I initially wrote the first chapter of my research proposal/dissertation in February this year. Of the three chapters that I wrote, it was the most difficult because I had no idea who my audience was. In reality, the audience was my professor in the research proposal writing class and my classmates. However, none of them are members of my dissertation committee, who I tried to imagine as my audience. The problem with that was I could not really consult them yet because I had not completed my comprehensive exams yet. So it felt like I was writing Chapter 1 for a simulated audience, one that doesn't really exist.
Chapter 1 should be the most engaging of the chapters to write because it is my opportunity to make my case. Because I didn't know who I'm making my case to, I struggled. Although I tried to imagine my future dissertation committee as my audience, I also had to write it for someone outside the field. In fact, I do have someone outside the field sitting on my committee, but she is very familiar with the context of my initially proposed data collection. I felt like I was making my case to people who were already half on board with me. I didn't feel the need to make a stronger case, and perhaps that is what made my first chapter 1 weak.
Now that I have passed my comprehensive exams, my advisor and co-chair recommended that my audience be to someone in education, but not in foreign language or ESL education, and to someone who has the authority of issuing grant money. This advice has helped tremendously, but I basically had to scrap most of the original draft. I had to scrap it because I have decided, through the advice of several committee members, that I should broaden my scope beyond sojourning EFL teachers in Japan to EFL teachers in East Asia sojourning from the United States (and maybe Canada?). My advisor also recommended that framing chapter 1 as a call for intercultural communication training in ESL education would help.
The first steps were the easiest as I already had most of the literature. I made a spreadsheet and categorized my literature in terms of domain: education, language education, teacher education, intercultural communication, and sojourner studies. After I completed this spreadsheet, I revisited all the literature that stressed both teacher education and intercultural communication to find the best arguments. Then I looked at literature about intercultural communication to better sell the idea as the business/corporate world finds intercultural communication to be quite important.
Actually...writing this blog is helping because I haven't made my point clear enough about the connection between the international business/corporate need for intercultural communication and the reason why many people learn English as an international language. Put simply: globalization. I've heard this pitch so many times that I forget that not everybody knows this connection. I wonder if I should make that my biggest catch rather than the poor standards for teachers in terms of intercultural communication. It seems as if it precludes the standards.
Anyway, although I seemed to have avoided analysis paralysis when writing chapter 1 for class. I now seem to be going into it a bit. I seem to have about 2 good hours of progress a day before I get second thoughts that send me into this analysis paralysis. The simplest example is when I realize that many of my studies for demographics are over a decade old. So when I search for more up to date demographic information, I find little to none, but that search helps me find other literature that may help. But I already have enough convincing literature. This sidestepping literature search usually takes up an hour, and then I lose track and second guess my arguments, primarily, and my writing ability, secondarily.
This blog is helping me refocus in terms of bullet points. I seem to have a few bullet point-type ideas, but I feel the urge to elaborate on them even though that's the point of chapter 2. I believe my biggest struggle is when to elaborate and when to keep it succinct. This struggle comes out of explaining my ideas to someone who is not in my field. How much explanation or background information should this person need, so it is clear enough?
So I will revisit my literature and make more bullet points to sell the need for my study under the premise that it will improve intercultural communication training in second language teacher education. It's back to outlining, but without scrapping again.
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Intercultural Communication Training
This past week has been quite a productive one, especially compared to the last 6 weeks of relatively little productivity. Firstly, I now have two co-chairs for my dissertation committee: my advisor who is essential in the area of teacher education and another professor in my department who is essential in the area of ESL education specifically. After meeting with the former, I have been advised to revise Chapter 1 of my research proposal to make a stronger argument for intercultural communication training of language educators.
Within the past few days, I have engaged this advice in three different ways. The first was reviewing the literature I had already collected and seeing how I could reorganize my writing to make a stronger argument. For me, this is the easiest to plan and most difficult to write. The second was doing some online research of programs that recruit people to teach English (or other languages) abroad and seeking out any evidence of intercultural or cross-cultural training. With the list I have compiled so far, I would say that I am familiar with about half of the programs. The third was starting another search for scholarly articles and books that specifically address the benefits and disadvantages of intercultural communication training in education and elsewhere (usually in multinational corporations).
