ARGUMENTATIVE TALK

   Put the sections of an argumentative talk below in a proper order and match each of them with
   the corresponding paragraph from the extract:

   Talks which contain argument usually have the following sections:

   

   discussion + conclusion

   arguments against

   author´s argument

   rejection of arguments against

   arguments for

   background

   

   Student evaluation of lecturers.

   Anyone who has ever attended a university knows that the quality of lecturers varies greatly.
   A few are very effective communicators: they convey the substance of their lectures clearly
   and interestingly and inspire students to want to know more about the subject. Others produce
   dull, and sometimes even incoherent lectures and the students learn little from them. These
   are also likely to kill any interest the students may have in the subject.

   It is my contention that a lecturer’s performance in the lecture hall should be regularly
   evaluated and that the best people to carry out this evaluation are the students.

   You could, of course, argue that students are not competent to evaluate the academic quality
   of lectures. They may know little of the subject and have no means of judging whether a
   particular lecturer is giving them outdated or irrelevant information and or whether he or she
   is accurately reflecting the current state of the discipline. If anyone should evaluate
   lecturers, the argument goes, it should be their colleagues.

   However, I am not arguing that students should be asked to comment upon the academic content
   of lectures. We can still assess the academic calibre of lecturers in the usual way through
   their qualifications, publications, course outlines, performance at staff seminars and so on.

    What students are best placed to do is to evaluate the effectiveness of the teaching which
   goes on in a lecture. Students know perfectly well when they are learning something and are
   normally quite clear about which lectures are interesting and give them a clear understanding
   of the subject and which are boring.

   Another common objection is that the students do not know what is good for them. They are
   likely to rate highly lecturers who do not demand much of them, who keep their lectures very
   simple, give few assignments and award good grades for average work. They might even be
   influenced by such irrelevant factors as whether a lecturer is good looking or friendly.

   This argument assumes very low levels of maturity, motivation and intelligence among students.
   University students, after all, are no longer school children. They come to the university to
   learn and normally expect a certain amount of stimulation and challenge.

   I suspect that many of the objections to student evaluation of lecturers rise from the fear
   some lecturers have of being subject to criticism by their students. However, lecturers should
   see such evaluation as an opportunity to become aware of defects in their lecturing techniques
   and thus to become better lecturers..

   (Adapted from Interactive Writing by Anna Kwan-Terry, Prentice Hall, 1988, pp.60-61)