Austin Woerner's Memory Palace
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EAP101 Fall 2019

Day 8

Thurs. Apr. 19

  • Speaker summaries: Mackey, student essays

  • Citation and references

  • Discussion and video: What is a good essay?

Video: “What is a good essay?”

(VPN required to view; or must be on DKU campus wireless network)

Homework

➤ Finish your essay

due at 4pm tomorrow

Finish your essay and submit it by 4pm tomorrow. Print it and put in the blue box in front of my office (CC 1062).

Make sure you do these things before you hand it in:

  • Add a citation for each time you use someone else’s words, ideas, or knowledge.

  • Add a reference list at the end of the essay, including every source that you cited in the essay.

  • Read your essay again (I recommend you read it out loud!). Make sure it all makes sense. Make sure it’s up to your own standards of what constitutes good writing. If it’s not, improve it.

    • In particular, I suggest you make sure that the first paragraph accurately summarizes what you say in the rest of your essay. (In other words, it should summarize your argument.) If it doesn’t reflect what you actually ended up writing, change it.

➤ Read Hessler and Gardner & Lambert

due next class

Print the excerpt from Peter Hessler’s book River Town and the introduction to Robert Gardner & Wallace Lambert’s book Attitudes and Motivation in Second-Language Learning. (Sorry, I didn’t have time to print these for you!) Read them and be ready to discuss them next class. Bring your printed copies of the articles to class.

As you read, consider these questions:

  • What motivates Peter Hessler to learn Chinese? How are his sources of motivation similar to, and different from, Angel Lin’s motivations to learn English?

  • What do Gardner & Lambert mean by “integrative motivation” and “instrumental motivation”? Do you think these are meaningful ideas? Can they be used to explain Hessler and Lin’s motivations to learn Chinese and English, respectively?

Featured
Peter Hessler, "River Town"
Peter Hessler, "River Town"

Rivertown is Peter Hessler's memoir of living and teaching in rural Sichuan province as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1990s. It is one of the most widely read accounts in the English-speaking world of living in China as a foreigner.

Featured
Robert Gardner and Wallace Lambert, "Attitudes and Motivation in Second-Language-Learning”
Robert Gardner and Wallace Lambert, "Attitudes and Motivation in Second-Language-Learning”

This book, published in 1972, introduced the influential ideas of “integrative” and “instrumental” motivation to learn a language.

➤ Speaker tasks (2-minute oral summaries)

  • Chunheng: Summarize what the DKU professors say in the “What is a good essay?” video above. (What seem to be the key points or common themes? Don’t just list every single thing say said.)

  • Harry: Summarize the process of writing Essay 1. What steps did we go through? Start with the point at which we read all our classmates’ summaries and interview transcripts (the “sources” for this essay).

  • Ellen: Summarize the Gardner and Lambert reading. Focus on pages 1-4 — what comes afterward is just a list of studies.

  • Johnathan: Summarize the excerpt from River Town. Focus on Peter Hessler’s motivation: What things happened that motivated him, and demotivated him, in the process of learning Chinese?

Remember: Talk to us, don’t read to us. (Don’t read off of a transcript in your mind either—talk as you would naturally speak.) Make it clear when you’re quoting someone’s exact words. Look around the room, and connect with your listeners.

Austin WoernerSession 1