The last two approaches to this challenge have given me many new ideas, some of which are distracting in that they suggest a complete change in Chapter 3 of my research proposal. The most interesting yet distracting idea was to investigate the intercultural or cross-cultural training programs within these international teacher recruiters. For example, the JET Program in Japan, EPIK in South Korea, and the Peace Corps in the United States require some cultural training before their English teachers start teaching. I would like to know how they developed these programs, how they are evaluated, and how a random sample of teachers in these programs found them useful, useless, or something in between. I only think of this as distracting because the more I think about a theoretical framework about this type of research, the further I move away from my original proposal. This is a symptom of analysis paralysis, I believe. And I do not want to get snared in that net.
So far, I have collected about 10 articles with only a few published over a decade ago and 1 textbook. The best discovery so far is that I found another expert in the area, Karen E. Johnson from Penn State. I have heard of her before, and I look forward to reading her articles and the textbook she co-edited. Our interests overlap in the recognizing the importance of developing language teachers' sociocultural knowledge. I should be able to elaborate more on this as I read her work. On a side note, I remember one of my supervisors in Korea who had all of us sojourning teacher trainers read one of her articles.
I feel that I am on a roll in that the more recent studies have indicated that this area, intercultural competence or sociocultural knowledge of ESL teachers, is a hot research area. I am temporarily stepping aside from another hot area, the English language policies of Japan. And I am beginning to see a connection to this current research interest to another interest I have in multiliteracies, which suggests that today's classrooms have more diversity in terms of student backgrounds in terms of cultural and technological literacies. But I digress.
Within the past few days, I have engaged this advice in three different ways. The first was reviewing the literature I had already collected and seeing how I could reorganize my writing to make a stronger argument. For me, this is the easiest to plan and most difficult to write. The second was doing some online research of programs that recruit people to teach English (or other languages) abroad and seeking out any evidence of intercultural or cross-cultural training. With the list I have compiled so far, I would say that I am familiar with about half of the programs. The third was starting another search for scholarly articles and books that specifically address the benefits and disadvantages of intercultural communication training in education and elsewhere (usually in multinational corporations).
The last two approaches to this challenge have given me many new ideas, some of which are distracting in that they suggest a complete change in Chapter 3 of my research proposal. The most interesting yet distracting idea was to investigate the intercultural or cross-cultural training programs within these international teacher recruiters. For example, the JET Program in Japan, EPIK in South Korea, and the Peace Corps in the United States require some cultural training before their English teachers start teaching. I would like to know how they developed these programs, how they are evaluated, and how a random sample of teachers in these programs found them useful, useless, or something in between. I only think of this as distracting because the more I think about a theoretical framework about this type of research, the further I move away from my original proposal. This is a symptom of analysis paralysis, I believe. And I do not want to get snared in that net.
So far, I have collected about 10 articles with only a few published over a decade ago and 1 textbook. The best discovery so far is that I found another expert in the area, Karen E. Johnson from Penn State. I have heard of her before, and I look forward to reading her articles and the textbook she co-edited. Our interests overlap in the recognizing the importance of developing language teachers' sociocultural knowledge. I should be able to elaborate more on this as I read her work. On a side note, I remember one of my supervisors in Korea who had all of us sojourning teacher trainers read one of her articles.
I feel that I am on a roll in that the more recent studies have indicated that this area, intercultural competence or sociocultural knowledge of ESL teachers, is a hot research area. I am temporarily stepping aside from another hot area, the English language policies of Japan. And I am beginning to see a connection to this current research interest to another interest I have in multiliteracies, which suggests that today's classrooms have more diversity in terms of student backgrounds in terms of cultural and technological literacies. But I digress.
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Data Collection Options
I'm still in the research proposal phase and am facing some options for collecting data. I will list them here and hopefully they will help me (and maybe my committee) to help decide which path is the best to choose.
Option #1 - The Idealistic Path
I most likely will not choose this path, but for the sake of completeness and continuity, I'd like to share my original idea for data collection. I would travel abroad to either Japan or South Korea for 6-12 months to collect data on a group of individuals or on an already established community of EFL teachers that has formed. This would be either a multiple case study or an ethnography. Data collection would consist of interviews, participant-observation, and document analysis.
Option #2 - The First Stages of Adjustment
For my research proposal assignment, I proposed interviewing EFL instructors who had just arrived to Japan for the first time. Through my contacts in Japan, I would interview between 3 and 15 new sojourners with my theoretical framework based on cross-cultural adjustment, mainly from the field of psychology. I would interview each participant at least twice and ideally three times in stages within a 6 month period for a multiple case study. This study would be limited to Japan only.
