During the past few years of pursuing my linguistics and language teaching education, I have become increasingly interested in research. While working towards my undergraduate degree at Western Oregon University, I took an introduction course to socio-linguistics, in which we spent most of the time looking into research studies in the field. This course inspired me to want to conduct my own research. Below are research studies I have conducted by myself and with others, along with a research proposal I would enjoy pursuing after the LTS program. I have learned many lessons while creating each of the artifacts below that did not come from my textbook but through experience. I am very grateful for getting to create each of these artifacts under the supervision of my professors. I learned more about research studies and methods while developing my own. 

This questionnaire was inspired by Horwitz et al. (1986) Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale and Gardner et al. (1985) Attitude Motivation Test Battery. What was very interesting about the results of this study was that my participant showed high levels of language anxiety, but she also continued to show high levels of motivation. When asked if situations that would cause language anxiety affected her motivation to pursue the target language, she responded every single time that her anxiety did not affect her motivation. These results led me to believe that my participant might have been experiencing a form of anxiety-facilitating anxiety. According to Albert and Haber (1960), there are two forms of anxiety: facilitating and debilitating anxiety. Debilitating anxiety refers to a form of anxiety that causes individuals to run away from the source, whereas facilitating anxiety refers to individuals who become motivated to attack what is causing them anxiety so that they may overcome it. 

While conducting this study, I learned that asking the apparent question may lead to something other than the obvious answer. For this study, when talking to classmates, teachers, and even people outside of my programs, everyone believed that language anxiety and motivation would correlate. When language anxiety increases, motivation decreases. However, according to the study, that was not the case; there was no correlation between the two, so further research would need to be conducted. 

A fundamental lesson I learned during this project was that when developing a tool, it needs to be validated. When I heard this, it made complete sense and sounded obvious, but I had never considered it. So, while creating this research proposal, I explored how to validate a tool. This question led me to create a plan to validate the test I wanted to create, and I looked at a few research studies that suggested validating a tool. I was most interested in a method created by Reeves and Marbach-Ad (2016), which suggested that evidence should relate to multiple categories to validate its purpose. In order to do this, I would have to create three tests that asked the same questions but were written differently to test whether each section was consistent and led to unbiased results. This validation process was a lesson I would like to bring into the future as I pursue higher education and research.

The pillar of Research was the competency that most interested me and influenced the direction that I hope to follow in the future. As mentioned in my introduction, my current research interests are second language acquisition and sociolinguistics. The completion of this program has given me the knowledge necessary for conducting research and opportunities to implement my understanding into conducting studies.