Academic Presentations I, 2005-06

January 5: Finally I have the last three password-protected presentation evaluations up, Jeans, AIDS, Little Red Riding Hood, with apologies about taking so long to get them here.

November 30: The password-protected evaluation for the “Education Matters” presentation is here.

November 24: Here is the evaluation worksheet students need for each of the presentations.

November 22: The evaluation for the first presentation has been posted. Last Friday I forgot to provide a user name and password, which are required for access to the evaluations area. Temporarily, the user name is D1, and the password is the five-digit number of the room in which the class meets. I’ll change these to something more secure next week, and on Friday shall provide the class with the new user name and password. For now, use user name: D1; password: our room number. The evaluation is here.

October 21: Student are reminded that the next meeting of the class will be November 11.

Dates for the final presentations have been set. They are as follows:

November 18: Taiwan group;

November 25: Education group;

December 2: Jeans group;

December 9: AIDS group;

December 16: Little Red Riding Hood group.

September 23: Welcome back.

Homework: prepare for formal presentations as outlined in class, to begin next week, September 30.

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July 15: Last class meeting of the term. Re-worked working bibliographies collected; demonstration of the principles of managing direct quotations in English, including the use of ellipses and brackets (this to help with the note-taking exercise assigned earlier). Students are reminded that the June 24 homework is due in my mailbox in the Faculty Lounge no later than 5:00 Friday afternoon July 22.

Homework: nothing formal for the summer holiday, although of course I hope that each student will in some way remain engaged with his or her presentation topic.

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July 8: Class cancelled. Material promised for today will be covered in the July 15 class meeting.

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July 1: Discussion and further explanation of the long homework assignment of June 24; brief discussion of the management of direct quotations by the use of ellipses and brackets (more on this, and exercises, next week); bibliographies assigned June 10 returned with errors noted and where necessary explained.

Homework: 1) continue with the June 24 homework; 2) re-do the June 10 bibliography so that it is perfect; 3) in preparation for quotation exercises next week, read Hacker, pp. 85-86, sections 21f-g.

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June 24: Discussion and correction of bibliographical citations written on the blackboard, and collection of the bibliographies assigned June 3 (which will be returned with comments July 1).

Homework: 1) From among the books noted on your bibliography, choose one that seems of particular importance to your project and try to find it. The obvious starting point is CHOIS, since, in theory anyway, any book listed there should be available to students at the Chuo University Library. If Chuo does not hold the book you want, you have two choices: a) choose another book, or b) begin a search for access to the book that you want but that the Chuo University Library does not have.

Getting access to a book not held at Chuo can be a complicated and even expensive process. First, start by bringing a full bibliographical citation to the Reference Desk at the Chuo University Library. If you are lucky, the reference librarian will be able to find a copy of the book that can be sent to Chuo for a limited time from another library. Another possibility is the NACSIS Webcat, which lists the reference libraries in Japan that hold any particular item. The hope in this case is that you will find the book in a library that will share books with Chuo (there aren’t many, sadly), or at which you might somehow be able to gain access, or at which you might have a friend who could borrow the book for you. Finally, if none of this works and you still want access to the book, speak with me about the possibility of locating a copy for sale. The possibilities here range from an in-print Japanese-language book, which may be ordered from any bookstore or which will be available from Amazon.co.jp, to in-print foreign-language books, which are usually also available in a timely and relatively inexpensive way via Amazon.co.jp, to an out-of-print foreign-language book, which will be more difficult and more expensive to find. Two marvelous sources for out-of-print English-language titles are abebooks.com and AddALL.com, both of which simultaneously search more than 10,000 book sellers and many millions of titles. If the book is not available at either abebooks or AddALL, you are probably out of luck until you can get to a reference library abroad that holds the title you want.