Option #3 - Before and After Arriving to a New Country
Keeping the same theoretical framework as option #2, I would interview the same number of participants in the United States with weeks or a few months before they travel to teach EFL abroad. Because of my literature review, I would like to isolate the countries to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. I would interview each participant once before he or she leaves and once or twice after he or she arrives. The endpoint would be no longer than 3 months after their arrival, thus making this study a few months shorter than option #2 and it may be easier to find participants through the University of Iowa and perhaps my other alma mater.
Option #4 - Before, During, and After Sojourning
This option was raised by my advisor, but we hadn't much time to discuss in detail, so I may be misrepresenting her ideas. This is mainly my interpretation of how I see it. In this case, I would not follow my participants through a process as in the first 3 options. Instead they would represent a certain stage of sojourning. Like option 3, I can interview a few people before they teach abroad. Like options 1 & 2, I can interview a few who are currently teaching abroad. And a new option is to interview someone who has returned from teaching abroad. I would need a new theoretical framework for this, and my advisor and I have some ideas.
Option #5 - Interviews and Blogs
Many sojourning EFL teachers have written or are writing blogs about their experiences and beliefs about teaching abroad. I am strongly interested in investigating these blogs, but I would like to triangulate the data with some interviews from participants similar to the ones in option #4. I have already started collecting literature on collecting data from blogs for qualitative research.
Option #6 - Community of Sojourning EFL Teachers Online?
This idea is the furthest removed from my original idea, but I am equally interested in it. It involves the same target population, but they no longer need to be new to the country. This study would instead investigate the extent to which a community of sojourning EFL teachers exists online. I would start with locating web sites for these hypothetical communities and then join them (like in a netnography) or email/interview them about the structure, benefits, and caveats of the community online.
Summary
Option #1 - The Idealistic Path
I most likely will not choose this path, but for the sake of completeness and continuity, I'd like to share my original idea for data collection. I would travel abroad to either Japan or South Korea for 6-12 months to collect data on a group of individuals or on an already established community of EFL teachers that has formed. This would be either a multiple case study or an ethnography. Data collection would consist of interviews, participant-observation, and document analysis.
Option #2 - The First Stages of Adjustment
For my research proposal assignment, I proposed interviewing EFL instructors who had just arrived to Japan for the first time. Through my contacts in Japan, I would interview between 3 and 15 new sojourners with my theoretical framework based on cross-cultural adjustment, mainly from the field of psychology. I would interview each participant at least twice and ideally three times in stages within a 6 month period for a multiple case study. This study would be limited to Japan only.
Option #3 - Before and After Arriving to a New Country
Keeping the same theoretical framework as option #2, I would interview the same number of participants in the United States with weeks or a few months before they travel to teach EFL abroad. Because of my literature review, I would like to isolate the countries to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. I would interview each participant once before he or she leaves and once or twice after he or she arrives. The endpoint would be no longer than 3 months after their arrival, thus making this study a few months shorter than option #2 and it may be easier to find participants through the University of Iowa and perhaps my other alma mater.
Option #4 - Before, During, and After Sojourning
This option was raised by my advisor, but we hadn't much time to discuss in detail, so I may be misrepresenting her ideas. This is mainly my interpretation of how I see it. In this case, I would not follow my participants through a process as in the first 3 options. Instead they would represent a certain stage of sojourning. Like option 3, I can interview a few people before they teach abroad. Like options 1 & 2, I can interview a few who are currently teaching abroad. And a new option is to interview someone who has returned from teaching abroad. I would need a new theoretical framework for this, and my advisor and I have some ideas.
Option #5 - Interviews and Blogs
Many sojourning EFL teachers have written or are writing blogs about their experiences and beliefs about teaching abroad. I am strongly interested in investigating these blogs, but I would like to triangulate the data with some interviews from participants similar to the ones in option #4. I have already started collecting literature on collecting data from blogs for qualitative research.
Option #6 - Community of Sojourning EFL Teachers Online?
This idea is the furthest removed from my original idea, but I am equally interested in it. It involves the same target population, but they no longer need to be new to the country. This study would instead investigate the extent to which a community of sojourning EFL teachers exists online. I would start with locating web sites for these hypothetical communities and then join them (like in a netnography) or email/interview them about the structure, benefits, and caveats of the community online.
