Reading and Writing Skills

W7L7: Book Review or Article Critique

I. Part A. Analyze the following text very carefully. Then, complete the table that follows.
This paper purports to assess the linguistic complexity of students' narratives and reading texts.
However, the authors never stated the purpose behind the study. The authors provide no
motivation and goals for the study, no research questions, no strong methodological practices,
and very few findings that can be easily interpreted. While reading the study, every new
sentence is a surprise. There are no details and the entire paper is completely under-referenced.

Below I will discuss some of the major problems with the paper. First, the authors never
provide a rationale for their study. They never give a reason as to why they are studying
reading and writing together and they fail to link the two skills. The authors assume that the
reader knows the narrative and made no attempt to assist them in developing the narrative of
the paper. Another major problem with the paper is the naiveté that is apparent in the literature
review, the methods, and the analysis. The literature review is perhaps two pages long and full
of unsupported statements, conjecture, and limited viewpoints. The authors really need to
boost up on their knowledge of L2 writing and reading theory before they submit a paper to a
professional journal.

It is interesting that the language background of the participants is never made explicit
(participants are at the mid beginners to high beginners’ level in using English as a second
language). The extent to which any results found in the study would be widely generalizable to
what is typically conceived as an EFL/ESL learner is not clear. Moreover, the authors
continually draw on literature meant for an L1 acquisition audience and therefore of dubious
extension to L2 contexts.

The methods section contains no details at all. Ten participants per grade level, in a stratified
random sample, hardly seemed enough to get much stable data. Since there are only 10
participants per grade level on both accredited and non-accredited schools due to logistical
constraints, the paper is more of an exploratory study. In other words, it seems a stretch to ask
most journal readers to generalize from such a limited sample from such a specific population.
The authors state that "pupils were not given limits as to time and number of words, for them
to be relaxed in their narrative production" (p. 5). However, later the authors explain that those
written data also form the basis of the corpus used for analysis. How does this differential
production affect the results of the analysis? Surely, a participant who produces 1,000 words
will have different results from one who produces 500. It is not clear how the authors can
assert any sort of pattern from linguistic 'snapshots' from just 10 students per school,
producing such heterogenous data samples. Again, from such a modest sample size.

In general, the paper is hard to read. This likely goes back to the lack of research problems.
There are few transitions and, organizationally, the paper does not set up any expectations for
the reader. The first paragraph is a great example because it contains a single sentence and at
least five different clauses. The final paragraph in the introduction (right before the Methods
section) is another example. I have read that paragraph four times and am not sure how to
 process it.

There are other major problems with this paper, but I do not have the time or the energy to
discuss them all. The authors really need to rethink the purpose of the collected data and
educate themselves in the field of L2 reading and writing. I would highly suggest that the
authors reread issues of the Journal of Second Language Writing and Reading in a Foreign
Language.

Type of Document
Purpose of the
review
Writer’s persona
Intended reader
Strengths
Weakness

Part B. Revise the text given in Part A by eliminating its weaknesses and retaining its strengths.
Feel free to add other information, if necessary.