Form and Content in a Science Writing
Curriculum
Tom GALLY

The separation of form from content—that is, the abstraction of
consistent patterns, rules, and principles from a seeming diversity of empirical entities—is a fundamental component of humanmental activity and essential to intellectual and social progress.
Whether they are mathematical patterns observed in physicalphenomena, principles of social organization derived throughexperience with cooperation and conflict, or grammatical rules
inferred from a corpus of texts, abstract forms that have been
distilled and separated from concrete realities enable those realities to be better understood, manipulated, and predicted. But
this process of abstraction, however necessary it may be to mental comprehension and practical applications, often comes with a
cost: the neglect of individual variations which, in their diversity
or complexity, interfere with the formation of generalizations but
which nevertheless are real and often turn out to be significant inways not immediately apparent. This paper, after discussing
briefly a few instances of this conflict between form and content
in other realms, focuses on an area of particular interest to readers of this journal—the teaching of academic writing in English
to speakers of other languages—and presents an example of an
academic writing curriculum for which it has been possible forcontent to be effectively integrated with form.

Form and Content in Mathematics, Politics, and Language
From the early observation that the eyes in a person’s head, thewings on a bird, and a pair of stones on the ground all shared asimilar property—the property of being two in number—andthat this property was similar to properties of other groups of95

KOMABA JOURNAL OF ENGLISH EDUCATION

things—the quantities three, four, five, etc.—and that these properties themselves could be understood and manipulated independently of those eyes, wings, or stones, the science of arithmetic was born. As this abstract notion of number was observed tohave properties similar to other abstract notions, such as shapeand order, higher and higher levels of abstraction arose and further fields of study such as algebra, real analysis, and computational theory emerged, forming eventually today’s grand edificeof mathematics. So vast are both the practical and the aesthetic
benefits of mathematics that it may be difficult to imagine what
the negative aspects of this multiple abstraction might be, but acost does exist in the context of education. Although most children are able to learn numbers and counting at an early age andsoon become able to think of a concept like “seven” without
imagining “seven apples” or “seven people,” as they progress
through their mathematical education, with arithmetic being
abstracted into algebra and shapes into geometry, many, eventually most, children and teenagers lose interest in mathematics.
Part of the reason for this loss of interest is, of course, higher
mathematics’ inherent complexity and difficulty, but an equallylarge factor, as least to judge from the comments of people who
say they do not like mathematics, is the widening separation, as
one advances through the curriculum, between the abstract
forms of mathematics and the tangible content of everyday experience. Mathematics educators are aware of this problem, ofcourse, and have devised many ingenious pedagogical methods
for guiding and motivating students, such as by having young
children use blocks and counters to learn the concepts of number, addition, and subtraction or having older learners use algebra to solve real-world problems. Nevertheless, as the gulf
between the abstract concepts and the concrete reality widens
and there no longer seems to be an observable entity that intuitively corresponds to a concept such as a complex function or an
infinite-dimensional vector space, such teaching techniques
become increasingly difficult to devise. For people whose lives
are rooted in the messily tactile and visible, invisible mathematical concepts, despite—or because of—their pristine clarity,
become impossible to grasp.
In the realm of politics and social organization, the cost of
abstraction can be even higher. The principles and practices of96

