General Statement & Thesis Statement - English for Academic Purposes with Josh #2

hello everybody welcome to our livestream here I am not sure why the screen isn't green behind me there but we'll get that figured out welcome back this is the second edition of English 140 EAP which is English for academic purposes my name is Joshua I'm a teacher here and the director of the college at Spokane College of English language in Spokane Washington USA it's a lovely day outside today it's so sunshiny and nice and there's a big festival going on in the park where you can eat a bunch of different food hundreds of restaurants it's so much fun wish you guys were here but I'm glad you're here right now in in the chat and welcome everybody who is is here it looks like Salim hi how you doing Eugenia's you I'm probably saying that name wrong so correct me if you like and roof also in in Nigeria it looks like welcome and this class is designed to be English for academic purposes so what does that mean academic purposes is teaching students the fundamentals if you want to study at a university anywhere in the world that uses English as a primary language so if you want to get your bachelor's degree or master's degree or even just go to a community college this is the class for you we're doing some some open free live classes until the 19th but you can sign up for a closed class and be a regular student if you like and you will get feedback and information and personalized education from me so once again my name is Joshua and you know a little bit about myself I found my way into education through an interesting route I graduated Eastern Washington University with a Creative Writing degree in anthropology degree and then I traveled a bit and when I came back I started working in the medical profession I was a pharmaceutical technician and I lived and worked in Haiti for a while after the earthquake and I was a pharmacist down there so I got to work in a clinic and help people heal and in the evening hours my translators wanted to learn more English so I would teach them English and I sort of built a an impromptu school there and when I came back here I found that I loved teaching more than than working in medicine not just healing bodies but growing minds and and educating so I wound up doing this and I've taught for the last six years here and and now I'm the director so I love this job so much and I'm really excited to be here with you guys today and teach this class this is one of my favorite classes I've ever taught so I will go ahead and start the lesson for you I'm gonna switch over here I'm gonna get a little bit smaller and down in the corner for you here we are okay so this is the lesson that we're gonna go over yesterday we talked about different types of sentences and how to create those sentences but today I want to talk about what is the most important sentence of any academic essay it's called the thesis statement you see that right here thesis statement and I'll tell you that when I was in university as a freshman taking basic classes the thesis statement was such a hard thing to understand because I heard the word over and over and over and wasn't quite sure what to think about it so I'd like to just first define for me what thesis statement is when I think of a thesis statement I think of the most important thing most important sentence in the entire essay what your main point is and one way to think about it is if you use Twitter or Weibo or anything where you only have limited characters text messages sometimes you have to choose your words carefully and you have to get to the main point you have to let your your reader your audience know exactly what you mean as clearly and concisely as possible so if your phone was about to die and you're having this conversation with a friend and you realize you have to give them all the important information really quickly in a short message that's what the thesis statement would be the main point of your entire academic argument and when I say argument as an academic argument I don't mean yelling back and forth or arguing with the roommate about who didn't do the dishes I mean stating your information with evidence and and proving your point in your writing that's the idea of academic writing is convincing someone why the information you are giving them is correct and your main point is your thesis statement so hello hello uh Anwar and warrant welcome to the class and so as we as we go through here I want you to remember and keep in mind that the thesis statement is your absolute most important information and it goes in a specific place in a basic English essay and we'll go over that in a moment so the first the first sentence as you've seen the lesson here of an introduction of either a lecture or a reading and a reading of course is is something that someone wrote reading and writing are so interconnected you cannot have one without the other if you write something generally you write it because you want someone to read it even if it's your journal or blog you're going to read it later so you are the audience so when anything is written we keep our reader in mind and we want to give them the best information possible and a lecture or a presentation is no different it's organized in the same way so when we talk about lectures or presentations or academic essays they have the same basic format so the first sentence of an introduction is a general statement that is designed to introduce the broad topic the the main idea in general though the general idea so are we talking about sports or human rights or are we trying to get a law passed or a law eliminated what is the purpose so if I was writing about freedom of speech in my country and how important that is in the USA that's a very big tenant a big facet of our culture so if I'm writing about this I'll just start talking about freedom in my first sentence there to introduce the the general idea and it prepares for the second sentence the thesis statement which tells the reader or listener if it's a presentation or a lecture what my main point is we listen and look for examples of general statement and thesis statement from exercises and other lessons that will teach in this class but for now we're just going to go over what a thesis statement is and how to identify it and how to create a strong