1. Developing the Literature Review
Unit 8
Developing the Literature Review
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2. Contents Features of effective Literature Reviews
Steps to develop Literature Reviews
Critical responses to existing studies
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3. 8.1 Features of effective Literature Reviews
An effective literature review highlights specific arguments and ideas in a field of study, shows what has been studied in the field, and also where the weaknesses, gaps, or areas needing further study are.
The review also demonstrates to the reader why the writer’s research is useful, necessary, important, and valid.
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4. Basic features of an effective review
Using evidence
Being selective
Using quotes sparingly and judiciously
Summarizing and synthesizing
Keeping your own voice
Using your own words and being precise when paraphrasing
Beginning each sentence or paragraph in different ways
Using as up-to-date sources as possible.
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5. The moves of a good literature review include:
Writing it as an argument for what professionals need to understand (your research question) based on what is known from other scholarly work on the topic;
Organizing it by issue, topic, or theme, ones related to your own research question;
Introducing each study by author’s name with citation of the publication year;
Briefly summarizing key ideas that relate to your question/problem for each study. Also include limitations or problems with the studies.
Identifying areas of controversy in the literature or questions that need further research;
Ending by pointing to your own question as one left unanswered — and one that needs to be addressed.
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6. Gall et al. (1996: ) claim that the most frequent mistakes made in reviewing the literature are that the researcher:
does not clearly relate the findings of the literature review to the researcher’s own study;
does not take sufficient time to define the best descriptors and identify the best sources to use in the literature review related to one’s topic;
relies on secondary sources rather than on primary sources in reviewing the literature;
uncritically accepts another researcher’s findings and interpretations as valid, rather than examining critically all aspects of the research design and analysis;
does not report the research procedures that were used in the literature review;
reports isolated statistical results rather than synthesizing them; and
does not consider contrary findings and alternative interpretations in synthesizing quantitative literature.
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7. 8.2 Steps to develop Literature Reviews
To write an effective literature review, researchers often go through five steps:
(1) select a research topic;
(2) gather relevant sources;
(3) synthesize these sources;
(4) evaluate these sources;
(5) write the review.
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8. 8.3 Critical responses to existing studies
When conducting your own research, you will need to critically evaluate previous research positively or negatively in order to place your own research in context.
Evaluating previous research allows you to prove that you can competently think critically about topics in your field of study.
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9. A. Identifying a writer’s stance and perspective
In reviewing others’ work, you need to make it clear to the reader if your attitude is positive or negative.
Taking a “critical” approach usually means getting “underneath” the texts to identify - or at least try to interpret – the writer’s stance and perspective.
Example (p ): Language and gender: A brief critical review
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10. B. Precision in describing positions
Language skills can play a big part in helping you interpret the stance or perspective of a writer being reviewed, and indicating, in subtle and less direct ways, your own stance and perspective.
Verbs (p.136)
Anaphoric nouns (p.137)
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11. C. Use of your own voice
Your “voice”, that is, your perspective, position or standpoint, should be clearly identifiable in the literature review, as in the thesis as a whole.
It is important that, firstly, your theoretical position is clearly and strongly stated and that your critical evaluations are an integral part of this. Secondly, it is important that your language indicates your own or other writers’ attitudes to the question or issue.
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12. Two main ways of presenting your own voice assertively:
Take control of the text and lead your reader through the content;
Make your own position clear in relation to the source material that you incorporate and be explicit about how you will be drawing on particular aspects of previous work for your own research (p.138)
use the first person singular pronoun (e.g. I, in my view)
use explicit transitions (e.g. in direct contrast, in exactly the same way)
use strong adjectives (e.g. insufficient, weak, valuable, most supportive)
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13. Check your understanding
Rather than merely presenting a summary of each source, a literature review should be organized according to each subtopic discussed about the larger topic.
In the literature review, it is acceptable to report the outcomes of previous studies in isolation from the researcher’s own study.
Reporting verbs can be used by writers to both report their own claims or ideas and to demonstrate the attitude writers have towards others’ claims.
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14. When reviewing the existing studies, one should present the reader with a review of a subject or topic just as a lecture or textbook does.
A good literature review requires that you isolate key issues or themes related to your own research interests when summarizing sources.
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15. In-Class Activities
1. One way that proves particularly helpful in organizing literature reviews is the synthesis matrix, a chart that allows a researcher to sort and categorize the different arguments presented on an issue. It is probably best to begin your chart by labeling the columns both horizontally and vertically. The sample chart below illustrates how to do this.