FORM AND CONTENT IN A SCIENCE WRITING CURRICULUM

democratic government, for example, depend on the superordination of abstract principles to the specific personalities, needs,
and desires of individual human beings—thus John Adams’
description of a republic as “a government of laws, and not ofmen” (1775/1819, p. 84). While democracy arose out of thegreater failings of other forms of government, particularly thoseof feudalism and inherited monarchy, in which the whims anddesires of individual lords and monarchs took priority overabstract notions such as private property or legal procedure,
democratic government bears a converse cost, in which theneeds and wants of the individual human being are subsumed toabstract laws and procedures. Much effort has been made tobridge this conflict between the flesh-and-blood individual andthe ideals of democracy and the rule of law, such as throughrestrictions on the government’s ability to imprison individuals
or to seize private property, but no observer of today’s democratic governments would say that those conflicts have been
completely resolved. The shift to higher levels of abstraction,
however well-intentioned, inevitably leads to inadequate consideration of the concrete.
The same applies to the study of language, in which the distinct utterances of many individual speakers over time are classified into neat, abstract entities such as phonemes, words, andgrammatical structures. It is indeed the use of such concepts thatmakes it possible to discuss, teach, and learn languages efficiently. However, as this writer has argued elsewhere, that process inevitably obscures the actual variation in language production: what is regarded as a single sound is in fact, in articulation
and acoustics, different each time it is uttered (Gally, 2010a, pp.
12–14), and the “same” word can have a different meaning every
time it is used (Gally, 2010b, pp. 88–95). It would be impossible
in practice to discuss language without abstracting a layer ofconceptual structure to transcend the multitude of individual
variations, but that process of abstraction also obscures theorganic, idiosyncratic way in which human beings actually use
language.

The Slant Toward Form in the Teaching of Academic Writing
The impetus for the above discursion on the problems posed by97

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formalist approaches was a re-examination of several textbooks
on English academic writing for speakers of other languages.
One of those texts was the widely used Academic Writing for
Graduate Students: Essential Tasks and Skills by John M. Swales andChristine B. Feak of the University of Michigan (2nd edition,2004), a well-organized book that contains much useful information about how to write academic papers and theses in English.
Its first unit, “An Approach to Academic Writing,” begins with aclear exposition with useful examples of some considerations
that should go into any academic writing project: “audience,
purpose, organization, style, flow, and presentation” (p. 7). Laterunits cover matters such as the organization of different types oftexts, including those that proceed from general topics to specificexamples or those that describe problems and solutions, and thewriting of summaries or critiques. Scattered throughout the bookare many lessons on language use, including how to write definitions of various types, where to put adverbs in sentences, andwhat expressions to use to strengthen or weaken a claim. With
varying degrees of emphasis, other academic writing textbooks(such as Oshima & Hogue, 1999; Rossiter & Department of English, 2004; Kluge & Taylor, 2007; Gally, 2008; Cargill & O’Conner,
2009; Tajino, Stewart, & Dalksy, 2010) focus on similar matters—
in other words, on matters of form. If content—that is, the actual
information, arguments, and conclusions contained in an academic paper—is discussed, it is only in passing, such as in sample texts or in Swales and Feak’s very brief discussion of “creating a research space” (pp. 243–244). As so many textbooks give
much greater emphasis to form over content, it seems likely thatmost academic writing classes in universities have a similaremphasis.
There are practical reasons for this content-independent
approach. One is that it is much easier to teach and learn a few
general principles, such as types of paragraph structures or useful words for indicating transitions, if they have been abstracted
and separated from the vast multitude of possible content. This
principle, of course, applies similarly to other types of abstraction for pedagogical purposes as well. But academic writing possesses another characteristic that drives the separation of form
from content even more strongly: the high degree of specialization in academic fields and the difficulty textbook readers or98

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writing-class students would have trying to read and discussgenuine academic research in a variety of fields. Swales and Feakstate in passing (p. 4) that while “it is often believed that disciplinary courses are ‘better’ or ‘more efficient,’ ” they preferclasses in which students come from a variety of disciplines. One
reason they cite is the camaraderie that develops among students from different departments at a university, students who
would normally have little opportunity to meet and interact.
More significantly, for the purposes of this study, they argue thata multidisciplinary class is superior because it “turns attention
away from whether the information or content in a text is ‘correct’ toward questions of rhetoric and language” (p. 4). Ignoring
for the moment the revealing scare quotes around the word “correct,” one wonders in which disciplines and at what institutions
it would be possible to assemble enough graduate students who
understand the content of each other’s research papers wellenough to evaluate the correctness of their content. Even in a
relatively well-defined field such as economics or chemistry,
researchers working at the cutting edge are rarely able to fully
understand, let alone assess the validity of, other papers in theirfield unless their subspecializations match nearly precisely.
Swales and Feak’s arguments for the superiority of their multidisciplinary approach to academic writing seem less convincing
than the practical barriers to a monodisciplinary approach.
But whatever the reason for separation of form from content
in the teaching of academic writing, this separation has serious
implications. The most important is that the primary purpose ofacademic research is to acquire or develop new knowledge about
specific real or mental entities, whether the process of a chemical
reaction, the cognitive behavior of human infants, or the implications of an economic theory. Researchers write about theirresearch in order to convey that knowledge to others and to convince their readers of its importance and—despite Swales andFeak’s apparent disdain—of its correctness. While the tools
offered by academic writing textbooks—information about how
to organize a paper into sections, how to structure paragraphs,
or how to indicate transitions between sentences—are useful tothose ends, scholars do not write papers in order demonstrate
their ability to compose topic sentences, write discussion sections, or select sentential adverbs, and they do not read others’99KOMABA JOURNAL OF ENGLISH EDUCATION

