Week 3

A1.

This week I learned new things in the Academic Writing class – interview and questionnaire. We have to write our essay with interview and questionnaire in this term. I think it is because our teacher, Bill, want to give us new challenge. In last term, we just needed some reference (books, journals, or articles) and it is much easier for me since I have an experience to write my master thesis which has eighty pages and forty-three references several years ago. However, I have no idea to write an article with interview or questionnaire because I never seem that in engineering journals. I learned interview is qualitative and questionnaire is quantitative. When we interview, we should focus on the quality – fewer interviewees and fewer questions but more detail and more specific questions to different people. In contrast, questionnaire needs more people to fill out it and the questions must be clear. If the questions are ambiguous, the survey will be failure since we can not get the data that we need. For both interview and questionnaire, we should avoid biased items and terms. That kinds of questions also can not have a useful result for us.

A2.

In this week, I learned about the election of the United States President is different with Taiwan President. In Taiwan, we just focus on the number of votes because the winner is the candidate who has the most votes. In the United States, the candidate of President who has the most votes is not always the winner. Every state has different stste's electoral votes which depends on how many residents it has. When a candidate get the most votes from a stste, this candidate can get all the stste's electoral votes of th state. I think it is strange that a candidate (if there are only two candidates) who get 49% and 1% has the same result – lose all the stste's electoral votes. For this reason, if a political party believe that they can not get the most votes in a state, they will give up any activity in that state. Furthermore, they only have few activity in certain states if they know they can get most votes in those states. Although I think it is bizarre, it is a ecnomical way for each political pary because they can only spend money in a few states that they have possible to win.

A3.

Step 1. Skim the article and make sure what it talk about:

I can have an outline of the article before creating a GO.

Step 2. Find out all the signal words and decide the pattern:

Different types of signal words can generate different pattern.

Step 3. Make sure the relation of all items and write them into the graph:

I can write every item at prepared location and need not alter their location in the next step.

Step 4. put symbols such as arrow and equation:

This step can let my GO more clear since the symbols are visual.

A4.
What the questions are in GOs research?

1. Are GOs only supported by specific empirical studies?

2. What is the best type of GOs?

3. Lack research which focus on L2 learners.

4. Most objects of studies only have short-term training.

What are the merits of GO instructions suggested by researchers?

The merit is that students who emply GOs can improve their comprehension and memory of texts.