Postgraduate Course Pages > Methods of Academic Presentation in English

July 14: The course concluded with good presentations by Kim Eun Ae on the development and present situation of Korean NGOs and Suzuki Kaori on the concept of Japanese uniqueness.

Students who have not submitted all evaluation sheets should do so by e-mail this week. I’ll post evaluation summaries to you by the end of the week.

July 7: Three good presentations, by Miyako Hirata on the “public sphere” in education, Yoshihide Tabuchi on the ASEAN Regional Forum as a “low legalized” regime, and Yayoi Nishimura on temporary employment in Japan.

June 30: The class was fortunate to have an excellent first presentation, which will set the standard for those to follow July 7 and 14. Tsugumi Matsukuma’s presentation on the structure of governance in eighteenth-century Edo was well informed, well presented, and provocative. The exchanges that followed in the question and answer period were of the sort that an instructor hopes for.

June 23: Explanation of the peer-evaluation procedures for the upcoming presentations, and the worksheet that will be used in the evaluations. Correction of bibliographies. Presentations will begin next week, June 30, and continue, two per class meeting, until our last class on July 14.

June 16: Discussion of tactics for improving an academic presentation, including the distribution of a carefully prepared bibliography of sources and attention to attribution of sources in the presentation itself. Homework: a typed bibliography of sources for the upcoming presentations. These will be the subject of a workshop in the June 23 class.

June 9: Student workshop continued. Further discussion of the need to have a verb (an authorial stance) in a research project.

June 2: Student workshop in limiting topics and data sets to something manageable for a 20-minute academic presentation. Announcement that the dates of the presentations will be June 30 and July 7. July 14 is also a possibility, but my preference is to keep that last class meeting open for a final summary of the work of the course.

May 26: Rushed workshop in thesis topics (too many topics to get through properly in one class period, though I hope comments about the topics we looked at closely are of benefit in the finessing of other topics).

Homework: revise the proposal sentences if necessary; identify a part of the data set the thesis topic predicts as the data set for your presentation in this class; be prepared to discuss with specificity the data set you’ll draw upon in the presentation at the end of the semester in this course. In the June 2 class we’ll work with these limited data sets to arrive at specific topic proposals for the class presentations. Also, the date of presentations will be decided.

May 19: Discussion of the two most significant failings of student research projects in English at Chuo University, both of which have to do with a lack of clarity about the author’s position in a text, spoken or written. The first, the subject of last week’s lecture, is a failure to keep clear who is speaking, or, put another way, who is representing what to whom. The second, called in this lecture “the lack of a verb in the project,” is a topic that remains at the level of a noun phrase, that does not, in other words, position the author in relation to the topic and earlier texts about it. Accordingly, each student constructed a one-sentence description of his or her Master’s thesis, each of which began with either “I want to explain that . . .” or “I want to discover whether . . . .” A sentence that begins with either of these phrases, of course, requires a verb, or, put another way, a stance toward whatever noun or noun phrase follows the “that” or the “whether.”

It was noted further that these “I want to explain that . . .” or “I want to discover whether . . .” sentences when completed will necessarily predict a data set, in other words a clear set of primary and secondary materials that will have to be collected and analyzed in order to explain or to discover whatever it is (and, no less important, another, larger, data set that will not have to be collected and analyzed). The subject of the May 26 class will be the data sets the one-sentence descriptions predict.

Homework: continue exploring the online databases noted here, and keep a record both of useful key terms and interesting discoveries.

May 12: Deconstruction of student summaries in an attempt to find an author, or a position, or any sign either of acceptance or assignment of responsibility for anything said in or about Salman Rushdie’s text. Note was taken, at length, of the fact that the failure to mention Rushdie in a summary of Rushdie is problematic. Note was taken also, by EunAe and Yoshihide, of the un-naturalness of such a summary exercise, and the instructor admitted to a kind of entrapment in giving it, but contended nonetheless that responses indicated a serious misunderstanding about the construction of texts about texts. The discussion included brief and probably inadequate comment about principles of quotation and documentation.

Homework: spend at least an hour playing with key terms from your thesis project in the online databases noted in the first paragraph here. Keep a record of anything interesting.

May 7 note in advance of the May 12 class meeting: Regarding part 2 of the homework noted below under April 28, no need to send your e-mail address for me to send you the text. The homework has been posted in the worksheets section. You may find it here.

May 5: National holiday. No class.

April 28: Discussion of the meaning and purpose of a university, the meaning and purpose of research, and the importance of both primary and secondary sources.

Homework: 1) at the beginning of the next class (May 12) present a list (typed, standard manuscript form) of primary sources for your thesis topic. 2) send me your e-mail address by May 5 so that I may send to you by e-mail a short text that you should summarize in about 100 words (typed, standard manuscript form) before the May 12 meeting of the class.

April 21: First informal presentations of the course: an introduction and brief discussion of each student’s academic background and interests. Announcement, in the interest of keeping the course coherent for all involved, that except in unusual circumstances a grade of A will be reserved for those students who have not missed more than one class.

April 14: Introduction to the course; introduction to the idea that the methods and practices of scholarship in English are not identical to those in Japanese. Homework: a 100-200-word written summary of a source of importance to your master’s rsearch.