How to do this research?

[Florentina]

Dear Alan,

I need some help. I have to investigate and present a seminar work on Student and Teacher's utterances, as suggested by Sinclair and Coulthard. I was thinking to do the research with the bilingual students learning English at univerity contxt. For the time being I am not sure how am i going to do the research. Could you please give some tips. How to start?

I thank you in advance,
Florentina

[Alien]

Hello Florentina!
I am sorry for my breaking on. :?
Could you tell a bit more about your research? It is very interesting for me, because right now I am also doing a research with Russian-English bilingual students, concerning some aspects of visual word recognition. I think the theme is great and has multiple aspects, such as social, psychological, neurophysiological - everybody can find something of his/her particular interest! What is your study devoted to?
I am sorry again, but when I see a word "bilingualism", I cannot just overpass it :-)

best regards and good luck,
Alina.

[Jamie (K)]

Florentina, there's no way to do such research other than to get permission to record some English classes, and then to painstakingly transcribe the recorded data. From there, you do your analysis.

When I had to do dialect research, I found that recording these things was absolutely vital to accurate results. Once you get the headphones on and begin to concentrate on transcribing, you notice details that would have slipped past you if you had just taken notes while sitting in the class or interview.