Yesterday I went to a dissertation proposal presentation and it was crap.
The topic at hand was heritage language maintenance which is a really important topic. This dissertation is being done in the psychology dept. which is part of the problem I think. The psych perspective is necessary, but tends to be uninformed about the work in linguistics on some important topics.
To her credit the candidate did do a literature review but there wasn't much. She had problems collecting subjects which is just part of the complexity of data collection in a real world. She tested 3-5 yr olds with a non-English home language over a year as they entered pre-school (well most of them, some of them had been there for a while and some had older siblings who had already entered bilingual pre-school.)
Her hypotheses were that heritage language maintenance could be predicted by home language use, home attitudes, and support of theritage culture.
She didn't present any data because she hadn't processed it. But her experiment design had many confounding factos. And from an applied linguistics point of view, her language assessment precedures were dubious lacking in construct validity (and practicality which was why it was so hard to gather data.) In her case an ethnographic study would have been really helpful. If she could have used a video camera and collected the real utterances (instead of elicited utterances) of the children, she would have some real quantifiable data that at least had a stamp of authenticity instead of now all these questions about why an uncooperative 3 yr old would say X when told to produce an utterance. In addition, she would have more likely been able to get a small number of people to agree to video ethnography.
To me this project scared the pants off of me. First, it is hard to collect data and the design of the project is really important. I'm surprised that her advisor let it go this far. Maybe I'm just naive about the academic world. Second, there is BS being published out there and it is influential. Wow.
I'm now very grateful for the education I'm getting because I think it is valuable and needed to address some of these questions. I'd love to work with someone across disciplines because I don't have their perspective, but it seems like a sketchy thing to wander off from psych to linguistics without addressing certain questions like how language is acquired.
7:22:42 AM 
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