research writing in order to enjoy those papers’ organization orsentence structure. It is the content of the research, and that content’s validity, that drives both scholarship and writing aboutscholarship, and teaching of academic writing that downplays
content inevitably runs the risk of emphasizing the peripheral at
the expense of the central.1
This issue is particularly crucial for students early in theiracademic careers. While doctoral students, for example, havebeen immersed for some years in the methodologies and argumentation of their specializations and thus should be learning toevaluate for themselves whether the content of their writing iscorrect within the framework of those fields, students at an earlier stage of academic study, such as those targeted by Rossiter &Department of English (2004) and Gally (2008), have only justbegun to be exposed to academic modes of information collection, analysis, and argumentation. A typical first-year undergraduate generally has not yet learned how to evaluate thevalidity of data or reasoning in any particular academic field.
While textbooks and teachers can give general advice in such
regard, it must often be limited to common sense, which is insufficient for most fields, or to arguments for authority, such as
Tajino, Stewart, & Dalksy’s blanket prohibition on the use of
Wikipedia as a source (2010, p. 96). The modes of argumentationthat are regarded as valid in specific academic fields are particularly resistant to treatment in mixed-major writing classes, as
writing teachers are unlikely to be familiar enough with argumentation techniques in any fields outside their own to offer
useful guidance to their students. But it is primarily in its argumentation where academic research succeeds or fails, and the
reduction of argumentation in academic writing classes to superficial elements such as paragraph structure or transition words
leaves students with a dangerously incomplete introduction towhat scholars are actually trying to do when they write academic texts.

Form and Content in the ALESS Program
When the Active Learning of English for Science Students(ALESS) classes began in the College of Arts and Sciences at the
University of Tokyo in April 2008, the initial curriculum, which
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FORM AND CONTENT IN A SCIENCE WRITING CURRICULUM

