June 6th class (Please post your reflections and questions under this topic)

Dear All,

I have uploaded the thesis writing book to Baidu Pan in case you want to have an electronic version. Later today, I will upload today's PPT to baidu Pan for you to review what we have talked about today. Also, please remember to write your reflections and questions under this topic.

Best,
Wendy

Reflection:
Today’s lecture focused on case study. What impressed me most in today’s class can be summarized as follows:
1. While dealing with great amount of data, one should carefully consider whether some data are worth studying. It may be of help with supervisor’s suggestion;
2. When designing a questionnaire or interviewing someone, it is preferable to apply the first language of the participant in order to get more information from him or her;
3. In thesis writing, one needs to operationalize the terms, explaining who have used it and how they use it;
4. Collect data as much as possible and them consider whether it will be of help or not;
5. Find enough participants for research study to ensure the credibility of the study.

Question:
If we do not have time for a long-term research study, how can we ensure effectiveness of the research?

The class today focused on qualitative study, including the introduction of the rationale and presentation of the case studies. First of all, we worked in group to discuss how to conduct the case study in different research, then we gave a brief presentation and then we turned to Doctor Costa’s paper to further the exploration of the case study. And finally, Mr Han shared with us his experience of conducting a case study, which benefited us a lot.
Q: It’s hard to organize variable views from a large sum of papers, so how to write a coherent literature review?

Dear Peter,

Today we discuss about what case study is. It focuses on a small number of participants, trying to give a thick description of individuals’ behaviors, performance and other perspectives. As Professor Han said, we need to collect as much information as possible to make data analysis convincing. In addition, Peter’s tips like adding footnotes to save space are very useful.

I used to think that interviews are used to get qualitative results. But in Study Box 6.2 (Duff, 2012), a language awareness interview was used to as quantitative data. What kind of interview is it here? Does it equal to a questionnaire?

Best,
Lucy.

In today’s class, we have learned something about case study. When we do case study or interview, there are many things that require attention. For example, how to ensure the reliability of the data collected? How to choose useful data when faced with much data? When we do case study, we should collect as much information as possible, maybe when sometime in the future, it will be useful for our research. When choosing the interview language, we should choose the mother tongue of the interviewees to ensure their fluent expression.
Question: Since that we do not have much time in the preparation of the thesis research, how should we design an efficient research case study in a limited time?

In today's lecture, we read Peter’s case research on language ideology and positioning to broaden the SLA learner beliefs landscape. He told us how to make our statement clearer and more concise in thesis writing. The first point is to use numbers and tables with phrases description in detail. The second way is to use short quote from other people. When we do the summary work, we can put several names in the bracket, and only describe one study in detail. Besides, he told us the significance of defining concepts in the thesis.

what I learnt today:
Footnote: makes reading more fluently, or helps to increase number of words.
 Use tables to explain data sources.
 Thick description instead of generalizability may be a strength in research.
 Implications could for pedagogy, theory, methodology, testing, policy, etc.
 Triangulation: to collect more information
how to do thical reviews:
1. Specifying your research questions and methods,
2. Your recruitment procedures, whether participants can provide consent on their own behalf and in what language(s),
3. What the possible risks and benefits are to participating,
4. How you will maintain the anonymity of your participants,
5. What kinds of time or other resources will be required of them, and how you might compensate or reward them.

Question: What makes a good thesis?

Reflection:
Our theme for today’s lecture focused on case study research. For the first period, the emphasis was put on Duff’s article. We were divided into six groups and each two were in charge of one study box. These three study boxes were actual examples of case study while but with different participants, varying from undergraduate study-abroad students to a kindergarten student. From the analysis of each example, we can see a clear research design from the background to the result. Then we began with Peter’s article about using language ideology and positioning to broaden the SLA learner beliefs landscape. From the findings and discussion part, the transcribed data were clearly presented and Peter explained each excerpt to us. Meanwhile, Prof. Han shared his research experience of a minority student with us and gave us some suggestions.

Question:
A question related to Peter’s article: For the findings and discussion part, since every excerpt is short and very limited, can the results generated from the excerpt be very convincible to the readers?

Reflections:
In today's lecture, we read an article which mainly focuses on case study and i get informed of many tips as to doing case studies.
First, when selecting case participants, we should consider carefully the relationship with them and recruite as many participants as possible in case some of them may drop out with the experiment nfinished.
Second, when analyzing data and writing the report, we should triangulate data and try to obtain the intended meaning of the participants.
Third, when conducting interviews, we should choose the mother tongue of the interviewees to ensure that they can express their ideas fluently and clearly.
That's what I have learned today and it is really helpful.
Question:
When conducting long-term research, how can we get rid of the uncontroled variables which will interfere the experiment?