effective thesis statement so number one here I'm gonna play this short listening and see if I see if you can hear this here number one how many people here right hand right well put up your right hand okay that seems to follow the iLab who have says that about 90 percent because they're right here right as they're dumping a dominant hand how does house left that part of that mine or mine or affected life your life we'll take a look at helping let's continue doing that daily lives remain convenience is a social problem statement after that we'll discuss some of the reasons why sighs left handed okay so hopefully you heard that all right and please let me know in the chat if you haven't we can always replay that again if you need a second listen the the essence of that listening was the majority of the people of the people in the world are right-handed now the majority 90% is what the listening said and that's the majority the bulk the larger portion of people in the world is that the general statement or the thesis statement I'd like to know if you're in the chat there let me know do you think that is the general statement or the thesis statement and while you're thinking about it while you are thinking about it I will sorry just taking care of something over there I had some papers in my way while you're thinking about that I'm going to read the next sentence here that was in the listening the listening talks about how people's lives are affected by left handedness and what some of the causes are so that's sort of a definition of what we heard it's it's describing it's a summary so think about that is that a general statement or a thesis statement and I'll check out the chat here and see see what I guess is our one so you you Jenna juice you Jenna juice I'm sorry if I'm saying your name wrong but you say thesis actually by talking about a general concept like a statement where we give information that general general truth that would be a general statement we're not quite to the thesis yet the thesis is going to be more specific it's going to be a main point or argument sometimes for or against something so let's let's look at a second example here let's listen to this and and then we'll talk more about thesis and general statement number two last time we were talking about ecosystems and how organisms plant or animal all work together in a big cycle today we'll continue with this idea by explaining a specific type of relationship that exists within ecosystems regarding food chains and the hierarchy of who eats who which is called a trophic relationship that's T R o P H I see trophic I'll use an example of marine life in this case and we'll show how as you can guess the big fish eat the little fish but of course it's a bit more complex than that first listening again because I think the audio was a little strange there at first and I'm sorry about that we're doing these practice ones so we can sort out all of these things so that the class if you join is going to be perfect and all the audio will work excellently so I'm going to replay the first example we had once again and we can compare it to that second example so here is that number one how many people here are right-handed well put up your right hand if you are okay that seems to follow the actual average which says that about 90% of the population has the right hand as their dominant hand how does being left-handed part of that minority affect your life we'll take a look at how being left-handed has continued to affect people's daily lives from inconveniences to social problems they may have after that we'll discuss some of the reasons why scientists believe left handedness occurs in the first place alright so hopefully you got another listen there and that will be helpful as well for those viewers who just joined it looks like Fetty welcome good to have you here and earlier it looks like Anita I believe thought that the first one was general statement Anita you're correct that's a general statement the first listening there that we just replayed the majority of people in the world are right-handed is it is a general statement the next one which is in an ecosystem organisms cooperate with each other in a cycle again this is more detailed information it's not a thesis yet it's it's an explanation of what the topic might be about the listening talks about trophic relationships in the food chain and when I think of the word trophic which is a good academic word again this is English for academic purposes trophic I picture a small fish being eaten by a larger fish being eaten by a larger fish that is a trophic system where there is a food chain we would also say there's another example here we're going to listen to that talks about the disappearance of bees threatening agriculture and just in case we're still learning some vocab here before I play the listening I'll define some of these words for you we have the adverb recently which means near to this time so it's an it's a new event something that is new happening disappearance that is when something completely is removed from an environment or a situation I was think of a magician throwing a smoke bomb and disappearing I could disappear right now just by boom disappearance I'm gone right reappearance I'm back that is disappearance and bees bees are those animals I'll give you an image here many of you probably know bees but they are very important to our ecosystem too pollinating plants and creating crops so this is the bee what we're talking about back to our lesson here so the disappearance of bees is threatening threatening threaten is when you say or do or show a motion or an event that might cause harm will probably cause harm to someone or something that's to threaten if you tell someone I'm going to to hit you that would be to threaten them with with violence so never do that it's peace only right an agriculture lastly agriculture is the production of food so wheat or corn or any number of crops rice creating these crops to feed people or animals is agriculture so let's go ahead and listen to this once again and and we'll here and then and talk about it in the chat so feel free to ask questions or if you want more explanation send a message in the chat there number three there has been a lot in the news lately about bees and the fact that they seem to be disappearing which