Writing

Translate into English in written form.

Пьедестал в высшем образовании будущего займут не методики и лекции, а личность преподавателя. Студенты уже сейчас выбирают всё больше не специальность, а того, кто будет их учить. В будущем образование перейдет в он-лайн. Лекции и семинары будут проходить в интерактивном режиме и не будут привязаны ко времени. Поэтому на одного толкового учителя будут приходиться сотни и даже тысячи студентов. Вузы станут международными.

Будут утверждены единые стандарты для всего мира: что человек должен уметь и знать, способы и формат проверки. Появятся центры сертификации. Придя в центр, человек сдает квалификационный экзамен, который гарантирует набор навыков и компетенций. В зависимости от результата экзамена, человек имеет право занять определенную должность.

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Camus said: “The true university of these days is a collection of books.” Do you agree?

2. Oscar Wilde said: “The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any university can teach.” Do you agree?

MODULE 3

UNIT 12

What is Research?

LEAD-IN

Exercise 1. Answer the following questions.

1. What is the most challenging aspect of conducting research?

2. What is the most rewarding part about research?

3. What advice would you give to a student who wanted to get involved in research?

Exercise 2. Check the pronunciation and translate into Russian the following words.

Research, authoritative, inquiry, analyze, interpret, inductive, deductive phenomenon, hypothesize, acquire, consequence.

Exercise 3. Make nouns from the following verbs according to the model and translate them. Pay attention to the spelling changings.

Model: verb + -tion / verb + -sion

compare – comparison / inform – information

Decide, describe, predict, explain, protect, multiply, inspire, contribute, conduct, admit.

Comprehensive reading

Research is one of many different ways of knowing or understanding. It is different from other ways of knowing, such as insight, divine inspiration, and acceptance of authoritative dictates, in that it is a process of systematic inquiry that is designed to collect, analyze, interpret, and use data. Research involves inductive and deductive methods. Inductive methods analyze the observed phenomenon and identify the general principles, structures, or processes underlying the phenomenon observed. Deductive methods verify the hypothesized principles through observations. The purposes are different: one is to develop explanations, and the other is to test the validity of the explanations. One thing that we have to pay attention to research is that the heart of the research is not on statistics, but the thinking behind the research. How we really want to find out, how we build arguments about ideas and concepts, and what evidence that we can support to persuade people to accept our arguments. There are four types of knowledge that research contributed to science as follows:

1. Description: Results of research can describe natural or social phenomenon, such as its form, structure, activity, change over time, relationship to other phenomena. The descriptive function of research relies on instrumentation for measurement and observations. The descriptive research results in our understanding of what happened. It sometimes produces statistical information about aspects of education.

2. Prediction: Prediction research is intended to predict a phenomenon that will occur at time Y from information at an earlier time X.

3. Improvement: This type of research is mainly concerned with the effectiveness of intervention. The research approach includes experimental design and evaluation research.

4. Explanation: This type research subsumes the other three: if the researchers are able to explain a phenomenon, it means that they can describe, can predict its consequences, and know how to intervene to change those consequences.

What is the research process? There are five stages of conducting a research study:

1. Identify a significant research problem: in this stage, find out the research questions that are significant and feasible to study.

2. Prepare a research proposal: a research proposal usually consists of the sections including introductory, literature review, research design, research method, data analysis and protection of human subject section, and timeline.

3. Conduct a pilot study: the purpose is to develop and try out data-collection methods and other procedures.

4. Conduct a main study.

5. Prepare a report.

These five stages may overlap or occur in a different order depending the nature of the study. Qualitative studies which involve emergent research design may gather and analyze some data before developing the proposal, or a pilot study can be done before writing a research proposal or not at all.