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16. 2. In academic writing, it will often be necessary to refer to the research of others and to report their findings. In order to do so, we use reporting verbs such as suggest and argue. The difficulty with using reporting verbs is that there are many different verbs, and each of them has slightly different, and often subtle, meanings.
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17. 3. Read the following excerpt of a literature review, and do the exercises that follow: 4. Carefully examine the following excerpts of the Literature Review section and answer the questions that followed. 5. Read the following excerpt of the Literature Review section, and do the exercises that follow.
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18. 6. Read the following excerpt of the Literature Review section, and do the exercises. 7. The use of another person’s ideas or wording without giving appropriate credit, i.e., plagiarism, results from inaccurate or incomplete attribution of material to its source. Ideas, as well as the expression of those ideas, are considered to belong to the person who first puts them forward. Therefore, when you incorporate in your paper either ideas or phrases from another writer, whether you quote directly or indirectly, you need to indicate your source accurately and completely.
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19. Post-Class Tasks
1. Collect five research papers on a topic that may interest you, and build a synthesis matrix to help you organize the definitions of key terms and concepts, research methods, and summary of research results.
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20. 2. Reporting verbs differ in terms of their strength; for example, “to suggest” is much weaker, and more tentative, than “to argue”. The two verbs convey very different pictures about how the author you are studying sees his or her materials and research. Some reporting verbs are used principally to say what the writer does and does not do. These verbs do not indicate any value judgment on the part of the writer; they are called “neutral” reporting verbs. Some verbs are used to show when the writer has an inclination to believe something but still wishes to be hesitant; we call these “tentative” reporting verbs. If the writer has strong arguments to put forward and is absolutely sure of his or her ground, we can use “strong” reporting verbs to refer to these ideas.
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21. 3. Read the following excerpt of the Literature Review section
3. Read the following excerpt of the Literature Review section. Discuss how the author organizes and structures his review of literature on Desai’s work and whether his way of organization is effective. Pay attention to how the author expresses his personal stance and attitude. Underline the specific words or sentences that convey the author’s evaluative ideas.
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22. 4.Metadiscourse is the linguistic devices that writers employ to shape their arguments to the needs and expectations of their target readers. According to Williams (1981), metadiscourse provides a way of talking to the reader and consists of several categories: Sequencers and topicalizers (therefore, in the first place, finally) show the organization of the text and make the structure easier to perceive. Emphatics and hedges encode the writer’s certainty about the truth of the content and range from it is quite true that to it is unlikely that. Another category, attributors and narrators, gives the source of ideas and facts. This source may be the writers themselves (on the basis of my experience), others (according to Chomsky), or society at large (it has been observed that). These metadiscourse features signal writers’ intentions and make it easier for the reader to construct textual meaning. Hyland (2000) sees metadiscourse as the interpersonal resources used to organize a discourse or the writer’s stance towards either its content or the reader.
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23. 5. Schmid (2000) introduces the term “shell nouns” and states that these nouns are used by writers to create conceptual shells for complex and elaborate chunks of information. They serve the textual function of linking these nominal concepts with clauses or other pieces of text which contain the actual details of information, thus instructing the reader to interpret different sections of a text together. Semantically speaking, the shell nouns treated in Schmid’s study fall apart into five major classes, i.e. the factual class (denoting facts, states of affairs; e.g. fact, thing, point, problem), the linguistic class (denoting utterances, linguistic acts and products thereof; e.g. news, message, rumor), the mental class (designating ideas, cognitive states and processes; e.g. idea, notion, belief), the modal class (possibilities, abilities, permission, obligation; e.g. possibility, truth, permission, need) and the eventive class (denoting processes, activities, states; e.g. act, move, measure, reaction ).
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24. 6. The following is an early draft of a student’s literature review that needs revision. Based on what you know about a good literature review, how do you think this writer should revise it?
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25. 7. Look at the following two examples of literature reviews concerning class participation, and compare how each writer organizes his or her ideas and put forward critical evaluations.
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26. Project Work
Read the literature review section of a recent international journal paper in your field. When reading, check the following points in mind. Share your answers with your partner.
Is there a clear statement of the purpose and aims of the research?
Is relevant background literature reviewed? Was background information incorporated to define the problem?
Does it establish a valid thesis based on the examined research?
Does it state its thesis clearly in the introduction?
Are unfamiliar terms defined?
Is the hypothesis/thesis listed and described in each work reviewed?
Is the outcome of the work or the research described?
Does the author develop and incorporate his or her own comments, including response to the research, similarities and differences among literature reviewed, and reservations regarding author’s methods or conclusions?
Does the author over-quote source materials?
Does the author correctly cite all references in uniform documentation style? 
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