SEMESTRE 5 LINGUISTIQUES

Course Description :

This course offered in The 5^th semester as a preparatory course laying the foundations for the end-of-term project/paper that students have to submit at the end of the 6^th semester as partial fulfillment for the requirement of the BA in English studies. It is designed to familiarize the student with basic study skills and research methods in language and linguistics study. It aims to consolidate his/her knowledge of the study skills that he has learned in previous classes. It should prepare him/her for the writing of the end of study paper/ project (ESP) by introducing research skills in the training. S/he will then be exposed to the techniques used to design and undertake a certain type of research; descriptive research and/or experimental research. The course challenges the students to evaluate a range of language studies research methods, approaches, and paradigms and to consider which ones might best be applied in their prospective own research. 

It will be conducted over eight to twelve weeks, including an introductory class where the instructor will address the assigned readings (one of which will be the prospective topic of their ETP) and respond to students' questions on their theoretical and methodological approaches.

By the end of the course, the students will be put through hands on practice tasks studying, analyzing, and evaluating a set of published peer-reviewed articles. This will sharpen their skills as to how a report of a research study is designed, structured, mounted, and written up.

To close the course, a wrap-up session will be held, at which students will share and present an overview of their prospective ETP topic and the plan they envisage to follow in order to achieve the best they can in such a practical course.

Contents:

 This course will look at freely available tools useful in locating information on a research topic, designing research proposals, organizing and collecting materials used for that aim. It will introduce the research tools available in the research literature but focus only on those at the disposition of the students at the FLSS.

Learning Outcomes:

On completing this course, students should demonstrate their a potential to:

• Ø safely plan a research proposal, a research strategy respecting the guidelines, requirements, and steps for writing an effective research paper,
• Ø select, produce, and develop research topics & methodologies,
  • Ø compile references lists and bibliographies according to the APA style of referencing; but, in the meantime, open to other referencing styles like the Harvard system or the British one, the ASA, the MLA, and/or the Chicago-Turabian Styles,
  • Ø document and take useful notes following a conventional system (mostly the APA),
  • Ø look at ways of  discovering  information on the recommended Academic Web Sites page that may be of interest to their research, by using Web Search Engines page as Google Reader, Google Scholar, and Yahoo Pipes, and others,
  • Ø sift through the Library Catalog (index) searching for a collection of reference resources like scholarly journals (hard copies or virtual ones), magazines, newspaper issues that the university library owns,
  • Ø keep track of one or more of the university online or print subscription databases, other on-line print government resources, and eventually,
  • Ø demonstrate the potential to run research from beginning to end.

Teaching Materials

Left to the choice of the instructor

Indicative Assessment:

Appraisal  of the students’ achievement of the course will be achieved via the following measures :

75 % final written exam.

25 %  participation and attendance