had been prepared by Paul Rossiter and this writer, was largely
based on form.2 The first-year undergraduates were guided
through a discovery of the basic components of scientific papers,
particularly the papers’ Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRaD) structure, and they worked through exerciseson language-focused topics such as types of paragraphs (enumerative, sequential, and contrastive), topic sentences, information flow in sentences, and the use of pronouns in scientific writing. The writing process was also emphasized, particularly
rewriting and peer review, and some attention was paid to rhetoric in a unit on hedging and boosting (that is, expressions indicating various degrees of strength in the assertions made by thewriter). Even when the actual content and arguments of scientific papers were considered, such as in the reading of short
research papers taken from the journal Nature, the focus was noton the scientific validity and implications of the papers’ assertions but on the structure of their texts.
For example, in the sixth week of the course, students wereshown the following paragraph, which was adapted from theintroductory paragraph (which also served as the abstract) of a
research paper from Nature titled “Avoidance of disease by social
lobsters” (Behringer, Butler, & Shields, 2006):
Transmissible pathogens are a serious problem forsocial animals, so they have evolved behaviors to decrease
the probability of infection. There is no record, however, ofsocial animals avoiding diseased individuals of their own
species in the wild. Here we show how healthy, normallygregarious Caribbean spiny lobsters (Panulirus argus) avoid
conspecifics that are infected with a lethal virus. Early detection and avoidance of infected, though not yet infectious,
individuals by healthy lobsters confers a selective advantage and highlights the importance of host behaviour in disease transmission among natural populations.3
After reading the paragraph, the students were asked to identify
the function of each sentence, choosing from among the following:a) An explanation of the significance of the results of theresearch.
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KOMABA JOURNAL OF ENGLISH EDUCATIONb) A claim about what is missing from previous research on
this topic.
c) A summary of the results of the research done by theauthors.
d) A description of the issue which is the general topic of theresearch.
This question, while requiring an understanding of the paragraph’s content, focuses not on the content itself but on the paragraph’s structure, that is, the order of sentences within that paragraph.
The next question in that exercise, however, did delve somewhat more into the content:
Now that you have read the introduction, think about what
extra background information you might need before youread about the methods and results of the actual research.
Choose among the following (and you can add something
extra on the last line if you like).
a) A definition of the term “social animal”.
b) More information about the part of the ocean where thespiny lobsters live.
c) What kind of virus affected the lobsters in the study.
d) How the virus is transmitted.
e) More information about the social habits of spiny lobsters.
f) Previous knowledge about healthy lobsters perhaps
avoiding infected lobsters.
g)(something else)
The purpose of this exercise was to raise the students’ awarenessof the kinds of background information that must be provided toreaders in order to make the arguments of scientific papers comprehensible, thus making the students better able to write theintroduction sections of their own papers. The homeworkassignment that week was as follows:
Think about the topic of your research, the method you will
use to investigate your topic, and your expectations about
what the results will be, and ask yourself: What background102

FORM AND CONTENT IN A SCIENCE WRITING CURRICULUM

information would it be helpful for my reader to have
before I start describing my methods and results? Thenwrite one paragraph (or two, if absolutely necessary) clearly
explaining this background information and describing the
problem.
Thus the original curriculum for the ALESS classes, as introduced in April 2008, did not ignore the content of scientific communication, but, in keeping with the tradition of second-language academic writing pedagogy, its overall emphasis was on
form. The key exception to this formalist slant was the elementof the curriculum that was perhaps the most original but also themost controversial: the original scientific experiments that thestudents devised, conducted, and wrote up as IMRaD papers.

Student Experiments
An original experiment was made the centerpiece of the ALESS
curriculum for practical reasons. Even in an academic writing
course emphasizing form, students need to write about something. In the humanities or social sciences it is possible for students to write academic papers based on library or Internet
research, but scientific papers are generally about phenomena
observed in or inferred from the physical world, often throughthe use of highly specialized equipment and methodologies. As
first-year undergraduates, however, ALESS students are still
acquiring basic knowledge about scientific and mathematicalprinciples; few are conducting experiments, devising conceptualmodels, or doing other research that can be reasonably written
up in IMRaD form. To provide realistic content for their classpapers, therefore, it was decided to ask the students to design
and implement simple scientific experiments using readilyavailable materials.4 During the first few weeks of the semester,while also examining scientific papers in English for the firsttime, the students would think of topics for experiments theywould like to conduct. They would then present proposals fortheir experiments to their teachers and fellow students in writingor orally (or both), and the practicality and scientific validity of
those proposals would be discussed.
To help students learn how to evaluate the possible experiments, they might be asked, for example, to read the following
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three proposals and respond to the questions below.
Proposal 1
Because of the increased burning of high-sulfur coal in
China, the acidity of rainwater falling in Japan is said tohave increased. In this study, I will measure the acidity ofrainwater in Tokyo over a three-week period and compare
the results with the direction of prevailing winds over Japan
during the same period. The comparison will show whether
or not rainfall acidity in Japan is affected by coal-burning
power plants in China.
Proposal 2
In Japan, a person’s ABO blood type is popularly believed tocorrelate to the individual’s personality, but few systematicstudies have been done. For this project, I will survey 200
male university science majors aged 18 to 20 using a standard psychological test to look for correlations between
their personalities and blood types. Because the test groupwill be fairly homogenous, any correlation found will be
more significant than in studies of random populations.
Proposal 3
The Yamanote commuter train line in Tokyo, Japan, forms a
two-way loop, so it is possible to reach any station from anyother station by boarding a train going in either direction. In
this study, I will board the train at each station and measure
the amount of time it takes to reach each other station goingin either direction. The results will show which train should
be boarded at any particular Yamanote Line station in orderto reach any other particular station in the shortest time.
1. Evaluate each proposal according to the following criteria:• How interesting is the topic scientifically?
• Is it a scientifically logical experiment?
• How valid are the study’s results likely to be? (Notethat negative results, such as the lack of a correlation,
are also valid.)• Can the project be completed within the amount of time104

