VV064 Week 12 Adapted from De Chazal, Edward and Sam McCarter. Oxford EAP: A Course in English for Academic Purposes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012 Williams, Erica J. Presentations in English. Honkong: MacMillan, 2008 Jianfeng Chen, Alvin Harvey Kam, Jianmin Zhang, Ning Liu, Louis Shue. “Bathroom Activity Monitoring Based on Sound” Pervasive Computing. 2005. 47-61. GIVING FEEDBACK Read the introduction and first paragraph from a student essay on Is intelligence born or made? What are the good points? What do you think could be improved? Recently, the concept of intelligence has interested thinkers and researchers very deeply. Basically, people’s intelligence either comes from their parents, so it is genetic or inherited, or it comes from the world around them – their environment. It’s really a massive question. In this essay I will give arguments in favor of inherited intelligence as well as arguments against this idea, and then there will be a conclusion which sums up the main ideas. As mentioned in the introduction, the central question is the extent to which intelligence is inherited or learnt during someone’s life. These ideas are known as ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ respectively. Nowadays everyone knows that ‘nurture’ is more important, but in the nineteenth century it was the opposite. I think you learn so much from the world around you, for example your parents, school, and friends influence you a lot. Who can say that they haven’t been influenced by these people? Basically if you go to a bad school, you won’t develop properly, and you won’t end up being very intelligent. Furthermore, everyone knows that a good school is necessary to develop your intelligence. Moreover, in addition I think that your parents and your friends also develop your intelligence – they stimulate you and make you think. For these reasons, intelligence is ‘made’ rather than ‘born.’ Read the feedback to the above. Do you agree with it? Think of at least two further areas for the student to work on. Feedback CRITERIA GOOD FAIR NEEDS WORK Relevance: the essay content is relevant to the title X Content and organization: the material shows good academic thinking, and is clearly organized X Coherence and cohesion: the essay develops logically and has appropriate cohesive language X Language: the grammar, vocabulary, and style are appropriate and accurate, with a good range X Comments: - Some useful ideas, relevant to the essay title and logically divided into paragraphs. - Try to include something new in your thesis statement. - Add support/specific examples when you make a claim, e.g. ‘in the nineteenth century…’ - Aim to limit your use of discourse markers or linking words (e.g. ‘recently’), especially at the start of sentences. VV064 Week 12 Adapted from De Chazal, Edward and Sam McCarter. Oxford EAP: A Course in English for Academic Purposes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012 Williams, Erica J. Presentations in English. Honkong: MacMillan, 2008 Jianfeng Chen, Alvin Harvey Kam, Jianmin Zhang, Ning Liu, Louis Shue. “Bathroom Activity Monitoring Based on Sound” Pervasive Computing. 2005. 47-61. - Style – find more appropriate academic language, e.g. for ‘massive’, ‘you’; also think about your use of rhetorical questions in the text; avoid contractions (e.g. ‘won’t’) Read the comments above and discuss the following questions. 1) Go through each written comment and find examples in the text. 2) Which of the tutor’s comments relate to content and organization, and which relate to language? 3) Is the feedback clear and helpful? Identify any difficulties you have with it. Work in pairs/groups. From the perspective of the student in Task 1, select what you think are the three most important feedback areas to focus on. What sort of questions would you ask after receiving such feedback? Example: How can I be more specific? Compare your questions with other groups and add to your list of questions. ABSTRACTS Important parts of abstracts: - Background - Method - Results - Conclusion 3) Take a look at the following abstract. Can you revise it? In this paper an automated bathroom activity monitoring system based on acoustics is described. The system is designed to recognize and classify major activities occurring within a bathroom based on sound. Carefully designed HMM parameters using MFCC features are used for accurate and robust bathroom sound event classification. Experiments to validate the utility of the system were performed firstly in a constrained setting as a proof-of-concept and later in an actual trial involving real people using their bathroom in the normal course of their daily lives. Preliminary results are encouraging with the accuracy rate for most sound categories being above 84 percent. We sincerely believe that the system contributes towards increased understanding of personal hygiene behavioral problems that significantly affect both informal care-giving and clinical care of dementia patients.