Research Journal: December 10th 2007

Tessie’s Research Journal

December 10th 2007

What did I do today?
1. I searched for email contacts of Thai tertiary EFL lecturers on many university websites. I found a lot of contacts and details about their academic interests. I copied those web links into my favourite folders. Then I started writing a formal email briefly introducing myself and what I’m doing including links to my blogs for lecturers to learn more about me. After that I sent three emails to EFL lecturers in three universities asking about their participation interests.

2. The next thing that I have been up to today is keeping my blog updated and writing up this ‘substantial’ research journal.
3. Read Dornyei’s book about how to keep a research journal. Then I will read more about ‘Mix methodology in Applied Linguistics’.

Why did I do that?
I started sending initiative emails because of the statistics consultant suggested that it’s better to go for a larger group of respondents before focusing my target group respondents. At first I just want to contact the lecturers who have published articles about web-based instructions in journals or presented their works in seminars. However, that would be quite risk to find a very few people who can be my respondents. Therefore, it’s better to throw the large net into the river and see how many people would reply me. Now, it’s quite exciting to receive the feedback from my initiative contacts.

For my first entry of research journal, I should have done this many months ago but I’m very busy with other things (both study and personal issues). I keep telling myself to write this entry as soon as possible as this journal will be an important tool of my research apart from my survey and interview data.


What are helpful ideas for my research?
A research journal is very important for a qualitative study. It is one way to validate the data and the approach I used in my study. As I am doing epistemological study, there will be a lot of empirical data from the researcher’s view on the natural setting of the study.


Is there anything else that influencing me?
There will be another PhD meeting tomorrow and I will have to prepare a short talk about my research progress at the meeting, so tomorrow I may have a little time focusing on my study and reading.