is a great threat to agriculture around the world we'll discuss that in another lecture but before we do let's answer some basic questions about bees and what they do for us the first question to answer is how bees assists the process of flower pollination and help plants grow what do they give and take from the flowers themselves a second that I think more amazing aspect is how these bees communicate when one finds a flower how does he tell the rest of the hive where it is all right okay so in that listening we heard a new topic so I'd like to point out that all of these are different topics but there are examples of a small part of a bigger writing sample like an academic essay or lecture so that's what we're practicing with today that's what we're looking at as as we move forward onto another example and welcome Yanina welcome you Nina that's a good yes thesis and and we'll talk more about this we're gonna look at examples so that we have examples to talk about when we start to define thesis versus general statement so I love the the input and keep the questions coming we have Zack in there that you can talk to and if I miss anything he will pass that along to me so please ask all the questions you want as a teacher I love questions and answering any explanations you might want so number four we're going to talk about science or sociology and biology sociology any time you see the suffix ology it means the study of biology geology sociology is the study of society so things that make society run well cultures groups of people that live together and biology this is the study of life bio the prefix bio means life so life and the study of biology is the study of life and they are two different subjects so let's listen to this one and we'll have another example to talk about in just a bit number four sociology and biology are two seemingly very separate disciplines and it's hard to imagine studying both together let alone taking a course with both yet here we are in sociobiology 101 welcome I suppose the first thing we need to do before we begin our main lecture is discuss the nature of sociobiology and a bit of the history as to how it was created once we have that background we'll be more prepared to look at some examples of the kinds of research and topics that socio biologists work with you you you you you I'm so sorry there I had a little error I didn't click the mic back so you weren't able to hear what I was saying there I'll repeat everything I just said I said Anita had a very good question she asked is a thesis is not good to announce our general topic to readers or listeners you're correct Anita we don't use the thesis to announce the general topic that's the general statement so what we do is we we start with a general statement and we build up to the thesis which will be on the same topic but it is generally an argument or a call to action or asking someone to do something or change something this is the thesis this is the purpose of writing it's not general it's very specific and it's usually a strong sentence we often use modal's of obligation like must or should to to show the strength of that thesis statement and I'll go over examples in just a moment I will type some up for you based on these subjects so our fifth example is talking about a lack of cleanliness and that it can cause illness in patients a lack of cleanliness this means no cleanliness so early on in medicine since earlier I let you know I used to work in medicine it's been argued that the most important invention or or just change in practice in medicine was cleanliness washing your hands because you can get sick if you are in the hospital and someone does not wash their hands so it's very important so a lack of cleanliness can cause illness in patients and this listening will talk about how it was discovered that cleanliness is related to illness and what modern hospitals so so current new hospitals do to make sure they can clean enough so let's listen to this so we have another example to talk about and then we will go over some general statements ideas and we will write some thesis statements as well so let's listen to this one here number five one of the greatest achievements in medical technology was what heart transplants x-ray machines well you may be surprised that one of the most important steps forward was getting physicians to wash their hands and the fact that doctors realize the connection between germs and illness the history of how this was discovered is quite interesting so we'll touch on that slightly before getting into more scientific details about how modern hospitals work to ensure that everything in their environment is as clean as possible alright so there's one more example for us and we had some new viewers join in hi Jose how's it going Hannah glad you're here with us Rosa welcome back it's good to have you here and it looks like Yap Rock I hope I'm saying your name correctly welcome welcome happy to have you here and it looks like we are getting some nice questions Rosa says is writing the thesis statement the subject of the class for this class we are simply describing thesis statements and yes we're going to write some thesis statements based on these subjects that we've listened to we are also going to talk about general statements to introduce the general idea and talk about the difference between the two I think I'll restate what I said in the beginning here for those of you who just joined that a thesis statement is the most important sentence in an essay and I'm going to say sentence when when you go on to master's degrees or you want to get a doctoral degree sometimes a thesis can be multiple sentences or a paragraph or two but for general purposes if you enter a four-year university in an english-speaking school a thesis statement will be a single sentence in your essay a multi paragraph essay so yes we're going to write some and talk about the importance of it because without a strong thesis statement a lecture or a presentation or an essay sort of falls apart so it's very important that we learn how to identify what a thesis should look like and then when it comes time to write an essay we write a strong thesis it's it's very important in academic writing so we noticed the general statement does not introduce a great deal of information it simply prepares the reader or