FORM AND CONTENT IN A SCIENCE WRITING CURRICULUM

available?
2. If you find problems with the proposals, discuss how the
proposal can be revised. How can the problems be
reduced or eliminated?
After the students discuss these questions among themselves and as a class, they review each other’s proposals. As aresult of this peer review, as well as feedback from their teachersand further consideration on their own, the students revise theirexperimental plans and then proceed to conduct their experiments. In the following weeks, they write the paper itself, usually beginning with the introduction section about the background of the experiment, with citations to related literature,and then moving on to the description of the experimental methods and results and then a concluding discussion. The students
usually compose an abstract for their papers and also include
figures, tables, and other illustrative material. Finally, at the endof the semester, the students give five-minute oral presentations
to their classes in English about their experiments and results.
While sometimes the experimental topics chosen by students can be rather specialized and require technical vocabulary
to explain, most are readily understandable to the other firstyear students in the classes as well as to the teachers (many ofwhom do not have formal scientific backgrounds). As a result,both other students, during in-class peer review, and the teachers are able to consider not only the papers’ formal characteristics, such as grammar, rhetoric, and organization, but also theircontent, including, most importantly, the descriptions of experimental methods and results and the arguments used to support
the authors’ scientific claims. The opportunity to write papers
and give presentations about experiments that they have conducted themselves and to discuss the content of their experiments with their peers and teachers also motivates students andmakes the classroom environment more lively.

Internal Controversy
When ALESS began in 2008, however, the experiment was something of an accidental addendum to the form-based curriculum,almost a gimmick used to obtain the minimal content needed towrite an IMRaD paper. Little attention was given to scientific105

KOMABA JOURNAL OF ENGLISH EDUCATION

argumentation, and the guidance provided to the students as tothe scientific interest or validity of their proposed experiments
was limited to questions of the sort given above and to any supplemental explanations and examples offered by the individual
teachers in class. After the end of that semester, however, when
all of the students’ final papers had been received and compiled,some of the teachers expressed dissatisfaction with the quality ofthe science described in the papers. The two most serious objections were that some papers did not seem to tackle problems that
had any connection to actual scientific issues and that some
papers did not use valid scientific argumentation.
Beginning in the second semester, many teachers therefore
began placing greater emphasis on reading previous researchand devising experiments that would extend that research inaccordance with scientific methods. For example, one worksheet
prepared by an ALESS teacher as homework asked the students
to find papers by specific authors or with specific topics in the
Web of Science online database; later, students would use theskills acquired through that exercise to find other scientificpapers on which to base their own experiments. Another worksheet, used in-class, guided students through the various goalsof scientific research projects, such as identifying causes of phenomena, generalizing previous results to other materials or phenomena, finding applications for existing knowledge, and identifying flaws in previous research. As the semesters went by andthe teachers learned more about what types of student experiments tended to be most interesting, fruitful, and doable under
the course’s severe time and resource limitations, they also compiled more and better examples of previous research projects that
could serve as inspiration to ALESS students, both from the regular scientific literature and from previous student projects in
ALESS and elsewhere.
The issue of scientific argumentation was tackled by introducing students to the concepts of independent, dependent, controlled, and uncontrolled variables in scientific experiments. The
in-class peer review of research topics was thus enhanced tocover the questions such as the following (taken from a worksheet prepared by teachers after the first semester):
Explain to your partner your research question and the106

