English 711 : Research Methods in Applied Linguistics

Syllabus for Fall 2007

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:30 to 10:45 a.m., 2251 Humanities

Instructor	Assessment and Grading
Required Texts	Course Outline
Aims of the Course	Focal Studies
Assignments	Instructor's Home Page

Professor Richard F Young 7163 Helen C White Hall Office hours: Thursdays, 4:00 - 6:00 p.m., or by appointment E-mail: rfyoung at wisc dot edu Home Page: www.wisc.edu/english/rfyoung Phone: 263-2679

Class E-mail List. You may send e-mail messages to me and to all students registered for this course through the class e-mail list.  Send your messages to english711-1-f07 at lists dot wisc dot edu.  In order for you to receive messages from the e-mail list, your e-mail address must be in the Registrar's database.  You can update your preferred email address by accessing My UW-Madison, "Student Records" tab, "Preferred Address" module.

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Required Texts

	Mackey, A., & Gass, S. M. (2005). Second language research: Methodology and design. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
	Brown, J. D. (1988). Understanding research in second language learning: A teacher's guide to statistics and research design. New York: Cambridge University Press.
	Ryan, B., Joiner, B., & Cryer, J. (2005). MINITAB® handbook. (5th ed.). Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole—Thomas Learning.
	Focal studies that are the subject of learning activities are available in PDF format here.

Recommended Materials

	American Psychological Association. (2001). Publication manual of The American Psychological Association (5th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.
	MINITAB release 15. Statistical software for Windows® 2000, XP or Vista. You can download a rental version of MINITAB release 15 from e-academy at www.e-academy.com/minitab. MINITAB is also available for you to use on all the Windows computers in the infolabs at the Memorial Library room 140 and at Union South lower level.

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Aims of the Course

This course is designed to prepare graduate students in second language acquisition and other branches of applied linguistics to critically evaluate published research in their field and to design their own research studies.

The course will introduce the main concepts of research in applied linguistics and especially in second language acquisition. The course aims to make you comfortable with critically evaluating published reports of both quantitative and qualitative research studies in our field. The methodology of quantitative research, especially the use of inferential statistics, will be the main focus of the second half of the course. If you intend to use statistics in your own research, however, I advise you to take an in-depth and hands-on treatment of statistics in education. Consider taking the series of two courses offered in the Department of Educational Psychology: 760 and 761, Statistical Methods Applied to Education I and II.

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Assignments

Learning Activities. Most weeks there will be one or two Learning Activities, the aim of which is for you to get hands-on experience with critiquing published studies or with solving problems in the design of research. These activities must be done in pairs. Each member of the pair will receive the same grade. Each week, one pair of students will present their own responses and facilitate seminar discussion of the previous week's learning activities. Hard copies of assignments are due on the day specified in the Course Outline.  Assignments that are handed in or emailed late will receive a failing grade. If you miss class on a day when an assignment is due, you may send your responses as an email attachment to the class grader, Heather Carroll, with a copy to me. During the first half of the course you will write critiques of published studies of research in applied linguistics. Guidelines for critiquing quantitative and qualitative studies are available here.

SLA Exam Questions. There will be two examination questions taken from past papers of the Preliminary Exam for the Ph.D. program in SLA. You should answer these questions individually. One question will focus on a qualitative study and one on a quantitative study. An essay formatted in APA style is required to answer each of the exam questions.

Authorship. Some assignments in this course involve integrating information from published sources into your own writing. This means that you need to be careful not to plagiarize: "to steal or pass off (the ideas and words of another) as one's own" or to "present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source" (Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition, p. 888). For advice on what sources you should document and how to document them, consult Quoting and Paraphrasing Sources on the Writing Center website, from which the preceding statement is taken.

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Assessment and Grading

Format. All written work must use APA style.

Grades. Letter grades will be awarded for the written responses to the learning activities (40% of the final grade), seminar facilitation (10%), and exam essays (25% of the final grade for each). The meanings of the grades are as follows.

Incompletes. The grade of "Incomplete" will only be used for a student who has carried the course with a passing grade until near the end of the semester and then, because of illness or other unusual and substantial cause beyond his/her control, is unable to complete the research project.

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Course Outline

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Focal Studies

Derwing, T., Munro, M., & Wiebe, G. (1998). Evidence in favor of a broad framework for pronunciation instruction. Language Learning, 48(3), 393-410.

Dewaele, J-M. (2007). Predicting language learners’ grades in the L1, L2, L3 and L4: The effect of some psychological and sociocognitive variables. International Journal of Multilingualism, 4(3), 169-197.

Jenkins, S., & Parra, I. (2003). Multiple layers of meaning in an oral proficiency test: The complementary roles of nonverbal, paralinguistic, and verbal behaviors in assessment decisions. The Modern Language Journal, 87(1), 90-107.

Garrett, P., & Young, R. F. (2006, June 17). Theorizing affect in foreign language learning: An analysis of one learner’s responses to a communicative-based Portuguese course. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics, Montréal, Québec.

Gass, S. (1994). The reliability of second-language grammaticality judgments. In E. Tarone & S. Gass & A. Cohen (Eds.), Research methodology in second language acquisition (pp. 302-322). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Pica, T., Kanagy, R., & Falodun, J. (1993). Choosing and using communication tasks for second language instruction and research. In G. Crookes & S. M. Gass (Eds.), Tasks and language learning: Integrating theory and practice (pp. 9-34). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Skehan, P., & Foster, P. (1999). The influence of task structure and processing conditions on narrative retellings. Language Learning, 49(1), 93-120.

Young, R. (1996). Form-function relations in articles in English interlanguage. In R. Bayley & D. R. Preston (Eds.), Second language acquisition and linguistic variation (pp. 135-175). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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This page last revised November 13, 2007 .