Eng 1201 - About Doing Academic Research in Linguistic Field

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Inaddtion to different orientations in linguistic research, applying proper method in conducting a research is crucial to the result. Basically speaking, there are three ways to conduct a research, quantitative method, qualitative method and mixed method. Qualitative method refers to a huge collection of datas or information undergone carefully mathematical analysis. If the sample is representative enough to reflect the whole survey pool, then the result can be applied to the entire phenomenon. This is an objective way of doing research. However, some people question that enormous statistics cover up those individuals in the research where certain peculiarity cannot be shown in the result. This is one of the reasons why recently qualitative research has become more and more popular in western countries. Usually people who do qualitative research will immerse himself in certain environment regarding his study, or keep track of a certain question for at least several years and then make his final conclusion. These methods are useful not only in academic field but also in our daily use. We need to train ourselves in order to acquire the ability to seek rules in seemingly intricate and perplex problems.

Last but not least, we should never just weigh the success for a research and fail the integrity. Morals are indispensible in a research. There are researches which can make achievements easily, but we just simply cannot do it because some of the steps may violate moral values. We should bare this in mind whenever we are working on a research.

Suggestions:

How to do a research is not something that can be taught only in class. There should be some assignment in which professors can give students instructions in each step. Or we can just simply follow a professor in his or her research to see if there is anything we can help or learn from them.

Students may need some reference to know the cutting-edge research information. After reading materials, students can be divided into small groups to do some group tasks or simply share their feelings about the material.