First Draft of Final Project

Please turn in two copies

The project essentially entails preparing to conduct a study on the topic of your bibliography, but without actually conducting it. Given what you learned from reading the articles in the bibliography you are to include these sections in this order:

Introduction Introduce the topic and tie the articles that you annotated together. Explain what has been done in this area and what you feel still needs to be done. Show why your study is important and how it relates to the ones you have cited. Define the question you want to study and specifically state your hypothesis, and what you expect to find.

Method What are you going to do to get evidence for or against your hypothesis? Will you use evidence from corpora or will you do an experiment. How will you conduct the experiment or corpus study? If it's a corpus justify your selection of corpora. If it's an experiment, what will you participants do? What will you measure? Collocation frequency? Speaker's judgments? Reaction times?

Participants If people will take your experiment, who will you choose? How many? What factors are important in your selection of participants?

Test items What will your corpus search specifically look for? What specific test items will you use? Justify your selection in terms of their ability to test the hypothesis.

Results and conclusions Assuming that you have measured something during the study, how will you analyze it? What statistical procedure would you use? How would the results confirm or negate your hypothesis? How would you determine that? What would different outcomes say about the topic and how do those relate back to the articles you read?

Bibliography Put the references here in alphabetical order. Don't include the the annotation.

Rather than having you turn this in at the end of the semester for a grade, this first draft is your chance to have me and another student give you help and guidance on the project before you turn in the final version. In other words, I “grade” it once before it actually “counts.” The first version will only receive a pass/fail grade, fail meaning failure to turn it in on time. Only the final version will receive a letter grade. The idea behind the project isn't for you to give me something I can grade, but for you to understand how linguistic research is carried out.

Besides covering all of the sections mentioned above, the grade will be based on two other important factors. First, could someone take what you have described and use it as a guide to carry out an experiment or is it to vague or not well-defined enough. Second, would the study actually be relevant to the hypothesis, and a good way to test it.

Here is an example of an 'A' paper.

Here is another example of an 'A' paper.