Piloting

I piloted my revised test today. Overall, it went well, but I think I need to leave more time for students to type their responses--apparently I type much faster than them!

I'm hoping to revise the test tomorrow, and test it with a lower level late this week or early next week. Then I'll send it out to a wider test group.

so far so good

I have done the pretest, two treatment sessions, and the immediate posttest (today).

So I have at least some things to say (I have not checked their answers yet, though).

The delayed posttest will be done next Monday.

On the same day, the pretest for the other class begins.

interview data.

So I've decided to consider my first three interviews with learners as a pilot, because I realized it's a lot more difficult to get the data that I want through asking questions and picture description.

I've transcribed the first three interview sessions-1 from each level (beg, int, adv). And now I'm going through the transcripts looking for some of the 'default' type errors that I was hoping to find.

After my review, I think I will end up changing/modifying my interview questions, and try to get at something deeper. I realized, based on learner responses, that most of my questions only elicit limited responses--1 sentence. I guess I thought that learners would automatically keep talking beyond this 'guide', but I'm having to push/interrogate a lot, so I need to create some better, more open-ended questions.

Either way, I expect to have a decent report/update when our class next meets! :)

I hope things are going well for everyone else!

Sorry

I have been forgetting about this site, and I mistakenly clicked the link, and jumped to this blog today.

I finished negotiating the time slots when participants are available with them and found enough of them for two classes.

Now I am waiting to hear from IRB, hopefully I will get the green light soon.

updates

I guess I'll see you all tomorrow, but I thought I might post anyway. Maybe it'll help me get things straight in my mind.

I turned in my IRB and got it back with a comment that I should add a sentence to my consent form. Did that, sent it back, but haven't heard from them since.

While waiting for the IRB, I've been revising my stimuli. I looked at different corpora to see if I could use a different one than the one I used for my proposal, and it basically came down to: the British National Corpus (BNC), the American National Corpus (ANC), and the one I used before, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).

I was hoping to use the BNC because of its large size (100 million words) and because most corpus studies use it, but I found that it isn't free, ($100+), it takes time to get it, and there are some differences in American and British English. The ANC is too small in size (22 million, and 15 million freely available) and potentially skewed. So that leaves me with COCA, which I used for my proposal. I get free access to most of the functions, but I just found out that I need to purchase what I need most (which is a word frequency list)! $500....yeah.

So right now, I'm doing this and that with COCA to see if I can get around using a word frequency list. If I find I can't, I think I'll eventually buy a license to the BNC.

Whew! Anway, that's where I am right now. Hopefully, I'll be able to move forward and get past this stage. Good luck to all of you too!

Some methodological considerations...

After reviewing some more of the literature, including some newer stuff, I've realized that to be able to properly speak to psycholinguistic research and theoretical linguistic stuff, I've got to include an oral production component in the study.

I realized that if the linguistically-minded people were talking about morphological variability in oral production, then I couldn't simply use written production to speak to that evidence-wise.

The thing now is that I am considering using:
1. oral fill-in-blanks/cloze passage (which would focus on features analysed in lexical decision, and written tasks)
2. elicit narrative (which would just get at what they produce naturally)
3. both (which would give me a lot of data to work with!)

Thoughts?

My IRB is in . . .

Now I just have to sit and wait. I've also sent my dialect test to be evaluated by Sara and by the professor who will be my QRP reader.