Sabtu, 31 Maret 2012

The Use of Literary Review


A.     Definition of Literature Review
According to Cooper (1988) '... a literature review uses as its database reports of primary or original scholarship, and does not report new primary scholarship itself.  The primary reports used in the literature may be verbal, but in the vast majority of cases reports are written documents. The types of scholarship may be empirical, theoretical, critical/analytic, or methodological in nature. Second a literature review seeks to describe, summarise, evaluate, clarify and/or integrate the content of primary reports.'
The review of relevant literature is nearly always a standard chapter of a thesis or dissertation. The review forms an important chapter in a thesis where its purpose is to provide the background to and justification for the research undertaken (Bruce 1994). Bruce, who has published widely on the topic of the literature review, has identified six elements of a literature review. These elements comprise a list; a search; a survey; a vehicle for learning; a research facilitator; and a report (Bruce 1994).
Hart (1998) defines literature review as the selection of available documents (both published and unpublished) on the topic, which contain information, ideas, data and evidence. [This selection is] written from a particular standpoint to fulfil certain aims or express certain views on the nature of the topic and how it is to be investigated, and the effective evaluation of these documents in relation to the research being proposed.



B.     The Use of Literary Review
A crucial element of all research degrees is the review of relevant literature. So important is this chapter that its omission represents a void or absence of a major element in research (Afolabi 1992). According to Bourner (1996) there are good reasons for spending time and effort on a review of the literature before embarking on a research project. These reasons include:
1)       To identify gaps in the literature. The first reason why reviewing literary is very important in doing research because it identifies the research that our study is attempting to address, positioning your work in the context of previous research and creating a research space for our work.
2)       It gives readers easy access to research on a particular topic by selecting high quality articles or studies that are relevant, meaningful, important and valid and summarizing them into one complete report.
3)       To carry on from where others have already reached. When we do literary review we will know what other researchers have already reached. Therefore, we can carry on the next research that we will do. Reviewing the field allows us to build on the platform of existing knowledge and ideas.
4)       To identify other people working in the same fields. If we do the same research with others, we may look at the other researchers’ literary review to identify other people working. It can be used as references of our research. A researcher network is a valuable resource.
5)       To increase your breadth of knowledge of our subject area. In writing literary review, we write some theories that relate with our subject are. By writing the theories in our literary review, so that we know deeply about our subject are.
6)       To provide the intellectual context for your own work, enabling us to position our project relative to other work.


7)       To identify opposing views.
8)       It provides an excellent starting point for researchers beginning to do research in a new area by forcing them to summarize, evaluate, and compare original research in that speciļ¬c area.
9)       To put our work into perspective.
10)    To demonstrate that we can access previous work in an area
11)    To identify information and ideas that may be relevant to our project. In literary review, we write some information and ideas that may be relevant to our project. The information may be from books, journals, etc.
12)    To identify methods that could be relevant to our project. When we write the literary review, we can know what method that we will use in doing the research.
As far as the literature review process goes, ultimately the goal for students is to complete their review in the allocated time and to ensure they can maintain currency in their field of study for the duration of their research (Bruce 1990).

Speech Act


A. Basic Concept of Speech Act
A speech act is a minimal functional unit in human communication. Just as a word  (refusal) is the smallest free form found in language and a morpheme is the smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning (-al in refuse-al makes it a noun), the basic unit of communication is a speech act (the speech act of refusal).
Philosophers like Austin (1962), Grice (1957), and Searle (1965, 1969, 1975) offered basic insight into this new theory of linguistic communication based on the assumption that  “(…) the minimal units of human communication are not linguistic expressions, but rather the performance of certain kinds of acts, such as making statements, asking questions, giving directions, apologizing, thanking, and so on” (Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989, p.2). Austin (1962) defines the performance of uttering words with a consequential purpose as “the performance of a locutionary act, and the study of utterances thus far and in these respects the study of locutions, or of the full units of speech” (p. 69). These units of speech are not tokens of the symbol or word or sentence but rather units of linguistic communication and it is “(…) the production of the token in the performance of the speech act that constitutes the basic unit of linguistic communication” (Searle, 1965, p.136). According to Austin’s theory, these functional units of communication have prepositional or locutionary meaning (the literal meaning of the utterance), illocutionary meaning (the social function of the utterance), and perlocutionary force (the effect produced by the utterance in a given context) (Cohen, 1996, p. 384).

B. The Functions of Speech Act
a.      sender (speaker)
Identificational function of the communicative act is most closely associated with the sender -- such things as voice set, accent, intonation, etc. tell receiver about sender's age, sex,  etc.; ie. they identify him or her, and they are generally involuntary.
Expressive choices of words, intonation, etc. express emotions and attitudes toward receiver or other component of speech act; generally under voluntary control.


b.      message channel   (could be gestures, whistling, drumming, speech)
Contact --  physical - sound hits ears. psychological - phatic communion  (i.e. social contact)
c.       message form
Poetic function.  Not limited to poetry, this function is expressed as manipulations of and restrictions on message form, and these can be of many different sorts.  Different amounts and varieties of aesthetic appreciation are derivable from various ways of formulating a message with any given referential content.
d.      topic  (what the message is about)
Referential  function :most directly associated with the topic closely tied to the dictionary meanings of messages.
e.      code   (Signaling units of which a message is  composed – based on a set of conventions for communicating meaning).
Metalinguistic function,  i.e. information about the code that is conveyed in a speech act.
f.        receiver – (hearer, audience)
Directive   function -  concerns subsequent activity of the receiver as directed by what the speaker says.(e.g. "Would you close the door, please?")
Rhetorical function - concerns the receiver's outlook as it is affected by what is said.  (e.g. "What a nice dress.")
g.      setting (context)-- (relevant features constituting a specific setting most often involve place and time, but may also include physical circumstances germane to the place and time of  the speech act).
Contextual function of the speech act associated with the setting component is reflected in messages saying something about the time, place, or persons in the interaction.  Many linguistic forms referring to these things cannot be interpreted without reference to the speech act itself, for their meanings are not fixed but relative (e.g. 'me', 'you',  'here', 'there', 'now', 'then') (e.g. "It happened yesterday"; "Oh, there you are").  In some cases, the primary function of the whole speech act is contextual.



C. Categories of Illocutionary
Here is Searle's classification for types of illocutions:
*      Assertive: an illocutionary act that represents a state of affairs.
E.g. stating, claiming, hypothesizing, describing, telling, insisting, suggesting, asserting, or swearing that something is the case.
*      Directive: an illocutionary act for getting the addressee to do something.
E.g. ordering, commanding, daring, defying, challenging.
*      Commissive: an illocutionary act for getting the speaker (i.e. the one performing the speech act) to do something.
E.g. promising, threatening, intending, vowing to do or to refrain from doing something.
*      Expressive: an illocutionary act that expresses the mental state of the speaker about an event presumed to be true.
E.g. congratulating, thanking, deploring, condoling, welcoming, apologizing.
*      Declaration: an illocutionary act that brings into existence the state of affairs to which it refers.
E.g. blessing, firing, baptizing, bidding, passing sentence, excommunicating.