英语议论文描写.doc

Argumentative WritingThus far you have been learning to write essays that are primarily expository, in which the main purpose is to explain or analyze. You have found, too, that narration and description can act as support in this kind of writing. In this part, we will focus on another type of essay, one that has somewhat different purpose. This is the argumentative essay. In argumentation, the writer uses clear thinking and logic to convince readers of the soundness of a particular opinion on a controversial issue. Unit 7 Issues in EducationWriting strategy: Having a debatable point Principles: Argumentation / Persuasion in writing is how a writer puts forth his/her views on a subject and persuades readers that what he / she is saying is important. The writer may also wish to persuade readers to agree with his / her opinions, suggestions or solutions, or get readers to commit to a course of action. Argumentation frequently makes use of the other three types of writing description, narration, and exposition, but argumentative/persuasive essays are different from other essays. If you are going to write an essay on the College Entrance Examination using one of those styles of organization, it might sound like this:Personal narrative: I took the College Entrance ExaminationProcess essay: The preparation for the College Entrance Examination. Classification/Division essay: The English test in the College Entrance Examination has many items. Compare/Contrast Essay: The College Entrance Examination versus SAT.Cause/Effect Essay: The College Entrance Examination causes these problems.These essays are informing the reader of the College Entrance Examination with a particular focus. However, in a persuasive essay, you are not just trying to inform the reader about the subject. A persuasive essay takes a stand, supports an opinion on the topic. An argumentative/persuasive essay, for instance, would argue:The College Entrance Examination should be abolished.Argumentation/Persuasion always assumes that a controversy (or a debatable point) or some different opinions might exist about the topic. So writers have to do all they can to make readers accept their point of view. Sample A: Read Sample A and see whether the writer has a debatable point. Point out the thesis statement. What are the writers arguments? What teaching method does the writer suggest to replace lectures? And what is his conclusion?College Lectures: Is Anybody Listening?A former teacher of mine, Robert A. Fowkes of New York University, likes to tell the story of a class he took in Old Welsh while studying in Germany during the 1930s. On the first day the professor strode up to the podium, shuffled his notes, coughed, and began, “Guten Tag, Meine Damen und Herren” (Good day, ladies and gentlemen). Fowkes glanced around uneasily. He was the only student in the course. Toward the middle of the semester, Fowkes fell ill and missed a class. When he returned, the professor nodded vaguely and, to Fowkes astonishment, began to deliver not the next lecture in the sequence but the one after. Had he, in fact, lectured to an empty hall in the absence of his solitary student? Fowkes thought it perfectly possible. One aspect of American education too seldom challenged is the lecture system. Professors continue to lecture and students to take notes much as they did in the thirteenth century, when books were so scarce and expensive that few students could own them. The time is long overdue for us to abandon the lecture system and turn to methods that really work. One problem with lectures is that listening intelligently is hard work. Reading the same material in a textbook is a more efficient way to learn because students can proceed as slowly as they need to until the subject matter becomes clear to them. Many students believe years of watching television have sabotaged their attention span, but their real problem is that listening attentively is much harder than they think. Worse still, attending lectures is passive learning, at least for inexperienced listeners. Active learning, in which students write essays or perform experiments and then have their work evaluated by an instructor, is far more beneficial for those who have not yet fully learned how to learn. While its true that techniques of active listening, such as trying to anticipate the speakers next point or taking notes selectively, can enhance the value of a lecture, few students possess such skills at the beginning of their college careers. More commonly, students try to write everything down and even bring recorders to class in a clumsy effort to capture every word. Students need to question their professors and to have their ideas taken seriously. Only then will they develop the analytical skills required to think intelligently and creatively. Most students learn best by engaging in frequent and even heated debate, not by scribbling down a professors often unsatisfactory summary of complicated issues. They need small discussion classes that demand the common labors of teacher and students rather than classes in which one person, however, learned, propounds his or her own ideas. The lecture system ultimately harms professors as well. It reduces feedback to a minimum, so that the lecturer can neither judge how well students understand the material nor benefit from their questions or comments. Questions that require the speaker to clarify obscure pointsand comments that challenge sloppily constructed arguments are indispensable to scholarship. Without them, the liveliest mind can atrophy. Undergraduates may not be able to make telling contributions very often, but lecturing insulates a professor even from the beginners naive question that could have triggered a fruitful line of thought. If lectures make so little sense, why have they been allowed to