The overall structure of your review will depend largely on your own thesis or research area. What you will need to do is to group together and compare and contrast the varying opinions of different writers on certain topics. What you must not do is just describe what one writer says, and then go on to give a general overview of another writer, and then another, and so on. Your structure should be dictated instead by topic areas, controversial issues or by questions to which there are varying approaches and theories. Within each of these sections, you would then discuss what the different literature argues, remembering to link this to your own purpose. At the end of the review you should include a summary of what the literature implies, which again links to your hypothesis or main question.
In the introduction, you should:
·Define or identify the general topic, issue, or area of concern, thus providing an appropriate context for reviewing the literature.
·Point out overall trends in what has been published about the topic; or conflicts in theory, methodology, evidence, and conclusions; or gaps in research and scholarship; or a single problem or new perspective of immediate interest.
·Establish the writer’s reason (point of view) for reviewing the literature; explain the criteria to be used in analyzing and comparing literature and the organization of the review (sequence); and, when necessary, state why certain literature is or is not included (scope).
In the body, you should:
·Group research studies and other types of literature (reviews, theoretical articles, case studies, etc.) according to common denominators such as qualitative versus quantitative approaches, conclusions of authors, specific purpose or objective, chronology, etc.
·Summarize individual studies or articles with as much or as little detail as each merits according to its comparative importance in the literature, remembering that space (length) denotes significance.
·Provide the reader with strong “umbrella” sentences at beginnings of paragraphs,“signposts” throughout, and brief “so what” summary sentences at intermediate points in the review to aid in understanding comparisons and analyses.
In the conclusion, you should:
·Summarize major contributions of significant studies and articles to the body of knowledge under review, maintaining the focus established in the introduction.
·Evaluate the current “state of the art” for the body of knowledge reviewed, pointing out major methodological flaws or gaps in research, inconsistencies in theory and findings, and areas or issues pertinent to future study.
·Conclude by providing some insight into the relationship between the central topic of the literature review and a larger area of study such as a discipline, a scientific endeavor, or a profession.
According to Caulley (1992) of La Trobe University, the literature review should:
·compare and contrast different authors’ views on an issue
·group authors who draw similar conclusions
·criticize aspects of methodology
·note areas in which authors are in disagreement
·highlight exemplary studies
·highlight gaps in research
·show how your study relates to previous studies
·show how your study relates to the literature in general
·conclude by summarizing what the literature says
Activity3-1: Identifying good review
Below is an extract from the Introduction to a paper entitled The Effects of Feedback and Attribution Style on Task Persistence where psychology student Chris Rozek begins his review of the literature. Read it and answer the following questions.
Persistence has most often been studied in terms of cultural differences. Blinco(1992) found that Japanese elementary school children showed greater task persistence than their American counterparts. School type and gender were not factors in moderating task persistence. This left culture as the remaining variable. Heine et al. (2001) furthered this idea by testing older American and Japanese subjects on responses after success or failure on task persistence. Japanese subjects were once again found to persist longer(in post-failure conditions), and this was speculated to be because they were more likely to view themselves as the cause of the problem. If they were the cause of the problem, they could also solve the problem themselves; although, this could only be accomplished through work and persistence. Americans were more likely to believe that outside factors were the cause of failure. These cultural studies hinted that task persistence may be predictable based on attribution style. A later experiment showed that attribution style and perfectionism level can be correlated with final grades in college-level classes (Blankstein& Winkworth, 2004).
Questions to answer
1.What is the focus of this literature review?
2.List the structure of this literature review.
3.By which way has the writer used to organize the literature review?
4.Explain the tenses used by the author with specific examples.
Activity3-2: Copying generic phrases
It is perfectly normal to copy phrases from other people’s papers. However, these phrases must be generic. In fact, such phrases should help you to improve your English. Read this extract of literature review and work in groups to pick out those genric phrases and try to use them in your future papers.
In fact there is some cross-linguistic contrastive research to suggest that the foreigner is at a disadvantage. Even where the grammar and vocabulary may be perfectly adequate, it seems to be the case that a non-native may tend to transfer the discourse patterns of her native language to English. It has been suggested, for example, that Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean have different patterns of argument to English [3]. Thus one study found that those Korean academics trained in the United States wrote in an‘English’ discourse style, while their colleague who had trained and worked only in Korea with a paper published in the same anthology, wrote in a Korean style with no statement of purpose of the article and a very loose and unstructured pattern from the English point of view [4]. More generally, Hinds has put forward a widely discussed position that Japanese has a different expectation as to the degree of involvement of the reader compared to English, with Japanese giving more responsibility to the reader, English to the writer [5].
It might be objected though that this is relevant only to languages and cultures which differ greatly to English. However, research on German has shown that German academic writing in the social sciences has a much less linear structure than English, to the extent that the English translation of a German textbook was criticized as haphazard or even chaotic by American reviewers, whereas the original had received no such reviews on the European continent [6]. Academic respectability in English is evidenced by the appropriate discourse structure but in German by the appropriate level of abstraction[7]. Similarly, academic Finnish texts have been shown to differ in the way they use connectors and previews and are much less explicit than English in their drawing of conclusions. Spanish also has a similar pattern [8]. English, therefore, would seem to be a more ‘writer-responsible’ language than at least some other European languages.