Summary
- Target Participants - sojourning EFL instructors; the original plan was on those new to a certain country, but I do not need to focus on them exclusively; I'm not sure how important it is that they all come from the same country for some of these options
- Theoretical Framework - initially it was in cross-cultural adjustment theory and Holliday's host culture complex (1994); I would like to the use the latter more than the former as it focuses on EFL education more; ideally I'd like to use a theory that deals with the sociocultural nature of teaching EFL abroad
- Target Site - in the strictest sense, I have the most literature and experience with Japan; in the loosest sense, it could be in any country where English is not the dominant or official language; in a stricter sense, I would like to focus on East Asia based on my literature and experience
- Method - qualitative with emphasis on interviews or blog document analysis or combination of both, with some participant-observation possible
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Netnographic Ideas
I'm about halfway through reading Kozinets' book Netnography, which I borrowed from one of my dissertation committee members. And I have a few ideas stirring around in my head, I'd like to jot them down now before more ideas come and I start forgetting the first ideas. Before I begin, I'm not certain that I will do a netnography, which requires the researcher to participate with a community online or an online community. The difference between these two is that the former is a community that also exists offline.
If I were to quickly choose a community online, which I may discover to be an online community, is one of the many forms found on Dave's ESL Cafe. I haven't used that site much since I have become more established in my profession as it seems the target audience is for new ESL instructors, who are the target for my study. There are 3 different forums I am interested in, two are specific to countries (China & South Korea) and the third is for international jobs specifically.
I wanted to check if someone had already investigated Dave's ESL Cafe for research. I found one peer-reviewed article published in the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education in 2010, written by Kristene K. McClure. Her study is not what I intend to investigate, but her findings may help me understand the forum as it was during her data collection period. I'm very interested in her findings, and I will definitely read the article once I finish reading Kozinets' book.
McClure also investigated another website a4esl.org, which I haven't used much and it doesn't seem to offer much in terms of an interactive community. It's a lot more Web 1.0 then Web 2.0, but perhaps I haven't explored the site enough.
There's somewhat of a community online of EFL teachers in Japan found in the blogosphere. I have written a document analysis paper covering three blogs written by EFL teachers in Japan, but this wouldn't count as a netnography because I did not participate in their blogs. Some of these blogs aren't really written for participation, but I could seek out ones that have consistent commentary by a regular group of people. Some of these blogs also provide a helpful blogroll of other blogs about Japan or teaching ESL or both. In passing, I noticed that some of these bloggers interact with one another.
I feel strongly to collect data from some of these blogs, especially if they are active and frequently written. At this point, I am not sure if I would like to dive into participation, thus qualifying my study as a netnography. I have to keep asking myself how much I would gain from it and how much it would answer my research questions, which may be modified anyway.
Just as I was about to end this posting, I remembered another online community that I have joined but have participated solely as a lurker. It is EFL Classroom 2.0, and the last time I check it seemed to be dominated by local and sojourning EFL teachers in South Korea. I will have to explore it more fully after finishing Kozinets' book. From what I remember, it was a bit chaotic to explore. I hope it's a little bit more user-friendly now.
If I were to quickly choose a community online, which I may discover to be an online community, is one of the many forms found on Dave's ESL Cafe. I haven't used that site much since I have become more established in my profession as it seems the target audience is for new ESL instructors, who are the target for my study. There are 3 different forums I am interested in, two are specific to countries (China & South Korea) and the third is for international jobs specifically.
I wanted to check if someone had already investigated Dave's ESL Cafe for research. I found one peer-reviewed article published in the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education in 2010, written by Kristene K. McClure. Her study is not what I intend to investigate, but her findings may help me understand the forum as it was during her data collection period. I'm very interested in her findings, and I will definitely read the article once I finish reading Kozinets' book.
McClure also investigated another website a4esl.org, which I haven't used much and it doesn't seem to offer much in terms of an interactive community. It's a lot more Web 1.0 then Web 2.0, but perhaps I haven't explored the site enough.
There's somewhat of a community online of EFL teachers in Japan found in the blogosphere. I have written a document analysis paper covering three blogs written by EFL teachers in Japan, but this wouldn't count as a netnography because I did not participate in their blogs. Some of these blogs aren't really written for participation, but I could seek out ones that have consistent commentary by a regular group of people. Some of these blogs also provide a helpful blogroll of other blogs about Japan or teaching ESL or both. In passing, I noticed that some of these bloggers interact with one another.
I feel strongly to collect data from some of these blogs, especially if they are active and frequently written. At this point, I am not sure if I would like to dive into participation, thus qualifying my study as a netnography. I have to keep asking myself how much I would gain from it and how much it would answer my research questions, which may be modified anyway.