FORM AND CONTENT IN A SCIENCE WRITING CURRICULUM

method that you are thinking of using to answer the question. Ask your partner for suggestions and criticisms of yourresearch project.
A few questions to get you started:
What are the independent variables, the dependent variables, the controlled variables, and the uncontrolled variables in this research?
Will the dependent variable be measurable? Will it bepossible to collect enough data?
Is the experiment realistic? Is it possible to conduct inthree weeks or so?
What is known (the background theory) and what is notknown (the answer your research question is aimed at)?
The most productive questions in this exercise—that is, the questions that contributed most to improvement in the content of thestudents’ experiments and papers—were the ones about variables and about the relation between the known and unknown.
Unlike in the first semester, when the questions focused only onvaguer issues of “interest” and “logic,” the attention now paid to
the types of variables in an empirical experiment and the role ofthe experiment in extending current knowledge has contributed
greatly to an improvement in the content of the students’ papers.
By 2010, the third year of the ALESS program, the faculty now
felt confident enough in the quality of the ALESS research
papers to compile and publish the first issue of a journal of 20
student papers. The titles and abstracts of some of these
papers—with the students’ English mostly unedited—appear in
the Figure.

Issues with the ALESS Approach
The incorporation of the design and implementation of an original experiment in the curriculum for an introductory class in scientific writing and presentation was not devoid of problems orcontroversy. One issue, as mentioned previously, was the lack oflaboratory space and experimental equipment, thus limiting stu107

KOMABA JOURNAL OF ENGLISH EDUCATION

dents to relatively simple experiments that could be conductedat home or on campus using readily obtainable materials. Being
simple to conduct does not necessarily mean that an experimentis easy to devise, and many students in the first semesters foundthe process of designing a new experiment from scratch to be themost difficult part of the course. As mentioned above, the ALESS
faculty have responded to these issues not only by obtaining
measuring equipment and other devices suitable for simple scientific experiments but also by presenting to students more systematically examples of interesting experiments that can be conducted without elaborate apparatus. The issue of the scientificinterest and validity of some of the students’ experiments was
also tackled through guided introductions to the research literature and to scientific methods of research and argumentation.
Since these measures were taken, a steady improvement has
been observed in both the seriousness of the students’ experiments and the rigor of the scientific arguments in their papers.
The most fundamental issue raised regarding the central
role played by the original experiment within the ALESS curriculum is the relevance of such an experiment to the goals of thecourse. If the class was supposed to be focused on scientific English, some faculty and students said, then the experiment and thetime devoted to scientific-reasoning issues were irrelevant distractions and an unnecessary waste of time. The limited time
available for the class, they said, should be focused on matterssuch as language, rhetoric, and logical exposition. These objections were taken very seriously by the ALESS faculty and weredebated at great length during faculty meetings and workshops,
with some of the teachers feeling that the experiment should be
simplified drastically or even dropped and others arguing for its
preservation and improvement. To explore other options, several
teachers taught pilot classes in which the experiment was modified in order to lessen its time burden.5 In the end, however, theconsensus among the faculty was to keep the experiment exercise largely in its original form but with students given more
help in devising, implementing, and interpreting their experiments. The content, it was decided, should not be separated
from the form.

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Content with Form
The decision to keep the experiment at the center of the ALESS
curriculum was not based on any quantitative data on the superiority of that approach. With the ALESS program aimed at
improving the communication and reasoning skills of students
for their careers years in the future as researchers, it would be
difficult—perhaps impossible—to design a quantitative assessment of the course’s effect on those future skills in a way thatwould exclude other factors also affecting the students’ development. Instead, it was the qualitative impressions and commentsof the teachers and students themselves that led to the experiment’s preservation. With the small size of ALESS classes (usually 15 or fewer students), students became familiar with eachother’s experiment topics through peer review and other in-classactivities; this familiarity lent a satisfying unity to the semester’sclasses and led to more fruitful discussions during the final oralpresentations.6 Teachers reported that it was easier to present
formal topics such as the use of pronouns in various sections of
IMRaD papers or the rhetoric of hedging and boosting whenthose topics were linked to the content of experiments that thestudents had designed and conducted themselves. As the experiment became integrated more meaningfully into the curriculum,
criticism of it from students in end-of-semester questionnaires
seemed to taper off and more positive comments were received(though many students continued to complain about thecourse’s overall workload, an inevitable consequence of compressing what could be a full-year course into a single semester).
While the manner in which the experiment is incorporated in the
ALESS course will continue to evolve in the years ahead asteachers gain more experience and as faculty with different perspectives join the program, it seems likely that this component
will continue to be central to the course’s curriculum.
This incorporation of a simple, student-designed experiment in an introductory course on second-language scientificwriting and presentation might not be possible if ALESS students were not first-year undergraduates who have not yet chosen their fields of study. If they were already budding organic
chemists, plant physiologists, and semiconductor engineers, thenthey would naturally want and need to write about content in109

