Methodological MA workshop

Ron Kuzar kuzar at research.haifa.ac.il
Mon Sep 13 10:01:54 UTC 2010


Posted to Funknet and Cogling.
--------
Dear fellow linguists,
I have been assigned to teach a methodological MA workshop in
linguistics (officially titled "Approaches to research in linguistics",
however it is in the Department of English, so mainly English
linguistics).
Presumably, students have taken "Style & composition" during their BA,
where they have learned the basics of academic writing.
It is a two semester course meeting once a week for 2 academic hours, so
there will be some 26-28 classes.
The seminar is intended to help students at the MA level in several areas:
1. Choosing a research domain, formulating a research question, choosing
the appropriate methodology.
2. The different parts of a research paper, how to develop an argument 
(probably the hardest of all tasks), how to write the introduction.
What's the difference between presenting the findings/results and
discussing/interpreting them?
3. Corpora: what English corpora are are available, search strategy and
search tools, regular expressions, organization and manipulation of data
(e.g. in Excel).
4. The LLBA as a resource (believe it or not: some students have made it
to the MA level without knowing about the LLBA).
5. Organizing bibliographical data and note-taking files (Refworks,
NotaBene).
6. Preparing students for linguistic presentations by reading and
discussing an article by that linguist beforehand.
If any of you have taught a similar course, I'd be very grateful to hear
from you. Are there any other points that should be covered? Do you have
any practical suggestions for points 1. and 2. or any literature that
might be consulted? As for point 3: does anybody know of a user friendly
introduction (or crash-course) to regular expressions at a rudimentary
level for non-computationally oriented students?
Looking forward to your advice.
Ron Kuzar
===============================================
                       Dr. Ron Kuzar
Address:       Department of English Language and Literature
                       University of Haifa
                       IL-31905 Haifa, Israel
Office:           +972-4-824-9826, Fax: +972-4-824-9711
Home:           +972-77-481-9676, Mobile: +972-54-481-9676
Home fax:     153-77-481-9676 (only from Israel)
Email:            kuzar at research.haifa.ac.il
Homepage:  http://research.haifa.ac.il/~kuzar
===============================================



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