Have you had to take a course in research skills, which would prepare you for your research project/dissertation? If not, do they have such a course available? Normally, you see, such a course is compulsory on an MA.

Apart from that, it’s hard to know what to suggest, as courses differ. On my MA we could chose to do our dissertation about pretty much anything, as long as it was in an area that the academic staff knew enough about. We also had to write a project proposal, in the style we’d learnt on our research skills course, which had to be accepted before we could start. On some courses you have to write a dissertation within your specialist area, so that’s something you’ll have to find out about..

Pragmatics - excellent choice! If I remember correctly from when I examined their course info the time you put up a link, their Pragmatics course looked very good, I thought. You might find that it also gives you a lot of new ideas for your dissertation, as it contains plenty of models that can be applied to how people learn or express themselves in other languages.

Perfect timing!

Definitely do the dissertaion. I did my MA 8 years ago with no thought of doing a PhD. Now that I want one, I have to jump through this post-graduate certificate at Macquarie to get in.

I’m just finishing up the research and methods course, Ling905, at MQ. I guess that is the course you will do next term. So far, I feel that I haven’t learned much. It is frustrating to feel like you are just jumping through hoops without any response (two months to get the first assignment back!) from the school, but I think/hope things will get better with the dissertation.

The final paper is a ~2500 word research proposal which many people use as the preliminary work for their dissertation. I submitted three ideas to the instructor for the course, and I finally got some reasonable feedback from the instructor (but too late to put some of it to use).

Here are the three ideas I submitted:

One idea is to follow up on some research that a
professor at one of my schools has been doing. He has
been working on repeated reading vs extensive reading.
He has found some transferable gains in reading fluency.
One big question is: How many repetitions are optimal?
This would be a fairly conventional study that I could
probably carry out next term. The problem is that I am
cited as the third author on his most recent paper, so I
wonder if following up on this would be excluded as
“work already done”.

One other idea is replicate a study (ERIC_NO: ED329120
TITLE:  Subjective Word Frequency Estimates in L1 and
L2. AUTHOR: Arnaud, Pierre J.  L.) about using student
inuitions about relative word frequency to estimate L2
proficiency. His study with French and English speakers
ran into trouble because of the similarity in the
languages. English and Japanese would be different
enough if the loanwords were eliminated. This would be
easy enough to do, but would it be hefty enough to turn
into the thesis starting next term? Hmm....

A third idea is perhaps most interesting to me
personally, but I’m not sure it really meets the
requirements of the assignment. I’d like to study
specialized vocabulary in IT technical writing. Some
corpus studies
(like http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/October2003/chung/chung.html )
have been done to come up with specialized vocabulary lists
for specific fields. This appeals to me personally, but
I’m not sure if it is appropriate to the assignment.

He assured me they would all be acceptable for the dissertation, but the first two were better. Because of time constraints, I have to stick to the first one for now. I have to get the paper done! Unfortunately, I probably can’t use that for my thesis, as I should share the project with my boss. I’ll get started on the research with this assignment, and he’ll get us published. So, it all works out well in the end.

I’ll probably do the second one for my dissertation. Jan Tent at MQ assured me there was more than enough there for the dissertation requirement.

The third one is just too vague so far to do anything with. It might be an interesting project, but doesn’t entail the kind of research questions required for the assignment for Ling905.

I got the ideas, especially the second one, from looking at studies that had failed, just slightly different from what I want, or somewhat incomplete. The repeated reading studies were fine, but opned up lots of new questions. The Arnaud study was interesting, but failed to prove anything conclusive. It should be relatively easy to replicate and improve. If it fails to produce any significant results, that’s OK. Of course, I’d prefer to get some good findings, but the process of doing it will be well worth it. Plus, it fits with a focus on vocabulary development I’m working towards in some of my teaching.