Just as I was about to end this posting, I remembered another online community that I have joined but have participated solely as a lurker. It is EFL Classroom 2.0, and the last time I check it seemed to be dominated by local and sojourning EFL teachers in South Korea. I will have to explore it more fully after finishing Kozinets' book. From what I remember, it was a bit chaotic to explore. I hope it's a little bit more user-friendly now.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Netnography
I have had 3 opportunities to present my research proposal before entering the official research proposal phase that occurs after one successfully completes comprehensive exams. The first was in the spring semester of 2011 for a final paper in my Cultural Curriculum course. The second was a presentation to my colleagues at the Summer Intensive English Program at the International University of Japan. And the third was appropriately in a course called Proposal Writing that I just completed a few weeks ago.
First, I will briefly describe how my research interest developed over the past year through those 3 opportunities. Then, I will introduce how my first post-comps meeting has presented new ways of approaching these research focus that I was narrowing.
In the Spring of 2011, I was still undecided about collecting data in Japan or South Korea, but I was leaning towards South Korea. This first proposal was written as if were granted a Fulbright grant to conduct my research in Seoul. My primary interest was the intercultural communication competence of American English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in their schools and communities. During the summer, I leaned towards Japan as a potential site as I made stronger contacts there over the summer. I also encountered two ideas that I grasped on to strongly, Holliday's host culture complex (1994) and Ting-Toomey's revised W-shaped cultural adaptation model (1999). These two ideas helped me change and narrow my focus to the adjustment process of new EFL expatriate instructors. From the fall of 2011 through this past semester (Spring 2012), I have been reading a lot more about the sociocultural context of education in Japan, specifically English education as well as the psychology of culture shock or acculturation. For my research proposal in the Proposal Writing course, I wrote about my interest in the adjustment process of new EFL instructors sojourning in Japan. I had planned to conduct a multiple case study over a 4-6 month period with at least 2 interviews per participant, which I have re-labeled sojourner instead of expatriate based on the literature on cross-cultural training and acculturation psychology.
My oral comprehensive exams and my first meeting thereafter have jolted me out this fixed research proposal. Firstly, it was suggested that I incorporate readings about the naive teacher adjusting to the new teaching environment in the United States, such as a suburban white teacher in an urban school that is mostly black or Hispanic school. I can also incorporate my second research interest about multiliteracies in that schools nowadays have students with various literacies, including little to none, when entering the classroom. The new teacher must be able to cope with students with different backgrounds and understandings of schooling.
The most liberating change was to incorporate some aspect of netnography (Kozinets, 2010) into my research methodology. At this point, I'm planning to conduct interviews online as well as collect data from blogs written by my target participants, past or present and maybe immediate future. I just started reading Kozinets' book yesterday, so I can't really elaborate on this concept yet. All I can say is that it excites me.
In the next few weeks, I will be exploring the various ways of conducting a netnography, in part or whole, and seeking approval for this type of research from IRB. So late May 2012, I will have netnography and its variants on the brain.
First, I will briefly describe how my research interest developed over the past year through those 3 opportunities. Then, I will introduce how my first post-comps meeting has presented new ways of approaching these research focus that I was narrowing.
In the Spring of 2011, I was still undecided about collecting data in Japan or South Korea, but I was leaning towards South Korea. This first proposal was written as if were granted a Fulbright grant to conduct my research in Seoul. My primary interest was the intercultural communication competence of American English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in their schools and communities. During the summer, I leaned towards Japan as a potential site as I made stronger contacts there over the summer. I also encountered two ideas that I grasped on to strongly, Holliday's host culture complex (1994) and Ting-Toomey's revised W-shaped cultural adaptation model (1999). These two ideas helped me change and narrow my focus to the adjustment process of new EFL expatriate instructors. From the fall of 2011 through this past semester (Spring 2012), I have been reading a lot more about the sociocultural context of education in Japan, specifically English education as well as the psychology of culture shock or acculturation. For my research proposal in the Proposal Writing course, I wrote about my interest in the adjustment process of new EFL instructors sojourning in Japan. I had planned to conduct a multiple case study over a 4-6 month period with at least 2 interviews per participant, which I have re-labeled sojourner instead of expatriate based on the literature on cross-cultural training and acculturation psychology.
My oral comprehensive exams and my first meeting thereafter have jolted me out this fixed research proposal. Firstly, it was suggested that I incorporate readings about the naive teacher adjusting to the new teaching environment in the United States, such as a suburban white teacher in an urban school that is mostly black or Hispanic school. I can also incorporate my second research interest about multiliteracies in that schools nowadays have students with various literacies, including little to none, when entering the classroom. The new teacher must be able to cope with students with different backgrounds and understandings of schooling.
