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 academic research, yet students often struggle with this unique genre. This will give you an opportunity to practice writing one.
Second, each student will be able to think about the interrelationship between the sources they have consulted for her or his own inquiry by learning what the field has to say about this writing or literacy-related issue and seeing what debates about this issue reporters and researchers agree upon and what they do not agree upon.
It is important that you understand that the reference to "literature" in the term "literature review" refers to a body of academic scholarship not a work of fiction as we commonly equate with "literature."
The Literature Review is the first step in the process of working on your IMRAD Essay. Therefore, you need to start with an issue related to writing or literacy and then develop a research question. You can start with the issues and questions you identified in Response #4: Research Topic, although you are not required to do so. Questions that you may pose to yourself to decide a topic could be, but are not limited to...
Once you have chosen a focus for your project, you are committed to it for the remainder of the semester. If you need help selecting this topic, please consult the instructor.
A significant feature of academic writing, like the IMRAD Essay, is the literature review in which the writer explains what other scholars have written on the topic; this is a way to show how their own research fits into a larger academic conversation. The literature review will give you the opportunity to work through your understanding of the texts that you choose. You are encouraged to appropriately insert revised portions of this text into your IMRAD Essay. (Please note that the reference to "literature" in the term "literature review" refers to a body of academic scholarship not a work of fiction as we commonly equate with "literature.")
For some topics, to do textual research, you may need to choose a similar or related topic. As an example, you may choose to study how successful African-American college students are with writing portfolios as opposed to exit exams. There might not be a lot of research specifically about African-Americans and writing portfolios. But you can look at what the scholarship says about 1) African-American students' general strengths (e.g., skills and strategies) as writers, 2) the fundamental features of writing portfolios, and 3) the features of high stakes exam writing and how students usually respond to these writing situations. Then you would look for the connections between the research about African-American writers and the trends with portfolios and high stakes writing exams, respectively. Note how these are all pieces of what you are looking at, but none are directly talking about the topic you chose because you are blazing a new trail–which is a good thing.
For these annotated bibliography entries you will be responding to five texts–three popular texts and two academic texts (one academic text can be replaced with a government report). To determine the credibility of each source, go to Evaluation During Reading.
Definitions
Popular source–A source that comes from an organization or press that is not subject to peer review (often mostly subject to an editor) and is written for the general public. It is recommended that you choose a popular publication that comes from a reputable source (i.e., news organization, government organization, magazine, interest group) that "tries" to present objective facts and arguments. However, if you feel that you will benefit from exploring a clearly biased source, you may do so as long as you can justify your decision.
Academic source–A source that comes from a university or academic press. They are often found in academic journals, edited collections, and monographs–academic books written or co-written by the same author(s). These sources have been peer-reviewed by experts in a specific field. Your second academic source can be replaced by a government report.
The Literature Review establishes what has already been learned about the topic you are studying. Instead of only looking for sources that support your opinion about the topic, the point of a Literature Review is to understand and report a range of perspectives on this topic. When you write your IMRAD Essay–NOT this essay–you will compare the results of your own data collection to the perspectives that you report in the Literature Review. Another way to think about it is that doing the work of a Literature Review allows you to understand how you are contributing to a conversation about the topic that is already taking place. A good Literature Review will not just summarize each of the articles. Instead the writer of this 1000-1500 word literature review will...
These guidelines are not designed for you to compose the document by taking it one bullet at a time. Instead you need to use these bullet points to gather what you are thinking and then compose a cohesive document using the genre of a literature review essay (see examples)
Compose a Works Cited or Reference list for your sources.
Logistic:
In addition to the general evaluation criteria, the instructor will be looking for evidence of...