I read 2 articles in writing research founding some information about communicative teaching, communicative reading, and writing which could serve as evidence for motivating students to actively use Chinese to communicate with native speakers of Chinese.
One important point is about assessment and self-assessment and its relation to motivation.
I read another article about action research because I think it is possible to do action research. Thus, I have scheduled an appointment with my advisor so that I can tell her about my new ideas. Worst case scenario, I will come back and get back to the readings on writing research. If it goes well, I might be able to graduate on time and not spending an extra $1000 to the school for nothing. The money could be gifted to my parents or even treat my fiance for helping me all this time.
In order to persuade her that it is more plausible, I need to come up with a valid proposal where she can tell I know exactly what I am doing and I am able to pull everything through with extra effort and the help of other people. That's the purpose of writing for tomorrow.
The purpose of the research is to improve student writing through technology. Is that the purpose of the research??? I need to read more on the action research book and get a better idea on the look, act, plan and improve maybe. The framework looks very easy to understand. Before I do anything, I need to think about the ultimate purpose of this whole research. As for the significance, it is relatively easy because there is not much research on using WeChat with beginning learners and there is a high attrition rate.
Next steps: 1. Read and understand action research.
2. Articulate research purpose and significance.
3. With that come up with the research questions. Refer to Brianna's feedback.
In addition, I want to give readers more details about the beginning of the research and how it evolved over time. That is the key to action research.
At the same time, I need to show my readers, especially my advisor, what data I already have and what I have done in the past. I need to show her how much I have been working on this project to achieve what I collected last semester and the difficulties of recruiting more students to participate. All the survey responses, Google document for each week and the assignment I have designed.
Everything else will follow, once I know the problems I am trying to solve and the outline of the research.
Another milestone for the future will be the themes in data analyzing as pointed out by Brianna.
One of them might be the motivation for using WeChat, the benefits of different kind, such as the function of WeChat, linguistic gains, cultural gains. This is where I need my advisor to contribute. She did some qualitative research and I like how she coded her data. If I need a second coder, I could ask help from my classmates really easily.
At this moment, I am very positve because I have something to work on untile I see my advisor. I hope I can keep it going until the day I finish my master project.
