LING90021 Bilingualism Assignment 3 – Research report

Due date: Monday 3 June, midnight

Word length: 3000* words (+/- 10%)
Weighting: 60%
Submission: word document, LMS

*This assignment needs to be completed in a pair. You will then have a maximum word limit of
5000 (expected at least 4500). Only under certain circumstances, you will be able to complete
this assignment alone, and this needs to be discussed with the subject coordinator.

You are strongly encouraged to present a short (2 minute) description of your planned research
question and method in the form of a PowerPoint Presentation in Weeks 7-9 on which you will
receive feedback from your teachers and peers. Only immediate oral feedback will be given.

Prelude

Read pages 257-261 of the textbook which is about conducting research and ethical concerns.
Make sure to download the Consent Form (on LMS – page for this assignment) and give to
your participants.

Task description

Your research project can be quantitative or qualitative. The style of project depends on your
research question and methods. It does not necessarily need to involve statistics.

You can either do your own data analysis or write a review article. For some topics a review
article may be more feasible.

Your task is to write a report. You need to

 Articulate a research question
 Analyse relevant data (or perform a review)
 Report your findings

Any publicly available material can be used as data e.g. research papers, government reports,
news articles, comment section posts, discussion forums, TV shows, signs…

Evaluation criteria
 Clear and focussed research question
 Suitability of methodology
 Presentation and discussion of empirical results
 Depth of discussion in relation to results and literature reviewed
 Ability to draw conclusions and recognize limitations
 Presentation and completeness of report

(See marking rubric on the LMS.)

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Project ideas and potential data sources

The following lists ideas for each topic area and offers guidelines for writing research reports
and review articles.

1. Growing up bilingual (Weeks 2-3)

Parental views

You could read parenting forums or discussion boards to find discussions of raising children
bilingually and analyse the different motivations and/or challenges parents report.
Child language

You could analyse recordings of bilingual children which have been made publicly available on
CHILDES. https://childes.talkbank.org/access/Biling/
You should study a corpus where you speak both/all of the languages involved.
 These are French/Portuguese, Italian/Dutch, French/Russian,
Hungarian/Spanish/Catalan, Mandarin/English, Cantonese/English, English/Spanish,
Japanese/English, French/English, Hebrew/English, Italian/German,
Mandarin/Cantonese/English, Portuguese/Swedish/English, Italian/Japanese,
Arabic/English

Be sure to read the description of the corpus to check how the data was collected and coded and
the age range of the child to see if it will be suitable for your research question.

The corpus must have audio and linked browsable transcripts available. It is better if it also has
video available. There are many topics you could study with such a corpus, e.g. when the child
shifts between languages, the vocabulary drawn from each language, language mixing…

2. Review advice given to parents regarding raising children bilingually

You could review the motivations/challenges/strategies discussed in advice given to parents

raising bilingual children. This can be found in government pamphlets, parenting books etc. for
instance Harding-Esch and Riley (2003) The Bilingual Family: A Handbook For Parents.

3. Bilingualism in society (Week 4)

For questions regarding language use in Indigenous Australia you could consider the NILS
reports https://www.arts.gov.au/what-we-do/indigenous-arts-and-languages/national-
indigenous-languages-report

There is a collection of interviews with elderly German-English bilinguals who were refugees
from WW2 currently living in England. https://biling.talkbank.org/access/Eppler.html This
could be used to investigate questions of language use in the community as well as language
attitudes.

Sabina Vakser has a corpus of conversations amongst Russian-English bilingual families in

Melbourne, with code-switching available for analysis. She collected this data as part of her
PhD thesis ‘Как мы codeswitchаем’: the range of Russianness in Melbourne’. https://minerva-
access.unimelb.edu.au/handle/11343/39963
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You can also search for other publicly available data e.g. interviews and media articles either
within Australia or in another country of interest.

4. Evaluation of language tests

You could write an evaluation of language proficiency tests e.g.

https://www.transparent.com/language-resources/tests.html http://world-english.org/
And others available online (including sample TOEFL and IELTS papers)

To do this, you should first take the tests and then evaluate them according to a set of questions.
See Task C 2.2 in the textbook for suggestions.

5. Attitudes and bilingualism (Weeks 6-7)

There is a collection of interviews with elderly German-English bilinguals who were refugees
from WW2 currently living in England. https://biling.talkbank.org/access/Eppler.html This
could be used to investigate questions of language use in the community as well as language
attitudes.

Online discussion forums (e.g. for parents, immigrants/ex pats, international students…)
could provide a valuable source of data here.

