I HAVE MY OWN WAY OF LEARNING

The e-tivity we did in class last week gave me the opportunity to discuss with my peers how to critically evaluate online sources. Since on the Internet there is a lot of junk, we have to skim and scan in order to come up with serious, trustworthy and reliable articles that can suite our research purposes. We agreed on the fact that the author of the piece of writing and the reason why the article was published are two of the main questions we all should pose ourselves when using materials downloaded from the Web. In our evaluations, references, external links and layout play a great role, too. I also understood that blogs run by experts are a good starting point for our research because they provide interesting links and references; moreover, bloggers often refer to other sources enabling the reader to have an exhaustive ‘picture’ of the matter.

In the lab we dug into “personal learning environment” and I found out that there is not a single definition for this relatively new concept, since it is something strictly personal and there are not hard and fast rules. Learning is up to us and people are supposed to find strategies and tools that go beyond academic lessons in order to improve a foreign language. The process of learning is thus under the control of the learners that can choose among a wide variety of approaches and systems to improve their skills. Blogs, books as well as many websites deal with this issue and try to examine it from different viewpoints. On Delicious I shared some of the bookmarks on this topic; I think they might be useful for you, too. Unfortunately, many scholar articles that seemed to be useful and interesting for PLE are not free and all you can see is a short abstract.

On Thursday we continued our discussion about critical reading. I think that the questions we have to pose when we come across a research article are very similar to the one we posed in e-tivity 5. Since I am interested in the language of e-mails for business purposes, I looked for an article dealing with this issue and I tried to answer the ten preliminary questions.

The researcher of “Business e-mail communication: some emerging tendencies in register” is Julio C. Gimenez, an ESP instructor at Universidad Empresarial Siglo 21 in Cordoba, Argentina and has a M.A. in Teaching English as Foreign Language. When the article first appeared on the web, on 27th March 2000, he was working towards a Ph.D. By now, I think he has completed it. From the abstract I could understand that the aim of his research was to investigate the language of e-mails and see if its spoken nature has already started to affect business communication. The data collected were qualitative, since the author analysed more than 63 business e-mails and 40 business letters. The study was done on a relatively small scale since the total amount of texts analysed was 103 and the business e-mails/letters came from a single company that is not mentioned in the abstract. In the conclusion, Gimenez highlighted the fact that e-mails are becoming more and more informal and personalized, since their language is extremely flexible and, unlike for business letters, there are any ‘how tos’ and rules for e-mails (a part from some general rules called ‘netiquette’). Among the limitations of the research, the author mentioned: “The data used is too small, however, to make any firm generalisations or to conclude that business e-mail communication represents a new genre as described by Swales (1990). Besides, even if the e-mails analysed in this paper can be said to exemplify the use of e-mails in business, they were all taken from the same source and mostly sent to the same receiver, thus not allowing for a more exhaustive cross-sectional analysis of business e-mail practices”.