continue? Administrators love them, of course. They can cram far more students into a lecture hall than into a discussion class, and for many administrators that is almost the end of the story. But the truth is that faculty members, and even students, conspire with them to keep the lecture system alive and well. Lectures are easier on everyone than debates. Professors can pretend to teach by lecturing just as students can pretend to learn by attending lectures, with no one the wiser, including the participants. Moreover, if lectures afford some students an opportunity to sit back and let the professor run the show, they offer some professors an irresistible forum for showing off. In a classroom where everyone contributes, students are less able to hide and professors less tempted to engage in intellectual exhibitionism. Smaller classes in which students are required to involve themselves in discussion put an end to students passivity. Students become actively involved when forced to question their own ideas as well as their instructors. Their listening skills improve dramatically in the excitement of intellectual give and take with their instructors and fellow students. Such interchanges help professors do their job better because they allowthem to discover who knows what before final exams, not after. When exams are given in this type of course, they require analysis and synthesis from students, not empty memorization. Classes like this require energy, imagination, and commitment from professors, all of which can be exhausting. But they compel students to share responsibility for their own intellectual growth. Lectures will never entirely disappear from the university scene both because they seem to be economically necessary and because they spring from a long tradition in a setting that values tradition for its own sake. But the lectures too frequently come at the wrong end of the students educational careers during the first two years, when they most need close, individual instruction. If lectures were restricted to junior and senior undergraduates and to graduate students, who are less in need of scholarly nurturing and more able to prepare work on their own, they would be far less destructive of students interests and enthusiasms than the present system. After all, students must learn to listen before they can listen to learn. (Taken from College Writing Skills with Readings by John Langan, McGraw-Hill Humanities / Social Sciences / Langua, 2005.)Practice：Fill in the blanks to show that you understand the structural elements of the essay.An argumentative or a persuasive essay is all about trying to your readers. It may take the “problem and solution” format. Basically, such a piece of writing states that a exits, examines the extent and possible of this problem and then puts forward a to it. Or, it may take the “pros and cons” format. By listing the good and bad points of an argument, the writer tries to persuade readers to agree with his/her particular views, opinions or suggestions.Sample B: The following essay is written by Lloyd Bond, a senior scholar and testing specialist at Carnegie. Much of his research career has been devoted to ensuring that tests are unbiased, fair and equitable for all who are affected by them. Rather than look at “teaching to the test” as an either/or decision, Lloyd considers taking advantage of a testing-centered culture in ways that do not distort student learning.Read the essay and point out the thesis statement and the evidence Lloyd Bond uses to support his position. Teaching to the Testby Lloyd BondA recurring criticism of tests used in high-stakes decision making is that they distort instruction and force teachers to “teach to the test”. The criticism is not without merit. The public pressure on students, teachers, principals, and school superintendents to raise scores on high-stakes tests is tremendous, and the temptation to tailor and restrict instruction to only that which will be tested is almost irresistible.Although many view teaching to the test as an all or none issue, in practice it is actually a continuum. At one extreme, some teachers examine the achievement objectives as described in their states curriculum and then design instructional activities around those objectives. This is done without regard to a particular test. At the other extreme is the unsavory and simply dishonest practice of drilling students on the actual items that will appear on the tests.In addition to offending our moral sense, teaching the actual items on a test (what James Popham calls “item teaching”) is counter-productive for the very practical reason that it makes valid inferences about student achievement almost impossible. There is nothing special about the set of words that happens to appear on a given vocabulary test. We assume that the words are a sample from a larger population of words, and we want to infer something about the students knowledge of this larger set, their general vocabulary. In like manner, we want to infer that students can solve not only the particular set of math problems on a test, but that they can solve an entire class of problems. Drilling students on a specific set of test items destroys our ability to generalize to this larger domain.But is teaching to the test all bad? Emphatically not. Consider the coach who drills young athletes on the very skills they will perform in competition, or the typing instructor who teaches students precisely the finger arrangements and keystrokes that will be used in typing. These practices are not seen as unethical or unsavory for the simple reason that in these two domains instruction and assessment merge into a single activity. Indeed, instructing students on anything other than the actual test itself seems illogical.The above two examples are so obvious as to be trivial. But more