listener for the thesis statement so we could make guesses about what these theses statements are but we we don't really know what the argument is we simply know the topic we know what the idea is so in example one up here the idea was people being left-handed or right-handed the majority of the people in the world are right-handed so we can make a guess about what the writer might want to argue what point they might want to make but we don't know yet we only know the general topic the second example is about organisms cooperating with each other in an ecosystem and we did here trophic relationships so it's a specific type of ecosystem and it's a specific aspect of that ecosystem but we still don't know what the thesis is so all of these were general statements introducing the topic number three was about the disappearance of bees and the effect on agriculture which if you remember is anytime we grow food we grow crops like wheat or corn for feeding animals and people so that's the general idea but we don't yet know what the thesis statement is let's see here Roza it looks like has another another question here do we use thesis statement when we speak I thought we only use it when we write essays that's a great question Rosa thank you for that earlier in the stream I had mentioned that the basic outline for an academic essay or a presentation or lecturer is essentially the same we outline them the same way we introduce the topic in a general way and we build up to our specific argument and in an academic argument we need to make a strong claim we need to make a call to action or change or prove a point but then we have to defend it with facts and information real statistics or examples that can be proven and this is to create progress in technology and any type of learning so as we grow all over the world I mean everyone here listening is from many different countries and we're all trying to collectively grow in technology such as this livestream which is amazing we can have a class with students from all over the world this happens because people are thoughtful about their information and they use facts and ideas to to grow in knowledge in progress so it's very important that we create a strong thesis that can prove a point and we defend it by giving information that backs up our thesis that supports it so that's a great question but to answer it more succinctly yes we do use a thesis in speaking in a lecture or in a presentation but generally anyone giving a lecture or presentation has written out a plan beforehand so they've written their thesis they just memorized it and then speak it so great question thank you for that let's see here number four talked about sociology and biology being different fields of study which they are the study of society and the study of biology and that's introducing the general topic the general idea we're going to talk about these two things and you might make a guess that someone is going to write a thesis that connects those two things if we have two things that are very different as a general statement there must be some sort of connection later on so that would be my guess for the thesis statement the last one here is about the cleanliness in medicine and how that helps patients and doctors do good work I mean not let patients get more sick or worse die because of simply not washing your hands so very important but again a lack of cleanliness is not a thesis statement it's a general idea it's a concept and we're gonna think more about it we're gonna learn more about it in this essay or lecture all of these are different topics different essays or different lectures but they're examples of general statements so as we continue on here all thesis statements follow a similar pattern we use noun clauses to introduce the main ideas and noun clauses are a form of subordinate clause and they begin with a question word a relative pronoun like what why who or how and often are used in reported speech so reported speech is where you report what someone else said for example if if Neil said it is very important to study verbs and nouns if I report that speech to someone else like Nicole I would say Neil said that it is very important to study verbs and nouns or whatever I just said we we use those relative pronouns like question words or the words that to introduce noun clauses so these patterns we can see right here the listening talks about how people's lives are affected by their left handedness the listening talks about what trophic relationships are the listening talks about how plan are helped by bees or the listening talks about what socio biologists research and study that combination so these are not proper noun clauses and not questions but it is a common pattern that you will see in academic writing so we're going to go through a bit of an exercise here in a bit and we're going to think about the reading and listening introductions we well these are the same ones we've worked on in another lesson in our main class which you can access and join if you like we'll give you the link for that later but you can sign up for our closed class and get our full attention and feedback from me every Tuesday and Thursday at 1:00 p.m. so think about that and because this is part of a bigger class some of the directions in here won't pertain right now but once you're in the closed class they will so if we look at this paragraph and I'm just going to read this to you Chinese and Western cultures existed quite independently from each other in the past and as a result many aspects of each have evolved such that they are quite different especially in areas like medical systems there are many contrasts between these two systems but the majority involve first how patients illness illnesses are viewed and diagnosed then what subsequent forms or treatment physicians use and what overall goals they have so we're gonna we're gonna think about this paragraph and come back to it later so I have the exercise here for us and we're gonna do these together I invite you to to comment and to try to do these sentences as we go but I'll sort of type them and if you can type them faster than me in the comments please do the first one is I went out oh excuse me I have the wrong document up there I apologize here we are hmm and that is the wrong one - okay let me just go back here and