The most liberating change was to incorporate some aspect of netnography (Kozinets, 2010) into my research methodology. At this point, I'm planning to conduct interviews online as well as collect data from blogs written by my target participants, past or present and maybe immediate future. I just started reading Kozinets' book yesterday, so I can't really elaborate on this concept yet. All I can say is that it excites me.
In the next few weeks, I will be exploring the various ways of conducting a netnography, in part or whole, and seeking approval for this type of research from IRB. So late May 2012, I will have netnography and its variants on the brain.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Comprehensive Exams
Yesterday, I successfully passed my comprehensive exams, which means a few things. First, I'm cleared by my advisor, my department, and the graduate college to start the research proposal phase of my PhD candidacy. Second, I'm not a PhD student anymore. I'm a PhD candidate, and now I have five years to get my dissertation done. So the deadline is official: I must finish by May 4, 2017 or I will never get my PhD from the College of Education at the University of Iowa.
The initial reaction of passing the exam was only a slight relief because it occurred at the end of the semester, and I still had to complete three final papers. I'm writing this now as I have finished two of the three, so the feeling of relief is a little stronger. I believe I should be completely relieved of my PhD student responsibilities by the end of tomorrow, and then I can enjoy complete relief.
I don't want to think about how much time I should give myself off before I engage in writing my research proposal, of which I already have a first draft completed. Another big summer project is to complete my application to the Internal Review Board. I'll give myself at least a week off before I dive into that. So after tomorrow, my next destination is to form my dissertation committee so they can approve of my proposal once my advisor and I believe it is ready. I'm hoping for sometime in September or October.
The initial reaction of passing the exam was only a slight relief because it occurred at the end of the semester, and I still had to complete three final papers. I'm writing this now as I have finished two of the three, so the feeling of relief is a little stronger. I believe I should be completely relieved of my PhD student responsibilities by the end of tomorrow, and then I can enjoy complete relief.
I don't want to think about how much time I should give myself off before I engage in writing my research proposal, of which I already have a first draft completed. Another big summer project is to complete my application to the Internal Review Board. I'll give myself at least a week off before I dive into that. So after tomorrow, my next destination is to form my dissertation committee so they can approve of my proposal once my advisor and I believe it is ready. I'm hoping for sometime in September or October.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Let the Writing Begin
Last week I started writing Chapter 1 for my dissertation, which will act as a part of my research proposal. I'm taking a class about proposal writing, and in the second half of the class we must write the first 2 chapters of our dissertation. The official research proposal requires the first 3 chapters, and my committee will tentatively accept take a look at it in the fall semester of this year.
The picture above represents most, but not all, of my physical books that I need just to write Chapter 1. There's a few more e-books that couldn't be photographed for obvious reasons. Also not included are the many articles I have stored electronically to help me write Chapter 1. Perhaps this pile of books represents at least 1/3 of my cited sources for that chapter.
At the same time, I'm writing two papers that overlap quite a bit with Chapter 1. One is about how the English language policy of Japan affects my target participants of my dissertation and the other is a research proposal for a mixed methods study, which is heavily influenced from my "unmixed" methods dissertation. Writing three papers that overlap that much is easy in that I don't need to collect much more literature, however having a distinct mindset for each paper is the challenging aspect, especially that my arguments differ.
At this point, in my early stages of my dissertation, I enjoy the writing process, especially because I have been collecting and reading a lot of literature over the past couple years. I wonder how long it will take before I become sick of writing. I hope it's later than sooner.
My dissertation time frame so far is as follows:
- In late April, complete my comprehensive exams and form my dissertation committee.
- By early May, complete drafts for chapters 1-2 for my proposal writing class, when I finish my last full semester of courses
- Over the summer, write chapter 3 and complete my application for the Internal Review Board (IRB)
- By September, submit my research proposal to my committee and prepare to collect data.
Data collection will commence once I have IRB and dissertation committee approval. This should take 4-6 months. Data analysis will take another 6 months. In the interim, I should be editing chapters 1-3 and slowly writing chapter 4 as my research is longitudinal, meaning I collect and analyze data in stages. Optimistically, I could have the dissertation completed before the summer of 2013. But I was told that it may take until the winter of 2013/14 to be done to the satisfaction of my committee.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)