significant illustrations of the issues are easy to find. In the ambitious New Standards Project, a national initiative that regularly brought teachers together from around the country to learn techniques for integrating instruction and assessment, participating teachers learned to literally merge these two activities in such a way that they were indistinguishable. Lauren Resnick of the University of Pittsburgh, one of the visionaries behind the project, noted that rather than bemoan the inclination to teach to the test, we should take advantage of it. We should make exercises so compelling, and so powerful as exemplars of a domain, that honing ones ability to solve them represents generalizable learning and achievement. Viewed in this light, teaching to the test is no longer vaguely disreputable because the skills and knowledge are themselves general and are the very things we wish students to acquire.In his senior level psychology course on learning at the University of Nebraska, Professor Dan Bernstein (now at the University of Kansas) was disappointed in the level of understanding of key concepts that his students displayed. He decided that the fault might not lie entirely in his students, but in the way he approached both instruction and assessment. Over the next few years, he changed his assessment from short abstract essay questions to problems that asked students to apply concepts in new contexts; added out-of-class questions about the readings to free up class time for discussion; and provided web-based examples of responses to test problems, so that students could learn to identify what makes some answers better than others. In short, Professor Bernstein merged instruction and assessment in such a way that teaching to the test became an integral part of his craft. The reader is invited to examine his approach in detail at his online teaching portfolio (文件夹).In its program of advanced teacher certification, The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards encourages certification candidates to practice putting together portfolios. They urge candidates to get suggestions and critical feedback from their colleagues and from others who have gone through the process. Candidates are encouraged to study excellent teachers and how they think, write about, and reflect upon their work. The National Board advises candidates to take several videotapes of their own teaching, to think about and write critically and reflectively about what they see. Teachers are encouraged to anticipate the difficulties students will have with various concepts and how to structure and sequence instruction to minimize these difficulties. In essence, the National Board encourages teachers to practice and hone the very things they will be tested on.There is a lesson here for teachers and assessment specialists alike. The tension between the instructional and assessment communities, as well the pejorative connotations that “teaching to the test” entails, will continue unabated so long as testing and assessment are seen as something quite apart from instruction and learning, rather than an integrated reflection of what was intentionally taught. To paraphrase A. G. Rud of Purdue University, what is needed is a deliberate attempt on the part of all parties to link curriculum, instruction, assessment, and standards in a more generative and even transparent way.(Taken from the website: / perspectives/sub.asp?key=245&subkey=579)Questions on content and structure:1. What is the thesis statement? But is teaching to the test all bad? Emphatically not. First two sentences2. What are the examples in paragraph 4? The examples are the coach and the typing instructor. Third sentence3. What is the example in paragraph 5? The example is of the New Standards Project. Third sentence4. What is the example in paragraph 6? The example is of Professor Dan Bernstein. The whole paragraph5.What is the example in paragraph 7? The example is of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. The whole paragraphExercise A: Expressions with which you can BEGIN an argumentative / persuasive essay:1.When asked about / When it comes to / Faced with , the majority of people say / believe / claim / think / argue that , but other people regard / view / think of / consider / conceive , as 2.There is a general / much / public discussion / debate / controversy today / on / about / over / as to the issue / problem of Those who criticize / object to argue that They believe that But people who advocate / favor on the other hand, argue that 3. Currently / In recent years / In the past few years, there is / has been a general / widespread / growing feeling / concern / trend / awareness / realization / belief that 4. Now people in growing numbers are beginning / coming / getting to believe / realize / recognize / understand / accept / see / be aware that 5. Now, it is commonly / widely / generally / increasingly believed / thought / held / accepted / felt / recognized / acknowledged that They think / believe But I wonder / doubt whether 6. Recently there is an astonishing proportion / percentage / population / number of teenagers / students who According to a(n) recent / new / official study / survey / report / poll 7. In the past five years there has been a sudden / dramatic / sharp / marked rise / increase in the crime rate / divorce rate / teenage smoking.8. Recently the problem / issue / question of has been brought to public attention.9. Most dangerous / disastrous / undesirable for is the trend / tendency / phenomenon which is now apparent / evident / obvious in the field of 10. These days we are often told that / often hear about But is this really the case?Exercise B: Transitional devices (connecting words) (1):Transitional devices are like bridges between parts of your essay. They are cues that help the readers to