KOMABA JOURNAL OF ENGLISH EDUCATION

their respective specializations—content that would be mostly
incomprehensible to their fellow students and to their teachers.
It is precisely because ALESS students are just embarking on
their scientific careers that the course is able to focus not only on
the formal aspects of their texts but on their content. Although
the context of the ALESS program might be unique, at least inJapan, one hopes that its curriculum might provide inspiration
to other academic writing programs that have, perhaps, drifted a
bit too far in the direction of formal language use and could beenhanced by increased attention to the actual content of what
students write.

Acknowledgments
The author wishes to express his deepest gratitude to the faculty members
who have created the ALESS curriculum as it is today: David Allen, Mark
Bowen, Yelena Guzman, Yuko Itatsu, Daniela Kato, Nancy Lee, Anni Marlow, Guy Middleton, Sawako Nakayasu, John O’Dea, Peter Robinson, Paul
Rossiter, and Toby Slade.

Notes
1. Extreme examples of an emphasis on form over content can be seen insatiric publications such as Annals of Improbable Research and The Journalof Irreproducible Results, which publish articles that, in language, organization, and format, closely resemble actual scientific research papers
but whose assertions are obviously false. The goal of these efforts is, ofcourse, humor, but they serve a more important purpose as well: toshow that correct form is not enough to make good scholarship.
2. At the University of Tokyo, undergraduates spend their first two years
in a liberal arts program, entering their majors only in their third year.
During those first two years, students are divided into six broad categories corresponding roughly to law, economics, humanities, physicalsciences, biological sciences, and medicine. Since 2008, all students inthe last three categories—about 1850 a year—have been required totake the one-semester ALESS class, during which they write a scientific paper in English based on a simple experiment that they devise
and conduct themselves and give a five-minute oral presentation
about their paper. Additional information about the ALESS programand curriculum is available in Gally (2009a, 2009b), Allen (2010), andLee (2010), and at http://aless.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/.

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3. The footnoted citations that were included in the original paper and in
the version given to students are omitted here.
4. When the ALESS program began, no equipment or laboratory space
was available for the students to use in their experiments. In the several years since, we have become able to provide some support for the
students’ experiments, both in the form of measuring equipment andother devices that can be lent to students for use in their experiments
and through one-on-one consultations with graduate students about
the design, implementation, and analysis of their experiments. These
improvements are still inadequate, however, and students will benefit
more when dedicated laboratory space and more expert advice
become available.
5. In several pilot classes, students were asked to devise a hypotheticalexperiment and then write their paper as if they had in fact conducted
it, using results that they had invented. While this did seem to reduce
the time burden, the students’ motivation and the conceptual unity of
the class also suffered, and this variation was not adopted more
widely. Ethical issues about the use of invented results were also
raised. Another possibility would be to present the students withdescriptions and results of genuine experiments and ask them to writeup those experiments in IMRaD format; this idea has been suggested
by faculty both inside and outside the program but has not yet been
tried.
6. When the program began, each student devised and conducted theexperiment on his or her own. Later, the teachers began to allow students to do the experiments in groups of about three or four. In mostclasses now, the students are given a choice whether to work in groups
or alone. When an experiment is devised and conducted by a group,
each member of the group must write a paper independently, explaining the method and results from a different point of view.

