New Topic: Surveys

After our mini lesson today, we're going to start our big semester project: the surveys, which are the basis for our research essays.

First, an ANNOUNCEMENT: next Monday, March 23rd, we will welcome a guest speaker, Dr. Thorsten Huth, who is going to talk about L2 acquisition. Thorsten is a German teacher in the Foreign Language Department. I count on your collaboration to make this an interesting presentation - which means, participate, and ask him questions!!!

Today, we'll learn how to create online surveys with SurveyMonkey.com.

I'll show you a couple of sample surveys we've created in ENGL 300-002 last year.

Your TASK will be:

1) to get together in (permanent) groups
2) to pick a topic that deals with "language acquisition" (not confined to pure grammar)
3) to assemble questions about your topic that you might ask in a survey
4) to figure out who your audience is going to be (will your questionnaire be for students, parents, teachers, or guardians; or relatives/parents of autistic or disabled children?)
5) to note down emails of the contact persons you are going to interview (you should have between 10 - 20 interviewees!!!) Take into consideration that many people don't answer email surveys. So, if you address 20 people, count on it that 50% won't respond, anyway. If you have less than 10 interviewees, that won't give you a valuable research basis.

You don't have to type anything into the online questionnaire yet!!! Just assemble everything on paper for your group.

Further tasks (that will become homework, depending how far we get with our in-class work today and on Wednesday):

1) Write a letter of introduction to the persons you will interview. State
- your name;
- class;
- instructor;
- why you do this survey;
- that you don't need consent by the Human Subjects Committee (HSC)/ Institutional Review Board (IRB) of SIU to conduct this survey, because it doesn't involve minors, or take blood samples, and is not for publication but for in-class practice only;
- that the survey is anonymous
- what the aim of your survey is
- how long it will take (not longer than 10 minutes)
- that your subjects can have the results of your survey from you, when it is finished
- how you will compensate them for taking the survey, if you do that
- say THANK YOU for taking the survey.