2) The second part of the homework, after you have a copy of one of the books from your bibliography, is to keep an electronic note page with direct quotations that seem pertinent to your work. I said in the June 24 class that if the book from which you are working is in Japanese you would have to translate all the quotes, but I have changed my mind about this. In either English (for an English book) or Japanese (for a Japanese book) simply type in the quotes that seem most pertinent to you. If in Japanese you may later have to translate some of the quotes into English (for your English-language presentation), but you need not worry about this for this homework assignment.

1) On this notes page, in proper manuscript form, you should begin at the top of page 1 with a full and accurate bibliographical citation for the book you are reading. Failure to to this risks having to find the book again to cite it later as you are making final preparations for your presentation or paper. If you are working from, say, fifteen sources (or five hundred), you can see the problem: you do not want to spend the last days of preparation for a research project, when you should be refining final arguments, finding all the same books and articles again so that you can document your work properly. 2) You must be very careful to be completely accurate in your transcription of the quotations, since in the final preparations for your presentation you will almost certainly be working from this notes page and not from the book itself. 3) You must always include, following the quotation, the page number or numbers from which the quote comes. If a quote runs across two pages you should indicate in your notes where the page break comes, by inserting in square brackets a note, like this “[end of p. 47].” See, for example, the final paragraph in my worksheet on Salman Rushdie’s “Assassination of Indira Gandhi,” in which the material I quote begins on page 41 of Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands and continues on to page 42.

We’ll discuss this assignment, including the number of words I would like, in the July 1 class meeting. On that day I shall also provide instruction on the management of quoted material, including ways to omit unneeded material or to add needed material to a direct quote, by means of ellipses ( . . . ) and square brackets ( [ ] ).

The homework itself, i.e., the note pages with pertinent quotes from your book, will be due in my mailbox in the Faculty Lounge by 5:00 p.m. Friday July 22.

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June 17: No class meeting. The homework is to continue the preparation of the bibliography assigned below.

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June 10: Bibliography exercises and discussion of the major parts of a bibliographical citation, and a synopsized version of a lecture that might be called “The Consumption of Knowledge,” about the importance of specifying clearly and accurately who has made a particular point or points that you are incorporating into your own presentation or your own text. Further notes about this may be found here.

In the absence of the required text for the course, Diana Hacker’s Pocket Style Manual, 4th ed. (because the Chuo University Co-op has not managed to get copies yet), students were provided photocopies of pp. 156-82, on APA style.

Homework (individual): 1) Using CHOIS, the NACSIS Webcat, and any other sources you like, find fifteen sources, at least ten of them books, that seem to you likely to be helpful in preparing your part of the presentation topic for this course. Please note that I am not asking you to find the sources themselves (i.e., to get them and to hold them in your hands), but rather to find reference to them in CHOIS, NACSIS, or some other source. 2) Prepare a perfect bibliography that lists these sources.

Notes: This will require the translation of bibliographic information from the styles used in CHOIS and NACSIS and perhaps other sources into APA or some other standard style (see below).

The material from Hacker should help here if you are content to use APA style, which is a commonly-used style in the Social Sciences. The important pages in the material photocopied from Hacker are 170-76. These provide model citations for the major types of both print and electronic publications. I know that it is tedious to follow these models when you do not have experience in preparing bibliographies, but it is nonetheless important, for reasons discussed in class and others, to be able carefully and accurately to follow a bibliographic style and to become comfortable with its conventions.

If for any reason you do not want to use APA style, if, for example, you have another style guide that you have used before and with which you are already comfortable, that is fine with me. Use any style you like, but do please remain consistent within the conventions of whatever style you choose.

If you are conscientious in the preparation of this bibliography you are likely to find some things that you are not sure how to list, either because the models in Hacker do not exactly fit a specific case or because a particular source contains information that confuses you in some way. Please keep a record of these confusions or difficulties so that you may ask in class how to handle whatever the problem is.

Please note that the bibliographies are due, in proper manuscript form, at the beginning of class June 24, and that we shall not meet next week, June 17.