we're going to we're going to type up some general statements and thesis statements for those topics we just reviewed so let's go through them one by one and I'm going to give you a little bit of time here to come up with what you think might be a thesis statement now remember these are the general topics so we could argue any thesis we want and we would we would spend time doing research and finding information to back up our thesis statement for example if my general topic was freedom is very important in American culture now I talked about this in the beginning it's just a general subject it's part of my culture and it's very important but this is not a thesis statement this is a general statement it only talks about freedom in American culture it doesn't have a call to action or an argument that I can defend I need a specific purpose for writing remember when I said if your phone is dying and you only have enough time to text message your friend one sentence before it shuts off what would you choose to text that person based on that conversation so if my main conversation idea is freedom but I have one point to make one purpose one argument I want to have my listener or reader understand what would that be so this would be an example of a general statement and to give you an example of a thesis statement my purpose about talking about freedom might be because I want to prove the point that for political growth and change freedom of speech is essential and we must preserve it at all costs I'm gonna change this here to a semicolon so this would be an example of my thesis my main argument the point that I want to prove so my general statement is about freedom but my thesis statement is more specific it talks about a specific form of freedom of course we have lots of different kinds of freedom freedom to walk down the street freedom to buy a car drive a car there are many freedoms we have here in American culture but I want to talk about specifically freedom of speech and how important it is I use the modal here must I use the word essential essential we can think of like water for life it's essential right so there's a lot of strong language here that proves my my argument and of course if I'm writing an entire essay I'll have many examples and evidence and supports and quotations but this would be one example of a possible thesis statement based on the general idea of freedom in American culture so as we go forward I'm going to and it looks like Rosa you're left-handed perfect so this is a perfect example for the first subject which is left handedness and right-handedness so I'm going to copy over this general statements and I'm going to put it right here and mark it and I'm going to give you a little bit of time to think about what a thesis statement might be what might you want to argue in an essay and proved with evidence and support based on this general idea so I'll give you a couple minutes and and think about it comment in the section and as you comment I will go ahead and write those down on this document for you okay so we're back here we had one good suggestion for a potential thesis for this general concept this general statement and that came from ingly see I'm sorry Gil easy I may be saying your name wrong and again feel free to correct me tell me how to pronounce that but your sentence was living in a right handed world could be hard now I like this idea I like this argument of difficulty in a right handed world I might expand on this and make it a little bit stronger by changing some of the language and adding a little bit as well I would say for a left-handed person living in a right-handed world is hard because and I would add information now you don't have to write it exactly as I did this is just what I came up with based on your idea but when we say could be hard could is not a very strong modal it's possibility but it's not strong possibility it's like the second conditional like it might be hard maybe with theses we want them to be very strong very direct and we should say our points concretely and make it an imperative something that we believe is true so I would change that language a little bit I would not use could I would say is for a left-handed person living in a right-handed world is hard and that is still a bit too general for a thesis statement we would want more reason why because or we could pick a specific reason white is hard and focus simply on one reason or we could try to tackle many reasons but I always tell my students when they choose the topics for their essays if it seems easy to choose a general topic like sports or left-handedness is even fairly general but we would want to choose something really specific the more specific your topic is the easier it is to write your argument so try to choose specific topics for your essays it will help and it seems a little scary and like you won't have enough to write but you can write hundreds of pages on one very very specific topic so make them strong statements and make them very specific in your arguments it looks like we have a few more people here commenting so Mary Ann hi welcome and third three no three note I believe welcome hello how are you your statement is being right-handed in Africa might be the result of cultural and religious aspects and and you're right there is cultural aspects to right and left handedness and that's a fascinating topic I'd love to talk about it but I'm going to focus on thesis and general statement but great comment keep the comments coming keep the questions coming and it looks like Kieran Kieran welcome hi it's good to have you here and it looks like okay so Kernan Kieran excuse me Kiran has a good comment there so that's the reason why all manufacturing companies design their products with that fact in mind and you're right that would be a good argument many things in in our world are designed for right-handed people so if we wanted to make this this argument here this is statement we could give the reason that manufacturing companies cater to right-handed people and they do not think of left-handed people scissors for example for like cutting paper or notebooks if you if you write in a notebook the binding is usually on the left hand side in english-speaking countries at least because we write from left to right and most people are right-handed this makes it very