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Literature Review Essay

Purpose

The literature review essay serves two purposes for this class. First, it gives you the opportunity to practice writing a literature review; these documents, whether a separate text, a chapter within a larger work, or a section in an essay, are an important part of graduate level writing, yet is often difficult for students to compose well.

Second, each student will be able to think about the inter-rationship between the sources they have consulted for her or his own inquiry, as well as how s/he positions oneself among the different arguments.


Instructions–Invention

Choose a L2 writing related topic that you want to engage. It is assumed that you focused your Blog Entry assignment on this topic; therefore you will want to draw upon the sources that you reviewed for the blog assignment. If the topic you have chosen for the literature review essay does not match the topic you are reviewing for the blog assignment, then you will need to start your inquiry from the beginning by finding sources on this topic. In either case, you are strongly encouraged to go above and beyond just five sources and any related texts assigned for the course. Consider looking through your peers' entries for relevant entries and reading those texts, as well as doing additional research.

Instructions-Writing

With most scholarship, the literature review establishes a precedent for the problem being investigated. In other words, the author reviews the literature, or scholarship, on a given topic to demonstrate how her/his current inquiry fits within the conversation, or corpus of scholarship, on this topic. Yet a literature review can stand on its own by providing the audience with an overview on a given topic. But like a snowflake, a literature review is as individual a the person who writes it. A good literature review will...

  • orchestrate the conversation among the scholars who have contributed this topic or related topics. Instead of moving from one summary to the next, it will demonstrate the aspects of the issue that scholars are aligned on, as well as those that they disagree upon
  • implicitly or explicitly take a position on the issue. A literature review is not just informational, but it is also argumentative
  • sometimes establish a framework for looking at the issue by combining the conversation about the topic with a theoretical lens

Use these generic guidelines, as well as the rhetorical situation presented by this assignment, to compose a 2500-3000 word essay. You will not want to just submit your blog entries cut and pasted into a single document.


Criteria

Logistic:

  • between 2500-3000
  • single spaced or double spaced
  • This document is due on March 22, 2010 to the instructor as a hard copy by the beginning of class.
  • 150 points

In addition to the general evaluation criteria, the instructor will be looking for evidence of

  • a sense of audience–do you provide an audience of scholars and practitioners with a useful and accessible resource for understanding the topic
  • a conversation among the scholars referenced
  • a sufficient cacophony of voices from the field
  • an argument about how the audience should examine the issue
  • an informed understanding of L2 writing. Does your inquiry demonstrate an understanding of the issues relevant to the teaching of English to L2 writers?
  • appropriate use of conventions, including MLA or APA citation formatting