You could also review media coverage about particular languages within a particular
community/country e.g. search Australian news articles for mention of French and analyse the
ways in which it is presented (what adjectives does it cooccur with, do these have positive or
negative associations…)

You could also do further study of the language portraits from the Assignment 1 data set.
e.g. Why are languages placed at the heart? In the tips of the hands/feet? See Singer & Harris
(2016).

6. Bilingualism in education (Weeks 8-9)

Review reports from bilingual programmes

Several reports on bilingual programmes are available e.g. Christian, D. & Genesee, F. (Eds.)
(2001) Bilingual Education or Devlin, B. C., Disbray, S., & Devlin, N. R. F. (Eds.) (2017)
History of Bilingual Education in the Northern Territory: People, Programs and Policies. You
could use these to survey the way programmes are structured/implemented and their
(perceived) strengths and weaknesses.

Review of bilingual education programmes in a region

You could also carry out an investigation of the bilingual programmes available within a
particular region or a particular language pair. First, select your region e.g. Melbourne or
language pair e.g. English/Japanese and search for schools offering bilingual programmes.
Then search their websites and other publicly available information to find how the programme
is structured. You can use the questions in Task C 6.2 in the textbook as a guide.
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 7. Language attrition (Week 12)

Analysis of personal narratives/reports

Discussion forums dedicated to language learning and/or immigration will contain mentions of
language loss. You could search these forums and analyse reasons/attitudes/descriptions of
language attrition.

Meta-analysis or review

Another option is to write a review paper examining articles published on a particular aspect of
language attrition.

Guide to Writing a Research Report

There are 5 main sections to a research report:

a) Abstract – This is approximately 150-200 words long. It states the rationale for the
project and gives a brief idea as to the nature of the project, the findings and the
implications. It is a summary to orientate your reader before the main report. (This
appears first in the report but it is usually written last.)

b) Literature Review – The related research (literature) is introduced so that the motivation
for the study can be discussed. You need to identify the issues which are directly
relevant to the aim(s) of your study and the rationale for why you are conducting the
study. Tight concise writing is needed here as you usually have to complete your
discussion in 1000 to 1500 words.
The first thing to do is to do a search for relevant research. The easiest way to do this to
use the library’s online databases. The most productive database for linguistics research
is the LLBA (Linguistics and Language Behavioural Abstracts) database. Try to read at
least 6-10 articles which are relevant to the study. The references from class and those
cited in the readings may also be helpful.

c) Method – This is a brief discussion of the methodology you used, that is who your
participants are, how the study was conducted and the materials used. Again, clear and
concise writing is very important. Usually, a methodology section follows the following
format:
o Participants
o Materials
o Procedure/s

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 d) Results and Discussion – Here, you comment on the results obtained and if necessary,
explain how figures are arrived at. Note that Tables and Figures help in presenting the
information but do not take the place of prose. (They do not explain themselves!)
Number and label all tables and figures. In discussing the results, it is important to do
three things:
o Identify where the results are obtained from (e.g., As can be seen from Table
2…)
o Identify the findings (Figure 2 indicates that 6 years olds are more likely to …)
o Comment on the findings – here, you go through the results pointing out the
generalizations and the implications.
Relate the discussion back to the research introduced in the literature review. Are your
findings the same or different from other claims? If there are differences, can you
explain why? It is customary to suggest directions for future research in the conclusion

e) References and appendices (these are not included in the word count)
Use APA 7 style referencing (LINK:
https://library.unimelb.edu.au/recite/apa7)

Guide to Writing a Review Paper

This requires an abstract and references as in the research report above. It still requires a small
literature review to situate and explain the research question. However, here the literature
review takes on an extended role providing the data for your paper.

Your methods section should explain how you carried out your literature search: How and why
did you constrain the literature you are including? (e.g. journal articles published in the last 5
years because….) How did you find the literature? (e.g. used database X to search for keywords
Y and Z). How did you code/evaluate the literature? (e.g. reviewed each article to determine
which of these five factors they used in defining bilingualism…). It is useful to employ a
checklist or evaluation metric, so you can code the methods used in each paper in the same
way.

Your results summarize and review the literature as relevant to your question and methods. In
your conclusion, make sure you come back to your question and answer it.

You may find these guidelines for reviews and meta-analyses useful (though note these are
guidelines for writing for publication and are at a higher level than is required for this
assignment).

http://www.ccace.ed.ac.uk/research/software-resources/systematic-reviews-and-meta- analyses
https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=283300&p=2915110
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003149