When I saw the title of "research," I had a headache for a moment, especially when I thought of the class LING530-research methods, but this class was definitely worth it. How to research, collect, analyze, and summarize the data is the knowledge one should learn no matter what industry one is in. This course mainly covered two research methods-qualitative and quantitative (McKinley & Rose, 2020). I chose to use the qualitative research method to do fieldwork in LING530-Research Proposal. However, no matter which research method was used, it was meaningful as long as it could answer our research questions. The difference lay in which one was more suitable.

                     In the LING530-Research Proposal, first, I determined my research's direction and theme, then I searched for relevant articles in the set theme, and finally wrote the literature review. I summarized my research question： "How do CFL learners perceive the use of Children's Literature-children's idiom stories in learning QIEs, and how does it impact their motivation and engagement in the learning process?" Through the content of the class, I learned how qualitative research is carried out. Before determining the research question at the beginning, I continued to search for various academic articles related to research and the empirical data summarized by these authors. The next step was to analyze the language context I studied more. The study background was college students learning Chinese as a foreign language, and the participants were college students who are generally 18-24 years old from all over the world, and most of their L1 was English. Data collection and analysis methods were mainly from idiom tests, journals, observations, and interviews. In the end, with a discussion of the possible findings and how they might affect my research subjects—to study the results of putting children's literature as an auxiliary material in the adult classroom of classical Chinese and idiom acquisition and my guess it would be of some help to the acquisition of QIEs.

                     In the course LT611, all the students participated in the program evaluation of the OIIP program as a team. This evaluation was designed to investigate the central question of "How prepared are OIIP interns for their internships in schools?" which Li-hsien Yang presented to the evaluators during the initial evaluation plan discussions. We read the guidebook carefully and adjusted our research questions, indicators, and data-collecting methods for the OIIP program we evaluated (Davis & McKay, 2018). I was mainly responsible for the focus group and class observation sections on pages 8-11 of the OIIP Program Evaluation. Before determining the research question and indicator, we conducted a detailed need analysis on all possible stakeholders (Nation & Macalister, 2010). By analyzing their needs, we could better formulate indicators and ways to collect and analyze information. For example, in method 1—OIIP Class Observations, our group determined the observation protocol in class discussions, which came with six sections: Student engagement with coursework; Success stories/Problem-solving; Confusion: Contexts under which uncertainties arise; Struggles/ Frustrations; Body Language; and Other themes of importance/relevance. The goal of this observation was to gain an understanding of what interns were noticing about the program and their success. Each research method was finally decided after fully considering the information we wanted to collect and the situation of the participants. By analyzing the data obtained, we could summarize the data and give evaluation and suggestions for the project based on these data.

                     In the LINg544-Article Critique 1, I critiqued the article (Nel & Krog, 2020), mainly focusing on explaining how three factors might affect the acquisition of Mandarin as a second language in South African schools. It was the first lesson on Second Language Acquisition in the Language Teaching Studies Program I started. So this was also the first time I read articles about SLA and made a summary analysis. The author used both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the results obtained from the survey of 34 sixth-grade English-speaking learners who studied Mandarin as a second language and found these three factors：1）The learner's mother tongue and Chinese phoneme differences might have an impact on their SLA，2）The learner's cognitive style，3）The learner's ability to sing and imitate the timbre might help them to identify the Mandarin tones. My understanding of the research method did not come from critiquing this article, but it did help me in developing my comprehension of how language is acquired and how to teach it. I thought involuntarily about how I could better help CFL learners acquire tone. The four tones would be one of the problematic areas of learning Chinese because it did not exist in English and many other Western languages. One of the software called Praat, which could draw the pitch contour, could help learners to check how well they produced the sound. It would be fun the watch the contour when learners sing in the target language. I was very interested in the author's third point-music helps SLA, and I looked forward to applying what I learned from this article in future teaching.

References

Davis, J. & McKay, T. (2018). A Guide to Useful Evaluation of Language Programs. Georgetown University Press. 

McKinley, & Rose, H. (2020). The Routledge handbook of research methods in applied linguistics (McKinley & H. Rose, Eds.). Routledge.

Nation, I.S.P. & Macalister, J. (2010). Language Curriculum Design. Routledge.