00:00Are you struggling to write the literature review for your research paper? Well, in this video I'm going to walk you through, step by step, how I go about structuring and writing my literature review, and we're really going to simplify it for you so that after watching this video you can go off and probably in one day structure everything and write it all

00:21It really doesn't have to be that complicated to write the literature review

00:26I know a lot of people struggle with it, but this video is going to show you how to do it more simply so that you can go off, finish the literature review, and submit your paper

00:32So let's dive in

00:37Now, if you're new here, my name is Marek Kiczkowiak, and I run Academic English Now, where I help PhD students and researchers

00:43We regularly publish research papers in top journals in the field

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00:53Alright, so what we're going to do is work backwards from, you know, a published paper and from the title of a published paper to show you the steps you need to go through in order to structure a literature review in a research paper

01:10By the way, the same thing would apply to a PhD thesis; it's just that it would be much longer

01:14Right, and you might be thinking, okay, but I mean, I'm still writing the paper

01:18I don't have to publish it immediately, right? Well, it's the same principle—you just need to focus on your aim

01:23So, you want to copy

01:26And paste the aim of your paper as the first thing in here

01:30I'm just going to use the title of the paper, but you can use the aim of your paper because surely you already know what the aim is, right? And we're going to start working from the aim

01:37Now, the easiest way to organize your literature review and write it in literally one day is to look at the main topics that are within your title or within the aim of your study

01:52So, I'm going to list all the main topics below the title, and we're going to try to organize the literature review around these topics

02:04For the time being, I'm just going to list them in no particular order and as they come up in the title or in your aim, and then try to organize them

02:19First, I'm just going to list the titles, right? And so, that would be the first one

02:23Of course, I could list them separately, right? And first, talk about this concept of native speakerism and then English language teaching, but that would be too general

02:31We want to dive directly into this, right? And then we've got, you know, these native speakers in here as well

02:39Let me copy and paste that

02:42So, that'll be our second main concept

02:45And then we've got conferences and plenary speakers

02:51So, copy and paste that

02:54Yeah, these could be two separate topics

02:58Again, you could talk about conferences and the importance of conferences, and then you could talk about plenary speakers

03:04And that's probably..

03:07What I'm going to do, but these would be the main topics

03:10I don't really need to talk about anything else

03:14I think in here, right? So, the first step to organize your literature review is just to list all the topics based on the aim of your research paper or based on the title if you've already decided on the title

03:29Now that we've got the main topics, we've kind of got to think about what is the most logical way of organizing them

03:38What should I talk about first in the literature review, and what should I talk about second? Now, how do you do that? The easiest way and usually the most logical is to go from general to specific

03:49Now, I can't really talk about conferences and plenary speakers first because conferences and plenary speakers..

03:59Aren't like really the main driving force of my topic

04:06The main driving force of my topic is this, right? Native speakerism in English language teaching—that's the main driving force, right? So, it wouldn't make sense to talk about conferences and plenary speakers

04:18Conferences and plenary speakers are kind of like a subtopic, a more specific aspect of this issue of native speakerism, right? If that makes sense

04:29So, what we're going to do is probably talk about this first, right? And then we would want to talk about, um, conferences

04:38And I think we're going to discuss conference plenary speakers as one topic

04:42Now, what are we doing with this? Like, native speakers, right? So, this perhaps requires a little bit..

04:50Of knowledge of the topic, but it's very simple really

04:54So, native speakerism can be kind of compared to, let's say, sexism or racism

04:58The main difference is that, unlike racism, which is based on someone's perceived belonging to a given race and all the discrimination and negative stereotypes that go with that, native speakerism is based on someone's perceived status as a native speaker of a certain language

05:21All the discrimination and prejudices associated with that come into play

05:24When it comes to teaching English, native speakers are often seen as better teachers, better models of the language, better in every way

05:29So, this is kind of..

