Research training seminar

Aims

Aims

• To provide students with the necessary training to enable them to complete an independent piece of research
• To expose students to a range of linguistic research forms and methods, and allow them to reflect on that to enrich their own experience
• To provide students with a number of generic transferable skills important for the job market

The Research Training Seminar (RTS) is compulsory for all MA and MSc students (as taught module L34M) and for first year PhD students who did not complete a masters programme in the department.

It is intended to give you training in research skills specific to Linguistics programmes.   Many staff participate in the teaching, so that you are able to benefit from our combined expertise in a range of linguistics research skills.

Programme

Programme

The Research training seminars are held weekly and last for one hour in the Autumn term and up to two hours in the Spring and Summer terms.  

The training is organised by theme:

• Autumn term covers research design and writing skills in linguistics
• Spring term covers the development and presentation of research plans, and also offers a number of subject-specific workshops.
• Summer term focuses on communicating research to others, and offers further subject-specific training.

Examples of sessions run include:

• Research design
• Writing in linguistics
• Formulating hypotheses, developing research questions, planning a research design
• Using corpora for dissertation research
• Fieldwork and sampling in Sociolinguistics
• Using a repeated measures ANOVA design in Psycholinguistic research
• CV writing and job applications
• Praat scripting

Assessment

Assessment

You will also be given regular exercises related to the material covered in the lectures. It is essential that you complete these assignments before the next lecture, as they are an integral part of the module and they help to consolidate your knowledge of research methods. We will discuss the assignments in the lectures so please come prepared.