IELTS LISTENING S52T4
DEVELOPMENT STUDIES
LECTURER: Good morning everyone, and welcome to your first lecture in development studies. Development studies as a discipline can be boiled down to a couple of core objectives. Basically, we are trying to understand how it is that societies experience particular kinds of change and how they progress as they develop. We’re also trying to go beyond that however and work out how different sorts of Q31 actions can facilitate or even encourage these changes to happen. To achieve these objectives there are two key approaches that underpin development studies. Firstly there’s a theoretical approach, which is all about the how of change, with theory we can explore some of the big questions. What kind of change should we aspire to and how can this be achieved?
Attempt full listening test…
But we don’t just talk we’ve also got to apply some of this thinking. So through the applied approach we’re looking at specific Q32 policies and trying to understand how they can most effectively be put into place. Although we try not to limit ourselves we do focus on a few key areas, due to our location, for example, the Asia Pacific region is an important area of research for us. At the moment we’re doing a lot of work on urbanization and there are two elements to this, one is employment as urbanization leads to major employment problems and the other is Q33 housing, with so many people moving to cities many of them struggle to find a place to live.
Other issues of particular interest to our staff are migration and of course trade. So what will you be able to do with the degree in development studies well firstly you’ll develop a full working knowledge of all aspects of development you’ll also learn how to gather data we include sessions on how to gather Q34 statistics but we mostly focus on textual data that is policy briefings research reports and so on. Once you’ve done your research you need to know what it all means after all there’s not much point in collecting a whole lot of data if you don’t know whether it’s significant or not so we’re going to teach you how to critically Q35 evaluate your findings and finally teamwork is a big part of development work your major piece of research work for this class is done in groups of four so you’re going to learn how to Q36 cooperate as a team in order to plan and conduct this research assignment.
I want to move on now to give you a brief overview of how development studies has evolved as a discipline since it was first established. The first thing to note is that, unlike other subjects such as mathematics or philosophy, development studies is very young it began taking shape as a formal discipline only in the 1950s. At that stage, Q37 economic concerns were at the forefront of nearly all research efforts researchers assumed that development, in general, could be measured by indicators such as gross domestic product GDP or unemployment levels. In the 1970s a new set of scholars took charge these researchers informed by the social movements of the 1960s brought a new set of issues to the table.