On page 66 of Skillful Reading and Writing Student's Book 3, the authors introduce online discussion boards, suggesting that students are often expected to participate in these online forums in addition to doing more formal academic writing such as essays (Bixby & Scanlon, 2013).
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My response
The Skillful series of books by Macmillan provide solid practice in important aspects of English in academic contexts, and they sensibly do not limit this to writing essays or other more formal activities. One of the benefits of online discussion boards, such as this blog, is that they are a bit more relaxed than other academic work. This allows you to play around with English, to try things out, and to see what works well and what might not work so well. At the same time, you are using the sort of English that is standard in an academic context.
A further advantage is that the response writing you do on an online discussion board does not take so much time as an essay might. We can write shorter pieces of work more often. Although our aim is to write something daily, five days a week, perhaps more than once a day, is probably enough. Don't worry: if you write in ten minute blocks, my suggestion that we write daily is not so terrible as it might sound.
The other great advantage to moving some exercises in the book to this class blog is that it's a great way to practice critical thinking, which is an important part of all academic writing courses. So don't be surprised over the coming weeks as you see some of the exercises in Bixby and Scanlon appearing here. This blog post is the first example of that.
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My questions for readers
These are not really my questions, they are copied from the "Over to You" section on page 66 (Bixby & Scanlon, 2013).
- Why are academic writing skills important for an online writing board?
- How do you think an online discussion board might improve your learning in a course?
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- Bixby, J. & Scanlon, J. (2013). Skillful reading and writing: Student's book 3. Oxford: Macmillan Education
1. because we have to deal with different ideas, so academic writing can help us gain a useful idea and also listen to various ideas that we have not thought about.
ReplyDelete2. I think it will improve my writing skills as much as I participate in an online discussion board. It gives me a chance to use my writing skills to communicate with others.
Academic writing skills are important for an online discussion board, because in the university, it is used in many way. For example, using for ask someone about the information you want to know and posting your work. You need to write it in academic. You cannot use the word like you chat to your friends, because you use it for learning.
ReplyDeleteAn online discussion board can improve my learning in a course by you can learn a lot of things from it, such when you post your question and someone answer it. You will know the answer. Moreover, your writing skills will be improved in a discussion board too.
Because I think academic writing skills is more polite and can understand in general (we can share our interesting idea with a good language).
ReplyDeleteOnline Discussion can also improve the to organized an idea, easy to exchange and see everyone opinions in the same time. Moreover writing is the easy way to improve grammar because we can see what we just write and can come back and re-read it everytime you like.
*PS. word missing form second paragraph first sentence - Online Discussion.....*the way to....an idea
DeleteIn my opinion, it is not quite important. In online board, we want to express just idea we have. But, It may be used sometimes in order to practice owner writing(it is good to do). However, I think it is unnecessary.
ReplyDeleteOnline is mean everyone who joins internet can see your blog. In this case, they can help you correct your writing(if you ask them to). So that will help you improve your writing skills. And in the other hand, if you are reader, you would see a lot of blog and you could determine it is correspond with in you class. It would make you more proficient.
Oops - I'm not finished.
ReplyDelete1. Actually that's interesting question. For me really interesting why ACADEMIC writing skills important for online discussion board. And I don't know why. Of course, we must to use English rules in our writing. But why academic language?
ReplyDelete2. So, that's question a bit easy. If we will write a lot, I think, we will start automatically writing more correctly, with grammar. And if we talk about online discussion - that's mean - that we have time to check our writing with, for example - dictionaries. For sure we can express our thoughts more clearly. And I think in online discussion board is very important to be understood by readers.
Academic writing skills are important for an online writing board because this skills will help people give a strong idea in each article they wrote. Those articles that can express strongand clear ideas are easy to understand what the writers try to say.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, an online discussion could improve my learning skills by practicing 2 main skills reading, writing.
For the first question,in my opinion writing skills can help us improve our grammar to express what i am thinking or let others know clearly about what i am tailing about.
ReplyDeleteI think an online discussion board might improve my learning because we can discuss about what i not clearly know about.
If you use the wrong grammar in the article,maybe others could not catch your ideas so that I think writing skills for an online writing board is useful.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion,although online discussion couldn't talk face to face but we can think our answer much more time and what's more it is also convenient for us to discuss with each other even in different areas so that means we could discuss all the time and everywhere which may improve my learning in the class.
Thank you everyone for sharing your ideas here. As you can see when you read through what others have written, there are some common ideas, such as how regular practice usefully improves writing. There are are also some contributions that are less common, such as Bo's idea that we can use an academic style of writing to more politely express our ideas, especially when those ideas might disagree with the deeply held beliefs of others. I liked that idea because academic work is supposed to be about improving our understanding and hopefully bringing our opinions closer to the facts, even if that means correcting our own ideas which might be wrong, or helping others to correct their ideas.
ReplyDeleteAs I looked over your different responses here, I thought that they also support the ideas about brainstorming of Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, especially his main idea that individual brainstorming is not only more effective for getting quality ideas, but that it works best for a group to begin with individual, online brainstorming.