Friday, Oct. 10th: Intro to Research Project

HOMEWORK for Monday, Oct. 13^th:

Read this introduction to our research project, and also look at the links I provided!

Make up your mind about your topic, and sign up for it on my list on Monday, Oct. 13^th. Multiple entries for the same topic are possible.

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Today after the movie, we're going to start our big semester project: the research essay. This will take about a month altogether to complete.

At first, we will discuss the difference between

REVIEW ESSAY (a collage of different research articles that are compared, contrasted, and evaluated. No self-collected data.)

and

RESEARCH ESSAY (self-collected data that verifies or contradicts existing research which is previously discussed in the literature review of this paper).

The project of your RESEARCH essay consists of three parts:

1. an online survey you will create with SurveyMonkey.com using an account for which I will provide you a with password (don’t sign up for the free trial; its functions are limited. I’ll give you the paid for version with more features).

2. a report sheet this online survey builder will build for you. It will contain all the data you need taken out of the answers from your survey.

3. a research article of about 8-10 pages you will write about your results in a given format. You will attach your report sheet to it as an annex, and you will create three xls graphs for your data statistics. You will cite 3 published and peer-reviewed research articles from a scientific journal in your Literature Review, and add an Annotated Bibliography in APA for these three articles.

NOTE: if you take this course at a 400-level, you will write 12-15 pages, and you will cite 5 published and peer-reviewed research articles from a scientific journal.

Today, we'll only deal with step 1, how to create online surveys with SurveyMonkey.com

First, we are going to look at a few sample surveys we’ve created in ENGL 300-1 last semester:

A. Understanding Autism Through Supervision

B. What Second Language Teachers Think About AAE/Ebonics as Second Language

C. a) Language Acquisition Among Twins
b) It's Cause We Is Twins?

D. Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL)

E. Learning a Foreign Language

I am going to model how to create the template. You all have to name your surveys the following way:

Lastname_topic

For example:

Voss_grammar

If your topic name is really long, abbreviate it. For example, don’t write “apraxia in children with Down’s syndrome,” but call it “DS apraxia.”

You have to save your online survey under the correct label for your class I’ve created (either 300-1Fall 08, or 300-2 Fall 08).

Your further TASKS will be:

1) to pick a topic that in some way deals with "language acquisition" (not confined to pure grammar). You can take any topic we’ve talked about before, such as ESL, AAVE, Asian ESL learners, slang, dialect, accent, autism, twins, Tourette, Down’s syndrome, grammar teaching, grammar learning, dyslexia, apraxia, or invent your own topic. You can also make up a survey consisting entirely of grammar quizzes, to find out how much your interviewees know about grammar, and what types of grammar they know least about.

2) to figure out who your audience is going to be (will your questionnaire be for students, parents, teachers, education majors, or guardians; or relatives/parents of autistic or disabled children? We have an autism center in WHAM downstairs, in case you want to find contact persons there.) NOTE: You are NOT allowed to do the survey with any faculty members of SIU!!!

3) to assemble questions on paper about your topic that you might ask in the survey

4) to note down emails of 20 (no more and no less!) persons you are going to interview. Take into consideration that many people don't answer email surveys. So, if you address 20 people, count on it that 50% won't respond, anyway. If you have less than 10 interviewees, that won't give you a valuable research basis, and your survey will be void.

We will do these preliminary tasks on Monday 13^th, Wednesday 15^th, and Friday 17^th next week in class. If you miss a class session, you have to do them at home; otherwise, you’ll get left behind and won’t be able to use the software simultaneously with the others.

We will create a URL for our online survey and email it out to our interviewees (AFTER I have given my consent in written form that your letter and survey are ready for publication!). Accompanying this URL will be a friendly letter of introduction no longer than one page. Here’s the prompt (we will do this on Wednesday, Oct. 15^th, together in class):

1) Write a letter of introduction to the persons you will interview. State

- your name;

- class;

- instructor;

- why you do this survey;

- that you don't need consent by the Human Subjects Committee (HSC)/ Institutional Review Board (IRB) of SIU to conduct this survey, because it doesn't involve minors, or take blood samples, and is not for publication but for in-class practice only;

- that the survey is anonymous

- what the aim of your survey is

- how long it will take (not longer than 10 minutes)

- what the deadline is for taking the surveys, before you close them for data analysis

- that your subjects can have the results of your survey from you, when it is finished

- how you will compensate them for taking the survey, if you do that

- say THANK YOU for taking the survey.