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archive.org
Allen, D. (2010). Lexical bundles in learner writing: An analysis of formulaic language in the ALESS learner corpus. Komaba Journal of English
Education, 1, 105–127.
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Behringer, D. C., Butler, M. J. & Shields, J. D. (2006). Avoidance of disease bysocial lobsters. Nature, 441, 421.

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Cargill, M., & O’Connor, P. (2009). Writing scientific research articles: Strategy
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Shuppankai［東京大学出版会］.
Gally, T. (2009a). Specific in general: Scientific writing and presentation
within a liberal arts curriculum. In Fukui, K.［福井希一］, Noguchi, J.［野口 ジ ュ デ ィ ー］, & Watanabe, N.［渡 辺 紀 子］(Eds.), ESP-teki bairingaru omezashite［ESP 的バイリンガルを目指して 大学英語教育の再定義 Towards
ESP bilingualism: Redefining English education in Japan］(pp. 120–128), Osaka: Ōsaka Daigaku Shuppankai［大阪大学出版会］.
Gally, T.［ト ム・ガ リ ー］(2009b, May 25 & June 8). Tōkyō Daigaku Kyōyō
Gakubu ni okeru rikei Eigo kaikaku［東京大学教養学部における理系英語改
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た め の 東 大 授 業 ラ イ ブ 純 情 編 UT classes live for high school students:
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The Relationship between Water Rise and the Composition of Fabrics
Author: Koki Sano
A liquid rises up a piece of fabric against gravity to a particular height.
Here we show how the proportion of cotton to polyester in the fabricaffects the height to which the liquid rises. When the proportion of cotton was large, the height of capillary rise increased quickly at first, butlater it increased more slowly. On the other hand, when the proportionof polyester was large, it increased slowly but steadily. It appears thatthese results are caused because cotton maintains more moisture thanpolyester does. These results may seem to have application in producing new textiles.
Influence of Light Color on Plant Growth
Author: Yumiko Tomoe
It is known that plant growth is considerably influenced by light condition, but how plant growth is actually influenced is unknown. In thisstudy, I observed the actual chromatic influence of light. I predictedthat under lights with more absorbed colors, auxetic growth, incrementof plant weight per a certain length, would be accelerated and thatplant pigmentation, leaf color, would be vivid. In addition, I expectedthat under lights with less absorbed colors, elongation would be accelerated and plant pigmentation would be diluted. In this experiment, I
grew radish sprouts in plastic containers covered with colored or achromatic cellophane. A large part of the results is consistent with the
hypothesis. However, it is surprising that the elongation under green
light was smaller than that of sprouts grown under other light colors
and that under blue light, the pigmentation became diluted. The findings from this experiment indicate that the influence of the light color
on plant growth is conditioned by the absorption rate of each lightcolor. This study suggests that to make plants taller but not thicker, it iseffective to radiate green or yellow light and that to accelerate auxetic
growth, it is effective to radiate red or blue light. Further work isneeded to determine the range of the light spectrum most effective forregulating the plant growth such as elongation acceleration, andwhether the results can be applied to other plant species.
Native Japanese Musicians and Non-Musicians Have Less Lateral
Preference in Attentional Capacity than Non-Japanese
Author: Anthony
Neurologically intact adults have the tendency to focus more attention
on the left side of space, as documented in line-bisection and “line-

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and-dot” tests. In the former, participants marked the center of a given
horizontal line, while in the later, participants were shown images ofvertical lines with a dot marked on either the left or right side of thelines. These lateralization tests were conducted on non-Japanese musicians and non-musicians, and it has been shown that musicians havemore balanced attentional lateralization than non-musicians. The aimof this study is to further investigate whether the same result appears
in the case of native Japanese participants. Two groups of 15 righthanded Japanese musicians and non-musicians were given mirror
image of gradient-coloured horizontal bars, and compared to the control group of non-Japanese, both groups made balanced choices of left
and right stimuli. Consistent with previous research, the result indicates that other than musical training, language and nationality background also influence the attentional capacity of adults to a considerable extent.
Figure. Titles and abstracts of three papers written by ALESS students in2010, taken from ALESS: A Collection of Student Papers.

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