This summer, I worked with professor Sarah Anthony (French and Francophone Studies) on a mixed-methods research project investigating how digital tools support vocabulary acquisition in the French as a Foreign Language (FFL) classroom. The project also investigated how the tools were perceived and used by students and whether the tools could be leveraged in particular to teach high-frequency vocabulary words.
My time was mainly spent working on two strands of the project: the literature review and qualitative analysis. For the literature review, I located and read a wide swath of articles relating to our research topics, then tagged and organized them by theme in a reference manager. From there, I identified the most frequently emerging themes and subthemes in those sources and created a “literature map” showing how the different sources fit together. In later stages of the project, the literature map will be useful to see how Professor Anthony’s research fits in with and contributes to what has already been done in the field. It is also a first step towards writing a formal literature review as part of published findings.
My work with qualitative data occurred in several stages, concurrent with the literature map. The data mostly consisted of semi-structured interviews with students who had used digital tools in their Carleton French classes. At the beginning of the project, professor Anthony and I brainstormed an interview protocol that would help us understand students’ experiences with and perceptions of digital tools. Then, we conducted the interviews over Zoom. From there, I transcribed each interview, then Professor Anthony and I both individually coded the transcriptions in order to identify major themes and subthemes in the interviews.
Throughout the entire project—and especially because ours was mixed-methods—I was surprised to find just how many different activities fall under the category of “research.” Professor Anthony pointed out that often when we hear the term “research,” we think of inquiry that is quantitative in nature and, as a result, qualitative research is perceived by many as being lesser or invalid. I found that those were indeed biases I held going into the research partnership, and I was glad to be able to teach myself to dispel them over the course of the project. I was particularly grateful that Professor Anthony put a large emphasis on my learning during the partnership. Every week, I read articles and book chapters about effective mixed-methods research, and the two of us discussed them. Both through that explicit learning and through learning-by-doing, I’m walking away from the research partnership with a much richer understanding of all the different things “research” can mean and with a deeper understanding of the kinds of research I naturally gravitate to.
Finally, a particular highlight of the Student Research Partnership was getting to attend the annual Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO) conference at the University of Minnesota. It was inspiring to hear from so many people who make their careers out of the kinds of research questions Professor Anthony and I were answering, and it helped to give a greater sense of purpose to the research we were doing—to see how many others are doing similar work in the field.
I’m very grateful to all who made the Research Partnership and these experiences possible, including the Humanities Center Trustee Endowed Research Fund, the department of French and Francophone Studies at Carleton, and of course, Professor Anthony for her willingness to collaborate, teach, and share her time generously. I look forward to further expanding my research horizons with the springboard that this partnership has given me.