Genre analysis of texts has always been significant. The current study aimed at investigating intertextuality considering cultural variations and differences in students' discourse communities. ...Social studies, philosophy, and biology were chosen as the representatives of social sciences, humanities and sciences. Tehran University, one of the most prominent and oldest universities in Iran, was chosen as the source of the theses. From each discipline, eight theses were chosen randomly and the organization of the introductions was analyzed according to Samraj's revised model of Swales (2008). Next, a comparative and contrastive analysis was performed between the results obtained from this study and the ones obtained from Samraj's (2008). The results indicated that social studies and biology introductions were quite similar and followed the traditional format of thesis writing whereas philosophy introductions were different as they had a more topic-based structure.
There are two well-known and often-quoted facts about Sub-Saharan Africa. One is that, in spite of significant progress made in recent years, Africa remains the least developed region in the world ...and is unlikely to achieve all the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. The other is that Africa fares very poorly in terms of research; it produces only about 1% of the world’s research publications, and the bulk of these emanate from just two countries – South Africa and Nigeria. There is a clear link between these two phenomena, and while there is general acknowledgement that the research output from Africa must be dramatically increased in order to overcome the development challenges, achieving that objective appears to be elusive. Promoting research that directly impacts on development remains a challenge for Africa.
This study reported how ten Taiwanese Master’s students perceived their experiences of receiving feedback given by their peers and writing consultants to revise a shortened version of their thesis ...proposals. Collected over the course of one semester, data included students’ writing portfolios and interviews with them. Analysis of the data revealed three major themes: (1) The participants felt quite positive about providing and receiving peer feedback, although they seemed cautious toward language-related peer comments; (2) they generally had positive experience with the writing consultants, although the perceived usefulness of the consultants’ feedback varied with individual consultants and (3) the two types of comments served different functions for students, and questions arose from the peer editing process could serve as prompts for writing consultation sessions. Possible future research directions as well as pedagogical implication are outlined to conclude the paper.
No sociological study of the exercise of American power has matched the provocative influence of
The Power Elite
(1956), which was published when radical criticism of foreign policy was extremely ...rare. C. Wright Mills claimed that an interlocking directorate had assumed unprecedented authority since Pearl Harbor. He argued that, in making decisions of war and peace, key officials in the executive branch, leaders of the largest private corporations, and the dominant figures in the military constituted a cohesive group that could ignore popular will and the public interest. Mills was undoubtedly right that the emergence of the Pentagon in particular marked a discontinuity in the history of federal authority and of the balance of power in Washington. But no empirical evidence supports the thesis of
The Power Elite
, not only in the historical instances that he himself mentions, but in subsequent conflicts like the military intervention in Vietnam. Mills nevertheless merits praise for having challenged comforting assumptions about the benign and democratic direction of American statecraft.
Research concerning the Local Education Committee has been scanty. Since the promulgation of Educational Fundamental Act in 1999, there have been only 9 master's theses included in the National ...Digital Library of Thesis and Dissertation in Taiwan and only 3 journal articles in NCL Taiwan Periodical Literature website. In 2000, a conference was held by the Graduate Institute of Education of National Chung Cheng University to discuss the organization and operation of the Local Education Committee. Why was there so little interest in studying the Local Education Committee, which was established based on the Educational Fundamental Act, known as the education constitution in the field of education research in the past 23 years? Where should the Local Education Committee go? This is the core question of the present study. This study uses the document analysis method to clarify the legislative intent of the Local Education Committee from the relevant files of the Legislative Yuan, and then describes the status quo
This study investigates citation practices among native and nonnative English writers. Five Master EFL theses written by Arab EFL learners were compared to 5 Master EFL theses written by native ...speakers of English. Adopting Swales' (1990) categorization, the employed citation patterns were analyzed and categorized into two types: integral and non-integral. The study revealed that the nonnative English writers used more integral-verb and non-integral citations than the native English writers. However, it was found that the native English writers used the noun-phrase citation type more frequently than did the nonnative writers. The findings conclude that Arab EFL learners lack the writing and research skills needed to use all citations types effectively.
Citation is an essential and common feature of academic writing and is used by academicwriters to achieve different purposes. This study investigated disciplinary variationsin terms of citation ...practices in the genre of Master’s theses with a specific focus ondiscussions. To this end, sixty discussions produced by MA/MS students of two keyuniversities in Iran from both hard and soft disciplines were analyzed in terms of citationtypes and functions. The medium of writing whether English or Persian was also takeninto account for its probable influence on the employed citation practices. The resultsrevealed that integral citations were used more frequently by writers in soft knowledgefields, allowing them to make evaluations, whereas non-integral citations were mostlyused by hard discipline writers. As for rhetorical functions, Support and Comparison werethe dominant functions in these text types. However, there existed subtle differences bothin the degree and the way these writers draw intertextual links to their disciplines. Thefindings can be of considerable help to EAP instructors and thesis supervisors to raise theirstudents’ awareness and refine their understanding of citation strategies in thesis writing.
This study aims to make a descriptive analysis and evaluation of postgraduate theses on blockchain technology conducted in Turkey between 2017 and 2021. Qualitative research methods were used in this ...research, and theses were analysed with the descriptive content analysis technique. It has been observed that 111 studies have been carried out on blockchain technology and the first thesis was prepared in 2017. 107 graduate studies registered in the Higher Education Council of Turkey’s National Thesis Centre database with access permissions were examined. Theses are coded according to publication date, university, institute, department, graduate/ doctorate level, advisors' academic title, thesis language, research method, research sub-areas, city and the region where the thesis was written. Studies on blockchain have been carried out in many universities, and Marmara University is the university that contributes the most to the subject with its graduate studies. Most studies were conducted at the Applied Sciences and Institute for Social Sciences. The distribution of the universities where the thesis studies are conducted according to the geographical regions is examined, the Marmara region leads with 70 studies, and no thesis studies have been carried out in the Eastern Anatolia region. Most of the thesis administrators are faculty members with the title of "Assist. Prof. Dr.". Most of the studies were written in Turkish, and primarily Qualitative Research methods were used. Theses were carried out in 10 institutes and 36 different departments, and most of the theses were produced from the studies in the Business department. The findings of this study will guide other researchers who want to work in the field of blockchain.
The consequences of organisational commitment (OC) are of great importance to organisations. Considering the effect of teacher commitment on student success and the increasing teacher turnover rates ...in the world, studies focusing on the organisational commitment of teachers gained more importance. However there is still a significant gap about the demographic and other factors that affect teachers' organisational commitment. This meta-analysis examines the relation between gender and organisational commitment of teachers. The relation was investigated as overall and in sub-dimensions of organisational commitment: affective, continuance and normative organisational commitment. 33 studies that use the Allen Meyer Organisational Commitment scale and which were carried out between 2000-2014 were used in the study. The sample included 11,690 teachers (female 6,232, male 5,458). Although the mean effect sizes for overall, affective, continuance and normative OC show that the effect of gender on the organisational commitment of teachers is in favour of females, the results highlight that gender is not a significant variable in determining teachers' level of organisational commitment. Author abstract
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