After a break, back to the research proposal

After a break, I'm coming back to my blog to review what has happened so far and what I'm heading for in the next couple of weeks.

I'm trying to organise my thoughts around my project and it is being rather challenging.

1. How far am I?

I have done a good deal of reading on the basic concepts like worldview, strategies, literature, use of theory.

I feel there is a lot of the reading I don't quite grasp such as the quantitative research methods and all the statistics around it - can anyone understand it just by reading about it?

My worldview:

The worldview I want to adopt will be the humanist one as this will allow me to describe students' perceptions, beliefs and reflect on them.

My research topic:

I have also chosen and formulated my research topic:

EFL students' perceptions and expectations of an intensive English course.

I have reviewed the literature on my topic and found some great articles.

 Interestingly, most of the literature on the topic focuses around quantitative methods studying students' perceptions, employing statistical analysis of questionnaires, surveys, inventories.

2. What is there ahead of me?

 In contrast to what I've read, I intend to carry out a qualitative study in order to explore students' perceptions.

The main dificulty for  me at the moment is deciding on the research method and methods of data collection.

Considering time constraints and the size of this study (a small-scale study) I have identified the following to be within the range of my possibilities:

1.    action research – because suitable for small scale research (Newby, P., p. 623)

-       it is a mechanism for engaging people with their work and has  the benefit of increasing commitment and motivation ;

-       makes use of reflective practice, which suits my research problem well

or

2. research question –  because: we can try and understand how our learners prefer to learn and adapt/change out teaching methods accordingly.

The research question could be: 

How do German learners of English prefer to learn this language in an intensive,

10-week long course?