Supervision of student theses
I am available as an advisor for Bachelor's, Master's and PhD theses at the University of Hamburg. Depending on students' needs, I offer detailed feedback on their work before they submit. Below is a non-exhaustive list of areas that I am interested in and for some of which I can suggest specific research questions that can be explored and that address questions at the cutting edge of current research efforts. Students who are interested may contact me via email in order to explore what topic they would like to work on and can of course also suggest their own topics. All theses need to involve an empirical analysis. For students who submit excellent theses, I also offer the option of working on a joint research publication or help with exploring publication options on their own.
List of research areas/topics
(Also take a look at my recent publications to get an impression of areas of interest )
Sociolinguistics
Language and gender
Attitudes to English in EFL, ESL and ENL countries, both based on surveys and the matched guise technique
Attitudes to English and use of English by young and adolescent learners
Learner Corpus Research, esp. tense and aspect, lexis
World Englishes, esp. corpus linguistic approaches, phonology, phonetics
Speech Learning (i.e. learners' phonology and pronunciation)
Acoustic phonetics
The linguistics of Covid-19
Formulating a research question or hypothesis
Any scholarly work, including Bachelor's and Master's theses, explore one or more research questions or hypotheses. When starting work on your thesis, you should formulate one or more research question(s) or hypothesis/-es. You may also propose several different research questions of which you will choose one. Your adviser will help you in making this choice and in ensuring that your research question is appropriate in terms of the field and the implied workload.
A good research question/hypothesis is
Answerable: Can you specify a set of different or contrasting answers to your research question (RQ) that you could identify with methods/skills at your disposition?
An RQ that you would find hard to answer is "Are English loanwords a threat to the German language?" - while you may consider yes or no as possible answers, how will you find out whether that is true? What does 'threat' mean in this context? A question that can be answered is whether the usage of English in loanwords in German has increased over a certain time, provided that a corpus of the required time depth is available.
Specific: All parts of your RQ need to be specific or, at least, you need to be able to explain how you will define them.
In the example above, 'threat' is a value-laden term that is hard to define objectively and should be avoided.
Not too large: Your RQ needs to be answerable in the amount of time you have available. Your advisor will help you check whether that is the case.
An RQ that is too large is "Does American English influence British English?". Something more manageable would to focus one or two phonetic or phonological variables or on lexical influence.
Preparing a proposal
Before you present your intended Bachelor's/Master's thesis project to a potential supervisor, you will need to prepare a proposal of about one page (not counting the references).
Title: A clear and concise title, describing the theme of your proposal.
Overview: Include a short summary (three to four sentences) of your proposal, stating the question or problem question you plan to address.
Significance: Identify the study area. Explain the significance and potential impact or benefits of addressing the research question and how it will contribute to the field. (Make sure you address a broad audience and try to convince them how this topic could be beneficial for them.)
Aims, research questions and hypotheses: Explain the key aim(s) of your research and the question(s) you will address in order to achieve them. Often, it will also be useful to formulate one or more (testable) hypotheses.
Methods and timescale: Detail how you intend to carry out your research. Will you derives data from corpora, other databases or by collecting data yourself? How will you analyse the data? Be specific.
(Note that you do not need to reinvent the wheel. It is not only unnecessary, but indeed problematic, if you create your own methods, research instruments or questionnaire from scratch. Rather, you should aim to harness existing approaches and methodologies from the literature. These established approaches may be adapted to your project (only) if necessary.)
Bibliography: List the publications and sources you have cited in your proposal (min. 10 for a Bachelor's, min. 15 for a Master's thesis). Do not add publications you have not cited.
(Adapted from the University of Nottingham)
Resources for preparing a PhD proposal: