CI 775: Applied Linguistics: ESL/Bilingual Teaching

Welcome to the library course guide for CI 775 -- Applied Linguistics: ESL/Bilingual Teaching!

This guide provides links to resources that will help you complete the research assignment for this class.

If you have questions about how to use any of the resources listed here, please don't hesitate to contact me! My contact information is on the left. Good luck with your research



Here are links to several websites and videos that provide useful information on writing a Literature Review:

• Literature Reviews
  This web page from the Writing Center at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill offers good information on how to write a literature review.

• Doing a Literature Review
  Interesting video from University of Wisconsin-Stout Library.

• Learn How to Write a Review of the Literature
  From the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

It will be important to use articles from scholarly journals for your Literature Review. It is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between scholarly journals, which contain academic content, and magazines, which tend to offer "lighter" reading material.

Take a few minutes to review the information in this brief   tutorial, which will help you recognize the differences between the two types of publciations.  

Electronic databases are essentially indexes to large collections of journals (and sometimes also magazines, dissertations, newspapers, books, etc.). They are the best starting point when you are looking for journal articles on a topic. Here are some good ones to get you started:

When you use an electronic database to search for articles on your topic, it is important to do some brainstorming for good keywords that describe your topic.  Start with the keywords that first come to mind, and then add synonyms or related keywords to broaden your search and increase relevant results.

Because the database search engine is only looking for the appearance of your keywords in the title, summary (abstract) and added notes of each article in the database, it's important to think of the variety of words that might describe your topic. 

For example, what if you were doing research on teaching morphology to second language learners? You would certainly want to include the words morphology and second language learners in your search. Let's consider the phrase second language learners. Are there other words that are related or similar that you might also want to use? How about some of these?

When you type your keyword search into the database searchbox, enclose all the synonyms you want to use in parentheses, and type the word or between each word. For example: (second language learners or english language learners or ELL or ESOL). Now the computer will look for the appearance of any or all of those words, giving you more chances to find relevant information!

A thesaurus is a great place to look for synonyms and related words!

Visuwords
A graphical dictionary and thesaurus in one! "Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections."

Graph Words: Online Thesaurus
A tool similar to Visuwords above.

Plagiarism means . . .

      To reproduce or otherwise use (the words, ideas, or other work of another) as one's own or without attribution.

            Source: The American heritage dictionary of the English language (5th ed.). (2011). Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt.

Here are several short videos about plagiarism that you might enjoy:

• Plagiarism: Don't Do It
  
  
• What is Plagiarism?
  
  
• A Quick Guide to Plagiarism
  
  
• Just Because You Put It In Your Own Words...