Eng 1201 - About Doing Academic Research in Linguistic Field

English sy1201

Xinduo Ju

20120313                                                 Academic Linguistics

About Doing Academic Research in Linguistic Field

For students like us who are pursuing further study, handling the skill of doing research is a necessity for higher level academic performances. Learning how to do a research will not only benefit our study, but also help us solve problems in workplace. Then what is “doing research”? Actually, we can say in a broad sense that whether you are trying to find out the specialties in a restaurant or to solve an extremely obscure physics problem is an action of doing research, because you are solving a problem.

If we put it in an academic way, doing research, in my view, is applying certain knowledge of a subject or interdisciplinary knowledge, organising logic thinking, guided by specific research methods, to analyze a problem or a phenomenon from the very surface to the deep center in a certain field. My major is English language and literature and I will take doing English linguistics research as an example to illustrate what I newly perceived after taking this class.

To do a research we firstly have to choose a topic to dig into. Ealier this year, I thought that language was a comparatively narrow field to do research in. However, later I realize that limited knowledge and research methods can be applied to almost every aspects relevant to society. Take the study of corpus for example, a very focused field, can have various perspectives to be linked to social problems such as education, interpersonal relationship and alike. Paul Nation has been regarded as one of the leaders in word study. Merely word study can be used to guide English learning, pointing out that there is a very basic scope of words needed to satisfy daily discourse. Differing from academic way of learning a language, corpus study shows the gap between the natural authentic language and text book English. The fact is that what we learned from text book is rarely used in daily discourse. Previously who went abroad talking like a text book met numerous cultural barriers just because of the way they used language. Therefore, corpus now serves as an indispensible reference in English learning, leading a change in test designing, class arrangement as well as other important aspects in education.

Another example given in his corpus study is about the qualities of a good conversation. He indicated that a communicative dialogue should be interactive, inspiring two interlocutors exploit commonality while each one of them is able to be an active listener. Other corpus scholars like Thorndike as well as Chomsky make their respective efforts contributing to linguistic study. These are examples of how a narrow scope of study can actually benefit different fields. Theoretical conclusions like the number used in corpus analysis may seem to be pedant at first, but as we can see from these examples, putting those theories into practice will make significant improvements in relevant fields of social study. Thus never try to contemn a research, as long as you have a interest in it and have the desire to make some remarkable achievements, there will be pores waiting to be filled in every research area.