1. Communicative and Academic English for the EFL Professional

2. Today’s Class (1) Discuss Academic Definitions. (2) Discuss Final Research Paper Project.

3. Definitions One import task of academic writers is to define terms. As a teacher you will constantly have to provide definitions for your students and as a researcher you will also have to define the terms you use in your research paper.

4. Definitions in Formal Academic Writing In general, there are three kinds of definitions in academic writing (1) Short definitions provided within sentences. (2) Full sentence definitions. (3) Extended definitions.

5. Short Definitions within Sentences Short definitions within sentences are usually provided using phrases such as:...known as...... defined as...... called... Short definitions are also given using the following: e.g., or i.e.

6. Short Definitions within Sentences Here is one example sentence: Questions where the teacher already knows the answer, known as display questions, are rarely asked in conversation outside of the classroom.

7. Short Definitions within Sentences Here is another example: Repeating what students have said for the benefits of the whole class, called teacher echo, may be beneficial or harmful depending on when a teacher uses it.

8. Short Definitions within Sentences Here is another example: Elicitation, defined as getting responses from students, is a valuable skill that teachers acquire over time with experience.

9. Short Definitions within Sentences Here is another example: Questions for which there are more than one possible answer, or open-ended questions, are thought to foster creativity and divergent thinking.

10. Short Definitions within Sentences Here is another example using an appositive structure: Wait time, the duration of teacher pauses after questions, is an important variable in research on science teaching.

11. Sentence Length Definitions Full sentence length definitions can be given using the following constructions: (term)is defined as (definition) (definition) is known as (term)

12. Sentence Length Definitions Here is one example: Wait time is defined as the time a teacher allows for a student to respond to a question.

13. Sentence Length Definitions Here is another example: The difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help is known as the Zone of Proximal Development.

14. Sentence Length Definitions Full sentence length definitions can also be given using the term/category/description model (term) is a (category) that/which (description) This is a very powerful and useful model for making formal definitions. It is also useful for making definitions in the classroom for your students.

15. Sentence Length Definitions Here is one example: A polyword is a phrase that acts as a single word.

16. Sentence Length Definitions Here is another example: TPR is a teaching technique in which a learners (usually children) responds to language input with body motions.

17. Sentence Length Definitions Here is another example: A collocation is a pair of words that occur together with high frequency so that their association seems natural whereas other synonymous words may seem awkward.

18. Extended Definitions Extended definitions are definitions that are long than a single sentence and contain much detail.

19. Extended Definitions Here is one example: In linguistics, a corpus (plural corpora) or text corpus is a large and structured set of real world texts that are usually electronically stored and processed. They are used to do statistical analysis and hypothesis testing, checking occurrences or validating linguistic rules. Corpora are often subjected to a process known as annotation such as part-of-speech tagging, or POS- tagging, in which information about each word's part of speech (verb, noun, adjective, etc.) is added to the corpus in the form of tags.

20. Competing Definitions In the examples above, the definitions were presented as if they were definitions that would be generally accepted by most interested people. However, there are times when there is a lack of agreement over the definition of a term. In this case, the term may be defined differently by different people or have different definitions under different conditions. It may be important to indicate that (a) a universally accepted definition does not exist (b) you are using the terms as defined in one specific way or that you are adopting a particular definition.

21. Competing Definitions Here are some examples: For the purposes of this paper,... is defined as... Here we define... as... We have adopted (author’s) definition of...

22. Competing Definitions Although there is no universally accepted definition of cultural and linguistic competency, a useful definition adopted by the Office of Minority Health (OMH) distinguishes between culture, competence and the relationship between the terms: "Cultural and linguistic competence is a set of congruent behaviors, attitudes and policies that come together in a system, agency or among health professionals that enables work in cross-cultural situations. http://www.nhchc.org/cultural.htmlhttp://www.nhchc.org/cultural.html

23. Competing Definitions Applied linguistics is broadly defined here as linguistics with an interest in social issues, and in the service of society.

24. Contrastive Definitions You may be asked to define two terms at once through a contrastive definition. This can accomplished using the following: On the other hand,... Whereas,... While,... The former.... The latter...