The work by Canagarajah, Ethnographic Methods in Language Policy, has been helpful in providing me with some problems I’m interested in working on. I already have a data, but the problem is in what particular research problem am I going to use it. The data I have is a transcription of a two-hour long English class (in two sessions). The class was having a debate. This data was originally intended to show the feature of English used in my school: whether it is SAE (Standard American English), Standard Philippine English, or another variety.
Using the same data, I have come up with three possible problems: please feel free to comment on these.
1. Does the “English Only” policy in the class work?
2. How do students and teachers use unauthorized codes in the classroom? What are its features?
3. How do students and teachers manage to circumvent or make their own language policies in a private parochial school in the Philippines?
In line with these problems are the following limitations or challenges I see:
1. Unsuitability of the data.
2. Lack of data.
3. How could the data be triangulated?
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Hi Oliver. Have you tried looking at your data again (perhaps a few more times)? I asked because your plan above seems to start with a problem and then let the data "answer" the problem. Why not forget (at least temporarily) about your problem(s) first, and go back to your data? You might find some interesting patterns there. Try to formulate your problem from the data. I would venture to think that you may have a number "why" questions there, such as "why does the teacher do this?", "why do the students say this"...In this case, you let the data dictate the problem, and not the problem dictating the data.
ReplyDeleteThanks Sir! That was very helpful. I'll go over my data again.
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