difficult for left-handed people so that would be a good specific argument to make and you could include that in your thesis statement so we could add that right now we could say for a left-handed person living in a right-handed world is hard because manufacturers cater to right-handed people I'm really glad you added that and and you two students working together from different countries with me have created a strong thesis statement if a student came to me and said they wanted to write on this topic I would be very excited to read their essay and and the research that they do to prove this thesis statement that's great thank you so much Rosa points out that computer mice are for right-handed people also these are great examples you could include in the bulk of your essay the the large part of your essay one paragraph could be about each individual item that we use often that are designed for right-handed people and each of those things would create difficulty in someone's life if they were left-handed so good point Rosa thank you for pointing that out and let's see here yes those are those are great statements also right and left-handed people and creativity wonderful but I'm going to focus again back on our arguments here for our thesis statements oh I'm sorry three fear no fear no I will try to pronounce your name correctly if you want to type it phonetically if you know what phonetic is I will try to pronounce that correctly for you for example my name is Joshua but to to write it phonetically so that someone might understand how to pronounce it I might write JA Xu right Joshua and and that can help us so if you want to do that I will work it pronouncing your name correctly because I'm glad you're here and studying with us on smart live English for academic purposes it looks like Juan is here as well Juan welcome hi and I he says he loves the idea for English for academic purposes thank you I love it too this is such a fun class to teach and I think it's really important for all English learners if you want to go to university or college or simply communicate effectively in English this is a great class as a teacher I feel like I get to relearn a lot all the time and keep my English good and sharp this class is great so thank you I appreciate that tree gnomes Reno okay I will work on that pronunciation okay so moving on to our second example that we talked about and listen to earlier about a trophic ecosystem so again trophic is where one animal eats another animal eats another animal it's a food chain we would call it and I'm gonna copy over this general statement again general statements introduced the main idea the general topic of an essay and it's very broad it's a big topic that is not a thesis statement it's just an idea it's as if you went to a friend's house and you said you know I'd really like to talk about sports and then you'd have a conversation and eventually that conversation might lead to you making a strong statement like baseball is the best sport in the world now most of you would probably disagree with me there I know the world loves football and and we call it soccer here in the USA but I could make that statement and then you could tell me no no football is the best sport in the world and we could each create academic arguments about that we could defend our opinion with facts there are more football fans in the world than baseball fans it's a good fact to include so your strong statement would be your thesis statement and that is what your whole lecture conversation presentation or essay is about is that one strong statement you make okay so it looks like Seoul you're just joining us it's okay if you're late we'll be here every Tuesday and Thursday at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time here in Spokane Washington USA so glad you're here thank you for joining and Mary Ann hi hi there so let's take a couple minutes and we'll think about potential thesis statements about this ecosystem and and you could use trophic in there if you like cuz that was in listening but you can create any sort of thesis you want we don't have to write a whole essay today but take a couple minutes and think of a thesis statement for this general statement and we'll see what we can come up with here so take two minutes and think about what might be a good thesis statement put it in the comments and I will type it here for you alright I'm back here so we have a couple submissions so it looks like Engel easy and Glee Z thank you for your submission there and Kieran also thank you for your submission it looks like one has one there too I'll add that in there for you want okay so thank you very much for these these submissions for thesis statements and Jose Jose's in there as well thank you Jose typing this here for you and I've made just small Corrections here in grammar and subject verb agreement so so mine that you can take a look at the comparison between my sentence and yours but thank you so much these are great submissions we love questions and and love you guys making comments in the chat thank you it's wonderful so let's take a look at this our main idea our general statement is in an ecosystem organisms cooperate with each other in a cycle so we're just talking about an ecosystem and right general this is our our general determiner if it was the that would be more specific and that would be more appropriate in a thesis statement something specific a specific argument so this is our general statement and these proposed theses you're on the right track you're trying to become more specific much of this is still general so you're building up there but we want to get to a very strong argument on your welcome Karen Karen thank you yeah thank you you're welcome for the corrections on your sentence they're happy to I love to make corrections and and okay we have one more submission here that I'll copy over because thank you three no and I'll work on pronouncing name correctly I learned that yours is right here although an ecosystem may seem terrific it is often due to the impact of the surroundings okay so these are great ideas and this would be these would be great ideas to include in the essay I don't quite see a thesis statement yet though we need something very specific a specific argument so let's look at the first one here the world is the largest ecosystem