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June 3: One-sentence presentation proposal and primary source presentations completed; introduction to the concept of bibliography and to citation styles.

Homework: Answer as best you can the questions of the bibliography exercise provided in class. We’ll go through these in class on June 10, and we’ll look also at the bibliography sections of Diana Hacker’s Pocket Style Manual, 4th ed. (Bedford, 2003), in preparation for the preparation of a preliminary bibliography in each of the presentation groups.

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May 27: First of all, recorded grades for “active participation” in today’s class (see Evaluation procedures in the official course description): for students who asked a question or made a comment in response to the informal presentations, A, for students who did not, E.

Attempted workshop in developing one-sentence proposals, primary sources, and key terms in English and Japanese. We’ll begin the June 3 class meeting with the presentation group we did not get to today because of the apparent lack of interest of most of the class in anything that was happening.

Homework (individual, each student in each group): Try one key term or combination of terms in English and one term or combination of terms in Japanese in the title field of the Chuo Online Information System, CHOIS, and the NACSIS Webcat. Each student in a particular group should try different key terms than other group members. In proper manuscript form, as a group, prepare a page that lists the key terms each member of the group tried and the number of items each term or terms returned in each database (for example, AIDS: CHOIS, 194; NACSIS Webcat, 2,763). I shall collect this page from each group, along with the one-sentence proposal and primary source list that was prepared for today’s class, on June 3.

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May 20: Workshop in the development of one-sentence panel topic proposals, followed by discussion of the distinction between primary and secondary sources and of the the importance of the former. Quick preliminary discussion of the primary sources that come to mind for each of the preliminary one-sentence proposals.

Homework (panel, not individual): Submit, in proper manuscript form, a one-sentence presentation proposal of the sort we worked on in class (i.e., “We want to explain that . . . ,” “We want to discover whether . . .”), which is followed by a list of all possible primary sources that you can think of. This should be as specific as possible. In other words, if you can think of a particular person or particular people whose name(s) you know, please provide these. In some cases, of course, the primary sources at this stage will be categories of people rather than specific people identified by name. I shall collect these manuscripts, one from each group, at the beginning of the May 27 class meeting.

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May 13: Student workshop and discussion of the selection of research topics for the term.

Homework: By Thursday afternoon May 19 at 5:00 send me e-mail, subject header “AcPres,” with the names of the members of the group. Only one member of each group need send this mail.

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May 6: We finished the first informal presentations. Many thanks for the good cheer put into those. Following this, brief discussion of the nature of the “academic” in the phrase “academic presentation,” which has to do with a stance toward a topic (an attitude, a procedure) and not with the topic itself. No topic in and of itself is either academic or not academic. What makes a spoken presentation or a written text “academic” is the way the speaker or the writer has approached and addressed the topic. You may think of this course as an introduction to that way of approaching and that manner of addressing a subject, any subject, in which you are interested.

Homework: Write a one-sentence proposal for a project you might enjoy working on this year. Your sentence must begin with either “I want to explain that . . .” or “I want to discover whether . . .”. This should be presented next week in proper manuscript form, as outlined at the end of the class.

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April 22: Enjoyable beginning to the first (informal) presentations, self introductions. We’ll continue these and perhaps finish them in our next class meeting, May 6.

Homework: Enjoy every day until Golden Week, and then enjoy Golden Week.

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April 15: Introduction to the course, much of which is covered in the course description. Distinction drawn between implicit and explicit teaching and learning methods, and note made that our methodology toward language learning in this course shall be implicit, in keeping with the best understandings of the ways high-intermediate and advanced language learners continue to acquire and to improve their target-language skills.

Homework: Prepare a self-introduction of three to five minutes for the April 22 class meeting. These will be the first (informal) presentations of the term.

This is not a homework assignment, but those of you who might be interested in the way this course unfolded last year will find the 2004 D1 Academic Presentations course page here. You won’t be able to read the evaluations for the presentations—they are password protected—but you may be able to get a feel for the kind of course this is.