The Day My Research Idea Was Conceived...

After talking with my advisors, I have finally started to identify and piece together some basic ideas/concepts that I want to focus on during my doctoral studies. For a while there, I was struggling through a swamp of possibilities. Finally, I just broke down and bought a crate-load of notebooks which I could fill maniacally with haphazard visualizations of my frustration. Surprisingly, I was able to pull some snippets of sanity from this muddle and meld them into my current idea for my dissertation.

What I figured out from the mess I had created was that I could actually make several connections between different interest areas of mine. I had originally wanted to address Krashen's (1981) Affective Hypothesis Theory, a theory that deals with the emotional factors present within a conducive learning environment; then I decide to include the technological element of video-conferencing; then somewhere I along the way, I got distracted with the innovativeness of the flipped classroom concept.

"Well, actually," I thought. "There is one way I do can this that would link all of these ideas." And so was born my research interest.

To test out some of my ideas, I have decided to create an ESL Conversation course that does not include great lengths of in-class, simulated discussions, as most typical courses do. Instead, students will take the conversation outside the classroom. I will connect them with an online language exchange partner who they must video-conference with for at least two hours each week. This is instead of vocab/grammar fill-in-the-blank homework. Students are required to take notes and write a report of what happened in each Skype conversation. Then, when they bring this to class, we can review real-life situations and problems that occur when the ESL students attempt to speak with and understand the speech patterns of native speakers.