Language investigation introductions: framing your research question(s).

A few of you have now done as I asked and drafted an introduction to your investigations. The rest of you really need to catch up with that. Even if your idea changes considerably by the time the coursework is completed, the discipline of getting your ideas down in writing will help you to focus on what you actually need to do to make progress with your investigation.

If at all possible, I’d like you to keep what you do public, then we can all learn from it, though I understand that some material needs to remain private. As I’ve said in class, an advantage of keeping things in the public domain is that comments I make are often relevant to many more people than one to whom they are specifically addressed. For example  here is part of a comment I made on a recent post that included a draft introduction including the extract immediately below:

There are several questions I wish to explore the answers to, such as, is the use of second language English the same as first language English? Or are there differences due to the influences of the other language?

If I have a quibble, it is that these questions are in one sense too big (you can’t draw such general conclusions from two individuals) and – perhaps paradoxically – lacking in ambition (it’s pretty obvious that there will be differences, so what are you hoping to achieve?).

Try and formulate your research question(s) to focus on your particular small-scale investigation, placing it within the context of what you have learned from larger scale findings about bi/multi lingualism from your reading.

Even though most of you are dealing with very different topics, the idea of including in your introduction the specific research questions that your investigation sets out to answer, and placing these within the wider context of research in that area of language study, is a sound principle that can apply to everyone.