Reflections:
1、When we write the article, we can adopt several different tips to make our demostration more clear and understandable such as using footnotes, using number lists and explanations in brackets.
2、In conclusion part, we may have implications on different aspects such as pedagogy, research methodology even policy making, etc.
3、Case study has very obvious advantages. It can examplify larger processes or situations in a very accessible, concrete, immediate and personal manner. We can get insights from the case study.
And as for generalizability, case study is a kind of analytic generalization.
4、Trangulation in conducting research and collecting data.
5、Involving more participants to prepare for the unexpected quit of some participant.
6、We can do qulitative study from a variety of perspectives(topics) and contexts those we are interested in and have easier access to such as bilungual family, immigrant and children.

Question:
In today's article, there should be lots of data of the participant Jenny, but how do you select those specific seven excerpts from such so much data to illustrate and arrange them in such a sequence?

Reflection for the 6th day:
After two days' rest,our class begins again, haha
Today's topic is mainly case studies. To be honest, these detailed research methodologies are really useful and implicative, which can be projected to our own research.
1. The idea in the article - being bilingual can make one happy gives me the motivation to build a bilingual enviroment for my child in the future.
2. We should also undertake an ethical review of the study. This is a quite new thought to me.
3. While writing thesis, we need to keep paraphrasing and repeating so as to make readers really get your idea.
4. The number of the participants should be at least 3-5 at first leat some unexpected things happen.
Qs: What's the difference between case study and sample study?

Reflection:
According to today’s course, I had a brief conception of case study. The case study is a necessary part in the linguistics research that every item should be paid attention to. And in my opinion, the data part is the most important issue in the whole process of case study. In this part, different methods may be used according to various situations, such as interview, questionnaire. And what case study differed from other research field is that it is a more sociable activity, every researchers may take a long time and cost a lot to do a case study. So in order to get a more concise data and research result, researchers usually do a large scale and number of research sample in case of some unpredictable problems. These are what I learnt today.

Question:
In the thesis of Duff, I knew that some case study just pick up few people to do the research, so I want to know how to generalize the characters according to limited study sample and what are the standards to choose the sample of every case?

Reflections on the 6th lecture
Today’s lecture is mainly about case study research and we focus on two articles, one is Duff, P.A.(2012) How to carry out case study research. Several steps in conducting case study research was new information for us, selecting and recruit case participants,conducting interview,analyzing data and writing the report. And then peter’s own article was presented, Using language ideology and positioning to broaden the SLA learner beliefs landscape, adopting the case study research by focusing on ESL learner from China .
Questions: when conducting and transcribing the interview, how can you distinguish between useful and futile information facing with a bunch of data?

Today we read the paper of Duff (2012), and learned the process of doing case studies. Thick description helps us get things clearer. We also talked about participants, the importance of using participants' native language to get closer to them, and trying to create a coherent connection, the skill of using footnote to explain or to croticize, the principles to barry in mind that always collect enough evidence to support your idea. Professor Han gave us his advice on case study. He thinks that we should get access as much information as possible and also, find ways to figure out the participants' words are valid or not. I really appreciate what I've learned today.

Today we read the paper of Duff (2012), and learned the process of doing case studies. Thick description helps us get things clearer. We also talked about participants, the importance of using participants' native language to get closer to them, and trying to create a coherent connection, the skill of using footnote to explain or to croticize, the principles to barry in mind that always collect enough evidence to support your idea. Professor Han gave us his advice on case study. He thinks that we should get access as much information as possible and also, find ways to figure out the participants' words are valid or not. I really appreciate what I've learned today.

Hey, Peter!
In today's class, we also read several articles about second language acquisition. And through reading your article, actually you set a good example for us to do a field research in the field of SLA, and how to design our own research, including question, process and so on. I noticed that you sepearated the Limitation part from conclusions, and explained directly where this research's weak point is, while at the same time, it is a strength of this article. I think it is a good way to persuade those critics~
Also, I remember there's an experiment study about adolescents with multiligual background. It's a longitudinal study that took 13 years to finish the research, do you still remember? I wonder whether we can do a comparative study on the multilingual issues, maybe apart from multilingual children, we can select several children with monolingual environment to compare their development and find out some difference. This would have a great significance on children's language education.
By the way, in this class, you have not answer my question of last course: what does "piloting" actually mean?
Best regards.
Andrea Nian