05:32Do we talk about this first, or do we talk about it within native speakers? Well, probably I might need to first kind of address this issue of, you know, kind of who a native speaker is in order to be able to talk about the issue of discrimination, which is native speakerism

05:51Right now, once you've got these main topics right, you want to list some subtopics

06:01In other words, like, what kind of stuff am I going to talk about? Well, I probably need a definition

06:05Almost whatever you talk about, you need some sort of definition

06:12Here, we need to talk about, like, previous studies, effects, for example, of native speakerism, reasons for it

06:17Right, maybe

06:22Right? I'm just kind of brainstorming right now, but you get the idea

06:26My point is, you want to list some subtopics that you're going to discuss under each main topic

06:32Now, one thing that people get wrong is that they say, "Well, I can't review any literature because my topic is very unique and no studies have been conducted on it." Well, that's true because that's the reason why you're doing your topic—to address something that hasn't been done before

06:50But what you want to do is look at the broader picture a little bit

06:56 In my specific case, nobody has talked about native speakerism when it comes to conference plenary speakers

07:04This has not been done before

07:11So, what I need to do here is look at the representation of, you know, women and people..

07:19Of color at conferences, right, and I could look at conferences in general, uh, you know, but also as plenary speakers, right? And then I want to look at, um, other disciplines, uh, because there's no research in English language teaching, right, right? So if there's no research on this specific topic in your field, well, that's amazing because you found a huge research gap that you can explore forever, basically, right? But you want to be looking at this topic of conference plenary speakers, and, you know, I'm looking broadly speaking at discrimination of a particular group of people, right? So, you can do the same and look at discrimination of other groups of people at conferences and as plenary speakers in other fields

08:13Discipline such as, I don't know, mathematics or physics or whatever else it is, right? And then afterwards, that brings you, you know, we're going to add it maybe as our point, um, number four, um, research gap plus aim

08:28That's always comes last, right? So the whole literature review builds to this

08:34Now, let's look at how this was actually done in this paper, and we're going to move down to, um, the literature review

08:44And you can say, you know, that first we've got the concept of a native speaker, and we provide the definitions in here

08:52Now, the thing is that this section is a little bit long when it comes to who a native speaker is, because it's a fairly contentious issue

09:01So, if you've got a topic like that, Where, like, lots of researchers disagree on how to, for example, define it correctly, and there is no consensus, then you might want to spend a little more time discussing it

09:14Because, for our study, it raises important issues in terms of methodology, right? Because what we did was investigate the balance of plenary speakers, with the goal of determining whether there was disparity along the lines of speakerhood, right? So, we would basically look at how many native and non-native speakers there were at the conference

09:40But first, we have to define it

09:42If people disagree in our field on how to define a native speaker, then we need to present that disagreement, in order to develop a working definition

09:55And we can use in our study, and then we move on to the concept of native speakerism and conference speaker representation

10:02Right, so first, as almost always, you need to define the concept, and then we present the past research on this topic

10:12So, basically, you know, the effect of native speakerism on English language teaching

10:17Right, and then, notice this sentence: there is no research, basically, on native speakerism and conferences, or just like there's almost none or none literally

10:28Right, so what we do here is, as I told you when we were structuring it, we're just going to look at discrimination and bias at other conferences

10:38Right, we look at surgical conferences, you know, and there's a lot about imbalance

10:44When it comes to female plenary speakers, people of color, and so on, we also look at ethnic minorities among conference plenary speakers

10:55But notice that we can't look at Native and non-native speakers, and we can't examine conferences in English language teaching because there is no research on it

11:02So, we want to look at the broader issue of discrimination at conferences in other scientific disciplines

11:07If that makes sense, we can expand our literature review to include the reasons for this discrimination at conferences and any potential explanations for why this happens

11:22Then, we move on to the research gap and the aim

11:28Of this paper, right? If that makes sense, so to sum up, you know, the way to structure your literature review and write it in literally one day or a couple of hours is to look at the main topics of your research aim or of your title and write them down, put them in the most logical order, and then list any subtopics and put them in the most logical order

11:44Right? And then start writing

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