Aim: developing research skills in English required for a postgraduate course.

CEFR: C1+

Description: The course aims to encourage the students' critical thinking as to what is significant in a text, what is relevant, what the authorial tone is to enhance the students' ability to cope with larger pieces of text, as will be required when doing bibliography research,to practice their summarizing and paraphrasing skills, building towards the construction of a research paper. In the same direction, students are also made familiar with the concept of plagiarism and how to avoid it. to increase the students' accuracy of vocabulary usage, beyond the acquisition of technical and academic vocabulary.

Assessment: The course is assessed by an end-of-term exam or continuous assessment (summary and reflection on 3 journal articles).
Students produce:

a 350-word (approx.) summary of the argumentation
a 150-word evaluation of the source (readability/ reliability)
readability: are the paragraphs well-structured?
reliability: is there adequate argument support? (examples, statistics, cause> effect relationships, reference to experts)
+ what theory does the author seem to belong to?
+ what essay can you be inspired to write on the topic? (compromise conflicting views, fill in missing point in the argumentation, refute the expressed view)

Syllabus:

1. Research bibliography theory:

a. Choosing a suitable topic

b. doing intelligent keyword search

c. making judgements of relevance (to topic), reliability

d. critical analysis as to authorial purpose and research paradigm.

2. Practice of annotated reading on political economy and history topics, such as:

- Worldviews of Global Environmental Change (Clapp, J.  (2005). Peril or Prosperity? Mapping Worldviews of Global Environmental Change. In Clapp, J., &Dauvergne, P. Paths to a Green World The Political Economy of the Global Environment. Academic MIT Press.)

- Steady state economics (Economics and Policy for Sustainability Research Group Report)

- Different Views on Globalization (John Gray and Leslie Sklair from the LSE Global Dimensions 2000 discussion forum)

- Towards an Emergent Global Culture (Allan Bird and Michael J. Stevens. (2003). Toward an emergent global culture and the effects of globalization on obsolescing national cultures. Journal of International Management  9: 4, 395-407)

- Changing citizenship in the digital age. (Bennett, W. L. (2008). Changing citizenship in the digital age. Civic life online: Learning how digital media can engage youth, 1, 1-24.)

Departments: Department of Economics (elective).