preparations for final task
Your major product for this seminar will be a fuller exploration of your own interests. You will have a choice to make:
There will be no final exam in this class, but there will be a final product due at the time the final exam would have been scheduled.
Option 01: Book Review
You may choose to create a review of 1-3 key books that would serve as a good, thorough introduction to an international or cultural area that you find interesting. Such a review should be about 5-10 pages long.
To get an idea of what a review might look like, glance over the eleven examples provided. In this collection, one each is about Asia, about Europe, about Latin America, and about language. Two are about American cultures and five are about Middle East topics. All were selected from the same source and are decent, if not necessarily perfect, book reviews. You would do well to emulate them - be thoughtful and think about the readers' needs to understand the topic under review.
OR
Option 02: Draft outline of your own book
If you want to stretch yourselves, you could create a draft outline of a book that you might write yourself. This outline would be composed of three things.
- An introductory section that discusses the proposed book. This section could be the preface to the proposed book.
- A fleshed-out table of contents, identifying the topics covered in each chapter of the book by use of sub-headings within each chapter.
- An annotated bibliography of references that you would either use in the creation of said book, or that you think should serve as a listing of key documents readers of such a book should also read about the topic.
You might get a fuller idea of what this might entail by looking at this product created in 1977 as an outline of a notional book that might serve to explain American culture to an Arab audience. You will note that the notional author of this book needs to have an appreciation of both the culture under discussion and the culture of the notional audience.