Стандарты последнего поколения для высшего образования имеют новый взгляд на основные требования к результатам образования в высшей школе. Эти требования продиктованы современным состоянием общества.

Современные выпускники вузов должны обладать определенными общекультурными и профессиональными компетенциями.

Исследовательская деятельность помогает студентам и магистрам приобрести профессиональные компетенции, а иностранный язык расширяет круг профессионального общения.

Данное учебное пособие разработано для студентов и магистров всех направлений подготовки Института радиоэлектроники и информационных технологий – РтФ, имеющих в учебных планах дисциплину «Иностранный язык для научных целей».

Учебное пособие содержит практические советы по выбору темы научного исследования, методы исследования и общие правила оформления отчетной документации. Задания к каждому разделу дают студентам и магистрам практические навыки исследовательской деятельности с использованием аутентичных источников. Глоссарий дает возможность разобраться в терминологии пособия.

Пособие составлено на основе публикаций британских и американских изданий последних лет.

Пособие состоит из 17 глав. Каждый раздел посвящен определенному этапу исследовательской деятельности: выбор темы, поиск и отбор материала, формирование структуры исследовательской работы, написание основных глав, редактирование, оформление.

В целом, пособие охватывает широкий спектр различных видов деятельности студентов: различные виды чтения, реферирование, письмо.

MAIN STEPS OF THE WRITING PROCESS

For any essay to achieve high marks it’s essential to go through five distinct stages:

1. Interpretation of the question

2. Research

3. Planning

4. Writing

5. Revision

If you omit any of these or just rush them, certain familiar problems will emerge in your writing: irrelevance, weak structure, insufficient evidence and examples to support your arguments, lack of fluency between paragraphs, inconsistent arguments, and many others.

It’s also as important to separate each stage, so that you leave, say, at least a day between each of them. Of course, it may not always be possible for you to do this. You may have a number of competing obligations that leave you only a few days to complete the essay. On these occasions the skills you’ll learn in this book to manage your time will help you cope more effectively. They will also help you organise your time so that with most pieces of work you can in fact find sufficient time between each stage. Not only does this allow you to return to your ideas fresh, so that you’re able to see which of them needs to be edited out, but you will also find that your ideas and arguments have developed in the meantime.

Ideas are organic. Hardly ever are they the complete and finished article the moment you grasp them, like products on a supermarket shelf. They grow and develop over time. So, for example, returning to your plan after a day or two, you will almost inevitably discover new ideas, new evidence and new ways of developing your arguments. You’re also likely to see a more sensible and logical way of ordering your ideas.

And the same goes for all the other stages. Each time you return to your work after leaving it to lie unattended for a while, you will find your subconscious has worked on the ideas, restructuring them, answering questions that you weren’t sure of, and critically evaluating the arguments you’ve read in your texts.

But, be reassured, this is not an endless, confusing process, in which your ideas are thrown up in the air each time you return to your work. Within a short time, after revising your plan a couple of times, you will realise that it’s ready and you can begin writing. The same is true of your interpretation of the question, your research and the revision of your work. You will know when enough is enough. It may take three or four essays before you feel confident about your judgement, and during these you will have to rely on your tutor’s judgement, but it will come.

1. These words are important for understanding the writing process. Match each word with the correct definition.

STAGE 1

Pre-Writing: Choosing and Narrowing a Topic, Analising Concepts

Before you begin writing, you decide what you are going to write about. Then you plan what you are going to write. The process is called pre-writing.

Selecting a topic is possibly the most difficult part of doing research. Is it too big? Is it too narrow? Will I be able to find enough on it? Start by choosing a topic that you like or are curious about. You're going to be working on it for quite a while, so try and find one that's interesting and that you can reasonably cover in the time and space available.

The Reference shelves behind our Reference Desks are filled with books that can help you focus your topic. These books are good places to start your research when you know little about a topic, when you need an overview of a subject, or when you want a quick summary of basic ideas. They are also useful for discovering the names of important people, and can familiarize you with the vocabulary of the field. Encyclopedia articles are often followed by carefully selected bibliographies or lists of references to other works, useful items to have as you begin looking for additional information.

Though you should work on something you are interested in, you need to keep it in mind who your readers are and what their interests might be. The topic should be interesting, significant, important and comprehensive to the readers. You need to consider what your readers already know about your topic, their academic levels, what their beliefs are, etc.

Your research paper needs to be competing and answer all the questions you started with. You need to understand what other questions your readers may have, whether you have discussed all questions or hypotheses you have raised at the beginning of the paper.

There are many research papers that are very ambitious. They try to explain a big topic and since there are limitations on the length of the paper, they cover a broad topic only superficially. That is, the paper does not thoroughly answer questions it raised, and the readers may be left unsatisfied.

