I hate to sound like a broken record, but I have to agree with some of the blog posts of my classmates and say that the research task at hand is intimidating. The idea of whittling down a general interest into a manageable topic and conducting a research study in such a short amount of time seems near impossible at this point. While our text for this course explains, for example, the various types of qualitative and quantitative research in an understandable format, the sheer volume of ways to approach any given subject appears daunting. I suppose, however, that once my topic of research becomes clearer and my knowledge of the field increases, it will be easier to pick through the myriad of research options and choose one that will be right for me
As for topic, I’m drawn to oral proficiency in second language learning. I am not sure how to narrow that down. My motivation is personal experience and observation. I only began to study Spanish (the subject I wish to teach) in high school. I felt that my instructors did not put a great deal of emphasis on learning the phonology of Spanish. I realize that constraints of the environment (i.e. high numbers of students only motivated to fulfill a language requirement) limited my Spanish high school instructors. Still, it seems that a bit more emphasis on how a foreign language’s sound system differs from English’s would be beneficial to the students who do continue their studies. I would think that better oral skills could translate into better listening comprehension skills. Observing how instructors teach a foreign phonology could be qualitative, but if certain actions of the teachers codified and given numerical values it could very well be quantitative. Similarly students’ oral production of the target language could be studied, or scores from listening comprehension assessments could be compared. In any case, there are a lot of options and I can easily see myself moving in a different direction.
2 comments:
Greg, I promise this is not an impossible task. Oral proficiency in Spanish is an excellent starting place, I think. You could study this topic from a number of different perspective and with different methods. Good beginning!
I like that you are open to both types of research, and can already begin to see how you might utilize them for this study. I think your study is neat because you will be able to directly use what you find in your own classroom. It may not necessarily be the basis for how you teach Spanish, but it can give you some direction that you might not have had before. I know that teaching a foreign language is a horse of a different color than teaching math, science, or english, so I would be interested in reading your study just out of curiosity. And b/c I've always thought that it would be a good idea to put my future kids in immersion school!
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