Subject Area: Linguistics

Assignment: Designing a research project

Assigment with the task to design a research project.

MC kit “Understanding scientific research” includes the following elements:

  1. a template
  2. detailed information on research design
  3. a sample solution

MC kit “Research methods” includes the following elements:

Research Project design (60 minutes + 15 days supervised homework):

Professor will ask students to create their own international research plans. For that purpose, students will be provided with the following guidelines:

  1. Deciding the topic to research
    • finding common topics of interest for students in different European countries.
    • Students will have to plan a research connecting the area of Language/Language teaching/Lingustics to selected topics from the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations.
    • This way, students will have to find the social and development value of Linguistics in any of its research lines: Applied Linguistics, Language Teacher Training, etc.)
  2. Developing arguments to set personal interests, local interest, global interest, social needs, etc.
  3. Defining the research methodology:
    • How?: research paradigm, instruments (interviews, questionnaires, focus groups, observation sheets,…)
    • Where?: context (local and global)
    • Who?: participants (researchers and participants or informants)
    • When?: time of the year, longitudinal study?

Corpus-based ​Constructional Analysis

A four-week collaboration between UC Louvain and HU Berlin. Since our summer semesters are very different in terms of time, we only had four weeks for the collaboration. We also had to somehow solve the problem that the collaboration took place at the beginning of the semester in Berlin and at the end of the semester in Louvain. Fortunately, we were able to schedule the seminars at the same time. We decided on an en-bloc version, where we both learned together in the course, but where students also worked in parallel in transnational teams. The focus was on the method of corpus-based construction analysis.

Construction Grammar and Corpus-based constructional analysis

The kit has two core modules: One module offers a basic introduction into Construction Grammar. The second module introduces the method of corpus-based constructional analysis.

The two modules should be combined with an ice breaker module. It is designed for an en-bloc collaboration scenario, but other designs are possible, as well.