to live in I love that idea that's such a cool concept in my opinion that would make a very good general statement we want to talk about something more specific than that so the general statement was organisms cooperating with each other so what type of situations would organisms cooperate with each other where if you took one organism out none of the others would work one example is the bees from our lesson example without bees we cannot produce agriculture but in a trophic system where animals eat one another if one animal is gone and that's the food source for a different animal then that animal will also die and so on and so forth so what we would want to do is choose a specific example of one of these ecosystems there's so many ecosystems in the world there's rain forests and there's oceanic ecosystems fish and plankton and sea life we would want to try to become to narrow our idea down to smaller and smaller and smaller until we have one really strong argument so that's the idea so it's still a little bit too general but you could continue to work on it and grow the idea until it became very specific this top one here I missed I'm sorry all organisms help to maintain the energy balance in an ecosystem again you're going in the right direction but we want to be more specific so can you think of one example of that could you think of an energy balance that would not work where it would be disrupted if if the system was not complete if it wasn't a complete system another example here organisms have to cooperate if they want to survive again I would love to see a specific example can you think of organisms that do cooperate that you're familiar with maybe in your home country or something you've seen in a documentary or on television what is one example that you might want to make an argument about and we could also talk about the ecosystem being disrupted in other ways - through pollution and again I would not encourage a student to write a whole essay on pollution because that's such a big idea I would encourage them to write about air pollution or oil or garbage pollution in the sea make it more specific and even if they said garbage pollution in the sea I would ask them questions like where does that garbage come from who is putting it there and we would try to narrow our focus until we had one strong arguments maybe there's one company that that puts a lot of garbage in the ocean and we want that company to stop so we're gonna come up with an academic essay that argues that that should stop Rosa has a question here how do I write a good thesis statement when I don't have enough information about the subject that's a great question Rosa remember earlier I said writing and reading are very closely connected if you write something you want someone to read it well in academics anytime you write an essay you're going to read a lot of information we have to find true facts and arguments and statistics or quotes to prove our points and those facts cannot come from anywhere we can't just you know Google and and pick the first thing we find we have to talk about credible sources which is a whole nother lesson we'll talk about another day where to find good information but the truth is Rosa you're going to read a lot if you write academic essays so if you don't have enough information time to go to the library or talk to your teachers and do research together and in this class this closed English for academic purposes we do have readings and we do have information that you will get to read and learn more about subjects as you learn to write these essays and strong thesis statements so so join the class and I'll be happy to answer that question in more detail later on great question though thank you for that and keep those questions coming in the chat we have a little bit of time left here I'll just try to close off with these last two great suggestions thank you again from our students in chat the organism cooperates to have an ecosystem balance also right track you're doing the right thing balance think of an example where is that balance what type of creatures interact with each other and create a balance and then you'll be closer to your thesis statement and then lastly I believe this was Jose our although an ecosystem may seem terrific it is often due to the impact of the surroundings so this is a perfect example of my pollution example the surroundings maybe there's a factory or air pollution or cities being built and destroying that ecosystem and that's the reason so you would focus in on that impact so due to the impact of the surroundings what is that impact that's my question for you what is that impact what is creating an impact and then you will be closer to your thesis statement and soul an example from your country here oh is solar from Ecuador wonderful beautiful country yeah and you're talking about some forms of oil pollution and an exploitation of environment so that is close to something that you could write in an academic essay so that would be a good topic we have to go for now thank you so much for joining us this has been great I really appreciate all the comments I really hope to see you next week as well this class will be Tuesday next week at the same time 1 o'clock p.m. Eastern Standard Time I'm gonna get out of the lesson here really quickly and so you can see see me here so I can thank you guys in in person big screen thank you so much for all your comments it was wonderful and like I said we have these classes for another week or so on the 19th the closed class will start we'll be teaching it right out of this studio here in Spokane Washington at the Spokane College of English language and if you if you tuned in late I'm Joshua I'll be your teacher so you can sign up check out our links on the smart live YouTube channel and we're on Facebook as well you can find me or our wonderful moderator Zac and send us a facebook message we'll add you as a friend this has been great and we hope to see you again next week so thank you so much and yeah tune in again thanks you you

Channel: Smrt English

Views: 34,632

Rating: 4.8899674 out of 5

Keywords: English, English Lesson, Live English, English Class, Articles, University preparation, writing, reading, listening

Id: FzUKu5le3sM

Length: 64min 19sec (3859 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 01 2016