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Aims/Hypothesis
English is widely popular in Oman and is also a preferred language like the rest of the world. Arabic society is quite different from European or Asian society. The society is conservative and English is considered as a second language, after Arabic. (Nitko 2003 12). Emails are however quite popular and have become a common form of communication today. They are being used as a convenient method for online social interactions.
In our present study, we aim to analyze the content of emails written by Omani males and females and see how far it corresponds or reinforces the varying degrees of politeness by Brown and Levinson, and whether the same differences are found in internet communication between men and women as in the everyday discourse. “Does this mean that you will refer to other studies that have investigated the use of English by Omani men and women in everyday discourse? It would be essential that you did because otherwise, you do not have a point of comparison?”
Aims and objectives
- To analyze the influence of email in the communication exchange.
- To Omani men and women exhibit the same language differences in internet communication as face to face interaction?
- Is the politeness theory applicable to internet interaction?
Research questions
The study aims to answer the following research question:
Is the politeness theory applicable to internet interaction between Omani men and women?
Too general – focus your research question on what you want to investigate. The research question should comprise the variables English, Omani men and women, e-mail, and politeness.
- What you are going to analyze the emails for.
- The above sections give indications that you would like to analyze politeness – but what exactly? Are you going to analyze the use of hedges? Are you going to analyze face-threats? Politeness forms like terms of address
- How are you going to make sure that you will have a balanced sample of participants? If you would like to make comparisons between male and female speech, it would be important to have an equal number of male and female project participants.
- What about the observer’s paradox? How far does your study take account of it?
Brief description of the proposed topic including the area of investigation and methodologies to be used:
The research will be a qualitative grounded ethnographically-informed discourse study, wherein I will draw upon politeness theory to investigate how a group of Omani men and women speakers negotiate and develop understanding via email (can u do this? How would this related to the politeness theory?) and examine the online qualitative data through a theoretically informed lens.
The research sources will include a pre-survey questionnaire, e-mails, e-journals, and e-interviews. In terms of the data analysis, it may be pointed out that, due to the asynchronous nature of email communication, the investigation of online intercultural communication requires a research paradigm that could take into consideration the features of computer-mediated discourse. (What is this paradigm?)
In phase one, the participants’ personal background information will be gathered. They will also have a web-based informed-consent form, a pre-survey questionnaire, and a Discourse-Completion Test. In phase two, the participants will begin the email correspondence with their e-pals. The data will be collected in phase two which will include email entries and weekly e-journals. In phase three, I will conduct e-interviews with the participants.
To collect naturally occurring data between the Omani men and women who are interested in language or exchanges, the participants of this research will be volunteers. The recruiting methods will include posting messages on universities’ web pages, posting project information on the language exchange forum, and by word of mouth. Twenty participants will be recruited in total. A detailed introduction to the research design will be sent to the people who show interest in the project. I will use various techniques to make more people aware of the project. These techniques will include setting up a blog to discuss my project, creating and signing up for web groups wherein people with the same interests can join, distributing recruitment notices to TESOL and other language listeners, and posting project flyers on the notice boards of schools and language centers. This is going to help me as a researcher to find potential candidates easily who themselves volunteer to participate in the program. And most people who frequently visit these places have the demographic and linguistic background required for this research.
Those who will confirm their willingness to join the project would receive a web-based consent form. They would then automatically connect the participants to the pre-survey questionnaire, where the participants could give some details of their background.
To protect the participants’ anonymity, the names will appear in this thesis as pseudonyms. I will give the participants new names with the same initial as their real names.
A greetings email will be sent to each e-pal pair at the beginning of the project. Participants will be reminded again in this email about the routine of writing one to two emails and one e-journal entry per week. There will be no restrictions on the content of the email correspondence. However, to avoid awkwardness at the beginning of the e-mail correspondence, a situated scenario (DCT) will be included in the email as a prompt for the participants to start their interactions. Participants will not need to use the prompt to start the email interactions if they preferred to initiate their topics. During the 8-week email intercultural project, a total number of email entries will be collected from the ten pairs of participants.
The Discourse Completion Test (hereafter referred to as the DCT) is a research method. A DCT is a kind of test in which the participants are required to respond in a given context. To collect some background information about the participants, they will be sent a pre-survey questionnaire at the beginning of this research project. The questionnaire will be intended to find out more about the participants’ backgrounds, such as their language learning experience. (Landis 2007, 159) The participants would receive an email that gives the procedure for filling out the online survey. The email contains a link to the online survey and an attachment (the exact questionnaire in Word format) in case the web page is difficult to access. To finish the survey, participants will need only to use the web link provided in the email to answer the questions and then submit the form. As a precaution against the possible interference of irrelevant responses from non-participants, the participants will be given a password to the online survey to ensure that they alone could access the web page. (Tannen 2007 23).
In addition to it in the present research, semi-structured interviews will be employed to clarify issues arising in the participants’ email correspondence. The advantages of using email to conduct semi-structured interviews (why is this necessary?) are three-fold. Foremost, email interviewing is convenient to both interviewers and interviewees. Also, the interview data collected from emails could be more reliable because the words used in the data analysis are the words written by the interviewees. There is no need to transcribe the interviewees’ responses since they are already written in their emails.
Moreover, using ‘communicative event’ (kvalseth 2009 65) as the unit of the analysis is useful for exploring and explaining what topics are discussed in email interactions and how the interactants form understandings during the email correspondence. (This is very unclear, what are you going to analyze?)
The participants will be given the choices either of using their email accounts or using the ones provided by me for the use of their email exchanges with their e-pals. This right to conceal their private email address from other participants will be stated in the pre-survey questionnaire. During the actual email correspondence, all the participants will be introduced to each other by their real names. (Make more explicit the fact that while the participants will know each other’s names and gender, for the study pseudonyms will be used)
I have decided that two months should be sufficient for me to have enough observations on the participants’ interactions, but not too long for the participants’ to be tired of being ‘watched’ all the time.
More comments:
- What this description is lacking is a section discussing what you are going to analyze.
- You are talking extensively about your methodology (the how of your study) and this part could be shortened and needs to be supported by references to secondary literature, where you got your ideas from (e.g. DCT, e-journal…).
Bibliography
BROWN, P and LEVINSON, S (1987): Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
CRYSTAL, David (2001): Language and the Internet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
HAY, J. (2001). ‘The pragmatics of humor support’, Humor, 14(1), 55–82.
HOLMES, J (1995): Women, Men and Politeness, London, Longman.
HOLMES, Janet (2000): ‘Politeness, power, and provocation: how humor functions in the workplace’, Discourse Studies 2(2): 159-185.
KVALSETH, T. O. (2009). Note on Cohen’s kappa. Psychological Reports, 65, 223–26.
LANDIS, J.R., & KOCH, G.G. (2007). The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics, 33, pp. 159–174.
LIMBERG, HOLGER (2009), ‘Impoliteness and threat responses ‘, Journal of Pragmatics, Volume 41, Issue 7, Pages 1376-1394.
MILLS, S (1995): Language and Gender: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, London, Longman.
MOSTELLER, F., AND D.L. WALLACE (2004). Inference and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley. 32-55.
MULLANY, L (2004): ‘Gender, politeness and institutional power roles: Humour as a tactic to gain compliance in workplace business meetings’, Multilingual, 23, 13–37.
NITKO, A.J. (2003). Educational Tests and Measurement: An Introduction. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 12-89.
TANNEN, Deborah (1990): You Just Don’t Understand Women and Men in Conversation, NY, Harper Collins Publishers.
WARDHAUGH, R (2008): An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Oxford, Blackwell.
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