On the other hand, a good paper handles a small topic that is interesting, important and significant for both the writer/researcher and reader and covers it thoroughly. Then the readers will be convinced and satisfied.

All papers, not only those for classes but also intended for publication in journals, have the limitations on their length. You keep your paper within these limitations.

Your topic has to be small enough for the length of the paper. It is very important to choose limited topic so you can cover every aspect in depth rather than large topic that you can only deal with shallowly. Your paper has to be complete, that is, you have to be able to discuss all important points and show your conclusion, otherwise your reader will not be satisfied with your argument.

Often, and for the best of motives, our problems in essay writing begin the very moment we are given the question. Anxious to get on with the work and not fall behind, we skip the interpretation stage and launch straight into our research. As a result, we read sources and take notes without a clear idea of what’s relevant, beyond some very general idea of the subject of the essay. Then finally, after hours of toil, tired and frustrated, and no clearer about what we’re doing, we’re left with a pile of irrelevant, unusable notes Yet, just an hour or two interpreting the question would not only have saved us this wasted time, but would have given us a clear idea of what the question is getting at and a better understanding of what the examiner is looking for in our work. And even more, it would have given us the opportunity to get our own ideas and insights involved at an early stage. Without this our work can seem routine and predictable: at best just the re-cycling of the ideas that dominate the subject.

So, what should you be looking for when you interpret a question? All essay questions tell you two things: the structure your essay should adopt for you to deal relevantly with all the issues it raises; and the range of abilities the examiner is expecting to see you use in answering the question. There are times in the research of every assay when you find yourself collecting material that is interesting and so closely argued that you find it difficult not to take notes from all of it, particularly when it’s relevant to the wider implications of the topic. But if it’s not relevant to the problems raised in this essay, ditch it! File it away for other essays, by all means, but don’t let it temp you in this essay. Otherwise it will lose focus and the reader will fall to understand what you’re doing and why.

With these warnings in mind it’s essential to pin down two things: how many parts there are to the question and what weight you will need to give to each part. With many questions these structural problems can be solved by analysing the key concepts used in the question.

Indeed, in most, if you fail to do this, the examiners will deduct marks: they will expect to see you show that you can analyse difficult abstract concepts and allow this to influence, if not determine, the structure of the essay.

For example, markers for the University of London are told to award the highest marks (70 – 100 %) to those students who “note subtlety, complexity and possible disagreements, [which they].. will discuss”, while only average marks (40 – 60 %) are to be awarded to the student who adopts a “More relaxed application” of the question, and who “follows [an] obvious line.. [and] uncritically accepts the terms of the question”.

Similarly, in the Department of Sociology at the University of Harvard students are told:

Papers will be graded on the basis of the completeness and clarity of your analysis and the persuasiveness of your recommendations. As always, we will be appreciative of well-organised and well-written papers.

The same emphasis can be found at the University of Oxford, where examiners look for a good analytical ability, to distinguish first class and upper second class scripts from the rest. In the marking criteria it’s only in these two grades that any mention is made of analytical ability, with those failing to display it more likely to end up with lower seconds and below. A first class script should show:

analytical and argumentative power, a good command of facts, evidence or arguments relevant to the questions, and an ability to organise the answer with clarity, insight and sensitivity.

An upper second class script also displays these qualities, but ‘less consistently’ or ‘to a lesser degree’ than a first class script.

To give you an idea of what this means in terms of actual questions, listed below is a selection of essay questions from different departments at different universities around the world. You will see that the answer to each of them hinges upon the same ‘clarity, insight and sensitivity’ that we can bring to the analysis of the key concepts in the question.

Some of them, as you can see, incorporate the concept in an assertion or opinion, which is not always obvious. Others present it in a statement of incontrovertible fact, which you must analyse before you can evaluate it to see whether it s consistent with the facts or just subjective opinion.

Alternatively the concept could be presented in the form of a generalization. Indeed, this is, in fact, exactly what concepts are: they are universal classifications that we develop from our observation of individual instances of something. Concepts like “love”, “honour”, “beauty” are universal classifications of the certain emotions, acts and desires that we experience or see other experience.

So it is important to identify the opinion, the statement or generalization and let the examiners know that you have done so. In the following questions key concepts are underlined.

• Do the narrators of Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations speak with the same kind of irony?

(The English Novel, University of Harvard).

• Are there any good reasons for supposing that historical explanation is, in principle, different from scientific explanation?

(History, University of Kent at Canterbury).

• Did the years 16034 witness a crisis in the history of English Protestantism?

(History, University of Kent at Canterbury).

