Keep an "eye" on the text: The Use of Self-mention in the Academic Writing of Experts

One of the most controversial inquiries in academic writing is whether it is admissible to use first person pronouns in a scientific paper or not. Many professors discourage their students from using them, rather favoring a more passive tone, and thus causing novices to avoid inserting themselves into their texts in an expert-like manner. Abundant research, however, has recently attested that negotiation of identity is plausible in academic prose, and there is no need for a paper to be void of an authorial identity. Because in the course of the English Studies Degree we have received opposing prompts in the use of I, the aim of this dissertation is to throw some light upon this vexed issue. To this end, I compiled a corpus of 16 Research Articles (RAs) that comprises two sub-corpora, one featuring Linguistics RAs and the other one Literature RAs, and each, in turn, consists of articles written by American and British authors. I then searched for real occurrences of I, me, my, mine, we, us, our and ours, and studied their frequency, rhetorical functions and distribution along each paper. The results obtained certainly show that academic writing is no longer the faceless prose that it used to be, for I is highly used in both disciplines and varieties of English. Concerning functions, the most typically used roles were the use of I to take credit for the writer’s research process, and also those involving plural forms. With respect to the spatial disposition, all sections welcomed first person pronouns, but the Method and the Results/Discussion sections seem to stimulate their appearance. On the basis of these findings, I suggest that an L2 writing pedagogy that is mindful not only of the language proficiency, but also of the students’ own identity may have a beneficial effect on the composition of their texts.

The effect of schooling on student self-concept /|nRonald S. Cowley. -- 260 St. Catharines [Ont. : s. n.],

The following research paper was a study into change in student academic and general self-concept with increase in grade level and age# The majority of literature found by this researcher dealt with self-concept and its relationship to achievement and interactions with others, Review, then, was in these two areas-particularily within the academic setting, but outside of it as well. It wrs hypothesized that there would be a decrease in both academic and general student self-concept with increase in grade level and age. Self-Appraisal inventories, measuring general and academic selfconcept, and Inferential Self-Reports, measuring only academic selfconcept, were the instruments used* Subjects were students, Trade 1 to 13, and ranging in age from 5 to 21„ Although al] Self-Appraisal inventories and all Self-1?eports were very similar, they differed according to three Grade levels: Primary (Grades 1 to 3)> Intermediate (Grades L to 8), and Secondary (Grades 9 to 13) • Students in the Primary division received only their respective Self-Appraisal inventory, while others v/ere administered both inventories designed for their grade level. Scores on the inventories were computed to percents and then mean percents were arrived at for epch grade, each of the three grade levels, each age, and each of three age intervals. In all of these instances Spearman1 s rank order coefficients (!lpff) were calculated and significance, at the *05 level, was determined by referring to a table of critical values for one-tailed tests* Similarily fftff scores were computed, but only for individual grades and ages, and significance was determined at the *0b level* In only one instance, the General Dimension for individual grades, was significance of overall decrease found* Consequently the hypotheses put forth did not gain support* The fltff scores, however, revealed some isolated significant changes for the Academic Dimension, which were generally decreases in mean percents from the last grade of one level to the first grade of the next* For age mean percents, significant changes generally took place at early (5 or 6) and late (20 or 21) ages* A number of reasons for the results were presented and were generally based upon the studentfs encounters, or lack of encounters, with achievement or success* No definite conclusions, relevant to the hypotheses stated^ could be made, although a number of isolated ones were drawn on the basis of significant fltff scores* As well, mention was made of the possible trends or tendencies that were revealed by the results, but that could not, or were not, proven significant by "t's11 or "p's"* Teaching methods stressing improvement in academic, as well as socially related, situations, were recommended and a model teaching approach was presented in Appendix B#

Parochialism or self-consciousness? Internationality in medical history journals 1997-2006

Research councils, universities and funding agencies are increasingly asking for tools to measure the quality of research in the humanities. One of their preferred methods is a ranking of journals according to their supposed level of internationality. Our quantitative survey of seventeen major journals of medical history reveals the futility of such an approach. Most journals have a strong national character with a dominance of native language, authors and topics. The most common case is a paper written by a local author in his own language on a national subject regarding the nineteenth or twentieth century. American and British journals are taken notice of internationally but they only rarely mention articles from other history of medicine journals. Continental European journals show a more international review of literature, but are in their turn not noticed globally. Increasing specialisation and fragmentation has changed the role of general medical history journals. They run the risk of losing their function as international platforms of discourse on general and theoretical issues and major trends in historiography, to international collections of papers. Journal editors should therefore force their authors to write a more international report, and authors should be encouraged to submit papers of international interest and from a more general, transnational and methodological point of view.

Sexual self-awareness and body Image

broadly describes the internal representations of the body structure and the physical appearance of the individual in regards him/herself and others. Sexual self-awareness (ACS) can be understood as the evaluation that each of us makes of his/her feelings and actions related to his/her sexuality and sexual behaviour, describing what each of us thinks about sex and what we feel about behaviours. Objective: Identify dimensions of sexual self-awareness and body image in sexual satisfaction of the young. Methods Correlational descriptive study, a convenience sample of 84 students of a health school (29.8 % male, 20.2 % female), with ages between 19 and 34 years. As data collection instrument a poll through questionnaire, incorporating a Body Image Satisfaction and a Multidimensional Sexual Self-awareness scale, was used. Results The majority of the sample subjects indicate having a partner (59.5 %), perceive themselves as having the ideal weight (75.0 %), the ideal height (65.5 %) and a normal appearance (76.2 %). Globally a high and statistically significant ACS was observed (t-Student = 12.520; GL = 83; p-value < 0.001) and significant statistical differences exist between having/not having a partner and the ACS (Student t = 2,965; GL = 82; p-value = 0.004) showing that those who mention having a partner have a higher average ACS (average = 3.812; SD = 0.412) compared to those without (average = 3.496; SD = 0.563). No statistically significant correlations were observed between ACS and Body Image.

Toward Self-Organising Service Communities

This paper discusses a framework in which catalog service communities are built, linked for interaction, and constantly monitored and adapted over time. A catalog service community (represented as a peer node in a peer-to-peer network) in our system can be viewed as domain specific data integration mediators representing the domain knowledge and the registry information. The query routing among communities is performed to identify a set of data sources that are relevant to answering a given query. The system monitors the interactions between the communities to discover patterns that may lead to restructuring of the network (e.g., irrelevant peers removed, new relationships created, etc.).