Thesis Mentor Schedule: Weekly meetings on Friday
Does text based language exchange through social media improve conversational English skills?
Elaborate and expand:
How much did vocabulary improve as a result of these exchanges?
At which points did language the improve the most? If any?
How did my language change when communicating? Did I have to adjust my writing at any point? Why ? Why not?
Evaluate vocabulary improvement: Using correlation tests, T-tests, descriptive statistics.
Further Reading: Search for PHD and Master thesis projects related to pen pals, vocabulary acquisition, Japanese ESL students.
Introduction
Backdrop for proposal, why do we have pen pals?
Explore pen pals as a traditional way to improve understanding of culture and language skills.
How do we compare the traditional pen pal relationship to the modern digital pen pal relationships with the support of social media?
Does having a pen pal improve learning in a traditional way? Reference the advantage of improving language skills. Pen pal in social media era’s.
Possible problems: Lack of longitude studies, lack of imperial studies to highlight the advantage of pen pals in modern times
Lit Review
PEN PAL Relationships to improve language skills pre web 2.0 era.
Pen pal relationships to improve language skills in the social media era.
Pen pal practices to improve vocabulary acquisition
Methodology
Search literature on action research. Researcher as well as a participant.
Data collection: 4 years of data collection.
Data analysis
talk about Tom Cobb. Language analyser: http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/
Particpants
Context of the relationship, frequency of communication, type of relationship.