• Consider Duncan Kennedy’s claim that people who favour casting the law in the form of rules are individualists while people who favour the use of standards are altruists. Do you agree that the debate between rules and standards reflects that sort of deep difference in general moral outlook?

(Law, University of Cornell).

• Hobbes insists that covenants extorted by force oblige. (Sovereignty by acquisition is a good example.) Is his argument consistent with his theory? What problems does his insistence pose for his theory? In your answer, be sure to address Hobbes’s account of obligation, in particular the obligation to obey the sovereign.

(Philosophy, University of Harvard).

• ‘Authority amounts to no more than the possession of power.’ Discuss.

(Philosophy, University of Maryland).

• Is there any important sense in which all men are equal? If so, what is it?

(Politics, University of Maryland).

• Is democracy always compatible with individual freedom? (Politics, University of York).

• Are concepts of anomie and subculture still of value in the explanation of criminality?

(Sociology, University of Oxford).

As you can see, no matter what the subject, the analysis of the important concepts is the main focus when we come to interpret questions like these. They may be couched subtly in everyday language, like ‘unacceptable inequalities’, ‘oblige’, or ‘efficient levels’, or they may stand out like beacons warning the unwary not to ignore them, like ‘Paretian Optimum’, and ‘anomie and subculture’. Historians, for example, are fond of using concepts like ‘revolution’ and ‘crisis’: seemingly inoffensive and untroubling words. But then, look at the British Industrial Revolution and you find yourself wondering, was this a revolution or just accelerated evolution? Indeed, what is a revolution?

Is it all a question of the speed of change? In which case, the Industrial Revolution was more an evolution than a revolution, spread as it was over seventy to a hundred years. Or is it more to do with the scale of change? If this is the case, then there’s little doubt that it was a revolution, what with the mechanisation of labour, factory production, the growth of cities and the development of mechanized transport.

Much the same could be argued for a concept like ‘crisis’. Again it appears to be inoffensive and untroubling; that is until you ask yourself, what do we really mean by the word? It comes from the Greek, Krisis, meaning a decisive moment or turning point. So are we really justified in arguing that the years 1634 were not only a time of serious challenge to Protestantism, but also a decisive turning point in its history? Whatever your answer, you now have a structure emerging: on the one hand you can argue that it was a time of serious challenge to Protestantism, but on the other you might question whether it really was a genuine turning point in its history.

The same analysis of concepts and arguments can be found in just about every subject. In politics there are concepts like freedom, ideology, equality, authority, power, political obligation, influence, legitimacy, democracy and many more. Do we really harbour not a single fear of ambiguity when we use such a large and important concept like freedom, or was Donovan Leitch right when he admitted in the sixties that, ‘Freedom is a word I rarely use without thinking’? What do we mean by legitimacy and how does it differ from legality? And when we use the word ‘democracy’ do we mean direct or indirect democracy, representative or responsible, totalitarian or liberal, third world or communist?

In literature what do we mean by concepts like tragedy, comedy, irony, and satire? Indeed, it’s not unusual to find universities devoting complete courses to unravelling the implications of these and others like them: concepts like class, political obligation, punishment, revolution, authority and so on. In the following course outline, the concepts of punishment and obligation, and the distinction between law and morality, are central concerns that run throughout the course.

Entitled ‘Moral Reasoning – Reasoning In and About the Law’, it is part of the programme at the University of Harvard: How is law related to morality? How is it distinct? Do we have an obligation to obey the law? What, if anything, justifies the imposition of legal punishment? These issues, and related issues dealing with the analysis and justification of legal practices, will be examined using the writings of philosophers, judges, and legal theorists.

Take just about any course at any university and you will see the same: that many of the challenges we face are questions about concepts. For example, the Philosophy Department of the University of Southampton describes its Philosophy of Science course in the following terms:

This course examines concepts of evidence, justification, probability and truth, in relation to scientific explanation, causality, laws of nature, theory and fact; the distinctions between science and pseudo-science, as well as between science and metaphor, are among the topics explored. Examples illustrating the philosophical argument will be drawn from the histories of the physical, biological and social sciences.

Syllabuses like these indicate the importance of key concepts both in the courses you’re studying, and in the essays you’re expected to write. By analysing them you not only give your essay a relevant structure, but, equally important, you qualify for the highest marks on offer. If, at this stage, you don’t acknowledge the significance of these concepts by analysing their implications, you will almost certainly fail to analyse them in your essay. This will indicate not only that you haven’t seen the point of the question, but, more seriously, that you haven’t yet developed that thoughtful, reflective ability to question some of the most important assumptions we make when we use language. It is as if you’re saying to the examiner that you can see no reason why these concepts should raise any particular problem and, therefore, they deserve no special treatment.

