) So that it moved Phillips (2014) to conduct this study. After proceeding this case study, the author aims to find out how do international multilingual graduate writers overcome the difficulty in writing for their own fields. As a result of her project, Phillips (2014) conclude that the eventual success of Chozin is the result of his own resourcefulness. That is to say resourcefulness of students can lead to their success as graduate writers in academic field. These findings could deepen our understanding of the strategies multilingual graduate writers use to improve their academic writing. That is to say, as graduate multilingual writers, they should take a set of strategies with the help of social support in order to acquire resourcefulness and then prevent being excluded by other group members in class.
Focused Analysis of Resourcefulness:
One key concept in this article was resourcefulness, which is the critical factor leads to Chozin’s success. In this article, the author didn’t explicitly give definition of any key concept, so did this one. But there are still several unique key terms of this concept helping the readers to understand such as “the resourcefulness that multilingual writers may bring to their writing development” and “the resources that they chose for themselves”. We can come to a definition according to these key terms that resourcefulness refers to the strategies or resources that multilingual graduate writers adopt to improve their writing skills and avoid being excluded. As we can see from Chozin’s case, because of his lack of background knowledge or resource, he was conscious of exclusion. However, after making much efforts on it, Chozin finally owned much resourcefulness. So that he would not be excluded from his group any more.
In addition, Phillips (2014) contrast Chozin’s optimistic response with Leki’s informant Yang’s negative response. That is a more effective way to express the importance of resourcefulness.
Focused Analysis of Language Pattern:
In the first set of key terms, “the strategies that multilingual writers employed when they encountered writing assignments” provides the most information. “That multilingual writers employed” and “when they encountered writing assignments” are modifiers of this key term. The shorter key terms of the first set are “their strategic moves” and “them” which have less modifiers and provide less information.
The second set of key terms contains five key terms. And the first one which has the key word of “study” has the most information: “my two-year, IRB-approved study on how incoming international multilingual graduate students learn to write for their fields and the resources they use to support their writing development.” As we can see from above, “my two-year”, “IRB approved”, “how incoming international multilingual graduate students learn to write for their fields and resources they use to support their writing development” are all modifiers of “study”. Moreover, there are four more key terms refer to the same meaning with the first one: “qualitative approaches like the case study”, “these approaches”, “the case study” and “it”. In addition, we can also find out several other examples of this kind of language pattern from this article. For example, on page 77, when Philips (2014) talked about NES students she used a longest phrase to firstly describe it that is “NES students in his classes who were also studying Javanese”. And in the following words, the author uses “them” and “these students” to replace the tedious description.
After analyzing those two sets of key terms, we can easily come to a conclusion about how to deal with the situation that the key concept we want to describe repeats again and again in our article. The main point is we should only particularly write in detail about the whole concept at the very beginning of the paragraph. That is to say we can use the most modifiers to give more information about the concept we want to describe at first. And then, every time when we would like to refer to this concept we should use much less modifiers and avoid using repeating expressions. At last, a single word of pronouns usually is a good choice for making our description more precise. This language pattern prevent the authors from repeat and repeat again when they want to mention the same concept in a short passage. It makes academic articles more concise and precise in order to efficiently convey messages to the readers.
Connection across the CPP texts:
We have learned two articles until now. Comparing these two articles, there are two common points we can find out after reading. On the one hand, the most obvious one is that both of them take international students as the study object. On the other hand, both of these two articles choose “social support” as one of their key concepts. Although both authors mentioned “social support” in their article, they totally use different way and talk about different aspect of this concept.
In De Araujo (2011), social support is just an abstract concept. The author uses several key terms to explain it such as support network, emotional support and so on. It gives the readers a general idea of this concept. However, when Phillips (2014) talks about social support, she is talking the academic aspect of it such as social supports from teachers, professional editors and NES students contribute to students’ resourcefulness. After reading these two article’s study of social support, as international students, we should really pay attention to it, not just social support from our family or friends, but more from academic related person such as professors and NES students. Even just acquiring specialized knowledge in our discipline by ourselves helps a lot for academic lives.