Language and Linguistics

Teaching English in the Land of the Dragon A Radical Departure from Student-Centered Learning     When my Shifu, Chinese for ‘master’, asked me if I would be interested in conducting teacher training workshops in Keifang, a city in Central China’s Henan province and formal capital of the Song Dynasty, my answer was a resounding ‘yes’. I have been a lifelong student of Northern Shaolin Kung Fu, and this was a golden opportunity for me to teach the fundamentals of the English language to Chinese teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at a public school in Keifang. I equipped myself with professional books, teacher training videos, and a CD-ROM containing exercises in syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics, but I was completely oblivious of the surprise that awaited me in the Land of the Dragon. While I was cognizant of the role of rote memorization in Chinese classrooms, I did not expect it to be so pervasive in formal instru...

Writing Report Abstracts Purdue Online Writing Lab Summary: This handout discusses how to write good abstracts for reports. It covers informational and descriptive abstracts and gives pointers for success. Contributors: Dana Lynn Driscoll Types of abstracts There are two types of abstracts: informational and descriptive. Informational abstracts Communicate contents of reports Include purpose, methods, scope, results, conclusions, and recommendations Highlight essential points Are short—from a paragraph to a page or two, depending upon the length of the report (10% or less of the report) Allow readers to decide whether they want to read the report Descriptive abstracts Tell what the report contains Include purpose, methods, scope, but NOT results, conclusions, and recommendations Are always very short— usually under 100 words Introduce subject to readers, who must then read the report to learn study result...