2. Choose one topic from each of three groups. Narrow each of the three down to a research topic. Then think of three-five titles of paragraphs in the research paper. Compare with your partner.

3. Underline the key concept in the following questions for research.

1. Discuss the management of health needs within a population group in the Primary Care setting.

(Nursing and Applied Clinical Studies, Canterbury Christ Church University).

2. What is bribery and can it be justified as an acceptable business practice?

(Business and Administration, University of Newcastle, Australia).

3. How do culture, race and ethnicity intersect in social work practice in multicultural society?

(Social Work, University of British Columbia, Canada).

4. “Geomorphology is a branch of geology rather than of geography”. Discuss.

(Geography, University of Oxford).

5. “Mill has made as naïve and artless a use of naturalistic fallacy as nobody could desire. “Good”, he tells us, “desirable”, and you can find out what is desirable by seeking to find out what is actually desired … The fact is that “desirable” does not mean “able to be desired” as “visible” means “able to be seen”. G. E. Moore. Discuss.

(Philosophy, University of Kent).

6. In the light of a number of recent high profile complaints about invasion of privacy, critically assess whether the press should continue to be self-regulating.

(Journalism, University of Newcastle, Australia).

7. What are the assumptions of the revealed preference approach to life valuation?

(Biology, Stanford University).

8. “Free Trade leads to a Paretian Optimum”. “Free Trade leads to unacceptable inequalities”. Discuss.

(Economics, University of Oxford).

Pre-Writing: Brainstorming, ‘Pattern Notes’, Mapping

Brainstorming is a way of gathering ideas about a topic. Think of a storm: thousand of drops of rain, all coming down together. Now, imagine thousands of ideas “raining” down onto your paper! When you brainstorm, write down every idea that comes to you. Don’t worry now about whether the ideas are good or silly, useful or not. You can decide that later. Right now, it is important to gather as many ideas as possible.

It is important to stake your claim as early as possible, indeed as soon as you get the question. This involves two things: first, as we’ve seen, thinking through your analysis of the concepts and implications of the question, and second, writing down your own ideas on the question. It’s now time to turn to the second of these: brainstorming your own ideas. This means that you empty your mind on the subject, without the aid of books. As quickly as possible you track the flow of your ideas as you note what you know about the subject and what you think might be relevant to the question.

Brainstorming is just a part of the process of analysis. After all, they both involve your own ideas, which you get down on paper as quickly as you can without the aid of books. But they are, in fact, quite different, and if you allow yourself to merge the two, skimping on one, you will almost certainly have problems. In analysis you’re unwrapping what’s already there. It may be buried deep, but by a process of introspection, through which you examine the different ways you use a concept such as authority or advertisement, you come to see more clearly the contours of the concept, its essential characteristics.

In contrast, with brainstorming you are going beyond the concept: this is synthesis, rather than analysis. You are pulling together ideas, arguments and evidence that you think may have a bearing on the question’s implications that you have already revealed through your analysis. So, whereas analysis is a convergent activity, brainstorming is divergent, synthesising material from different sources. If you like, one activity is centripetal, the other centrifugal. Confuse the two and you’ll do neither well.

If you overlook this distinction and merge the two activities, you’re likely to struggle with two problems. First, if you abandon analysis too soon and embark on brainstorming, your focus will shift away from the implications of the question and the concepts it contains. Consequently, you’re likely to find that you don’t have the guidelines to direct your brainstorming into profitable areas. You will find a lot less material and much of what you do unearth you will no doubt discover later that you cannot use, because it’s irrelevant. On the other hand, if you analyse without brainstorming you’ll fail to arm yourself with your ideas and what you know about the topic. As a result, almost certainly two things will happen:

1. The authors you read for your research will dictate to you without your own ideas to protect you, it will be difficult, at times impossible, for you to resist the pull of their ideas and the persuasiveness of their arguments. As a result you’ll find yourself accepting the case they develop and the judgements they make without evaluating them sufficiently, even copying large sections of the text into your own notes.

2. And, equally serious, you will find it difficult to avoid including a great mass of material that is quite irrelevant to your purposes. All of this material may have been relevant to the author’s purposes when he or she wrote the book, but their purposes are rarely identical with yours. Nevertheless, having spent days amassing this large quantity of notes, it’s most unlikely that you’re going to find the detachment somewhere to decide that most of these notes are irrelevant to your essay and you’ve got to ditch them. You’re more likely to convince yourself that they can ‘be made’ relevant, and you end up including them in a long, discursive, shapeless essay, in which the examiner frequently feels lost in a mass of irrelevant material.

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