#12 - Articles and Abstracts

ARTICLES CAE (CPE)  

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Some exercises to solve...

Abstracts:

Academic Articles are part of the genres that teachers can write if they want to do research, if they want to study from "authentic material". We are going to analyse them, so get ready for an interesting description of ARTICLES. Not only do FORMAL (academic) ARTICLES share these features, but also they are headed by ABSTRACTS. So, let's delve into this "new genre". An abstract is an independent text that comprises the most important concepts of the paper, the purpose of the research, the state of the art, what is missing, and the results of the investigation.

When writing an abstract avoid:

• Long background information,
• parahrased sentences, too many adverbs or adjectives,
• Acronyms or abbreviations,
• quotes or references from other sources, e.g. "studies have indicate that..."figures, statistics, tables, etc.

There are four types of abstracts: Critical, descriptive, informative and highlight abstract.

Each sentence in an abstract fulfils a specific purpose. These are called "moves":
the overall purpose of the study and the research problem(s) investigated,
the basic design of the study,
major findings found as a result
a brief summary of the conclusions


Types of abstracts

Critical: a critical abstract provides, in addition to describing main findings and information, a judgment or comment about the study’s validity, reliability, or completeness. The researcher evaluates the paper and often compares it with other works on the same subject. Critical abstracts are generally 400-500 words in length due to the additional interpretive commentary. These types of abstracts are used infrequently.

Descriptive: a descriptive abstract indicates the type of information found in the work. It makes no judgments about the work, nor does it provide results or conclusions of the research. It does incorporate key words found in the text and may include the purpose, methods, and scope of the research. Essentially, the descriptive abstract only describes the work being summarized. Some researchers consider it an outline of the work, rather than a summary. Descriptive abstracts are usually very short, 100 words or less.

Informative: The majority of abstracts are informative. While they still do not critique or evaluate a work, they do more than describe it. A good informative abstract acts as a surrogate for the work itself. That is, the researcher presents and explains all the main arguments and the important results and evidence in the paper. An informative abstract includes the information that can be found in a descriptive abstract [purpose, methods, scope] but it also includes the results and conclusions of the research and the recommendations of the author. The length varies according to discipline, but an informative abstract is usually no more than 300 words in length.

Highlight Abstract: It is specifically written to attract the reader’s attention to the study. No pretense is made of there being either a balanced or complete picture of the paper and, in fact, incomplete and leading remarks may be used to spark the reader’s interest. In that a highlight abstract cannot stand independent of its associated article, it is not a true abstract and, therefore, rarely used in academic writing.

Source: The University of Melbourne. Retrieved from the website. Available at: https://services.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/471274/Writing_an_Abstract_Update_051112.pdf Last visited: Oct. 21st, 2020

Source: University of Southern California. Retrieved from the website. Available at: https://libguides.usc.edu/writingguide/abstract Last visited: Oct.21st. 2020.

Group work:  Costa Laura, Flocco Leticia, Mannella Marcela

The scientific world depicts their achievements in articles, papers, essays and within them, abstracts. It is our duty, as future teachers, to provide our students with quality material to carry out the Didactic Transposition efficiently. We need to compile and shape the academic material that is going to be used in our professional work. Although, many teachers try to provide their students with good texts, we have witnessed as trainee teachers, many classes where there was absolutely no text scaffolding the lesson. Luckily, it is part of our learning process to acquire and distinguish material in order to plan our lessons based in suitable texts.  

Leticia Flocco