Workshop: Qualitative Research Workshop: Week 2

  Please revisit your Workshop thread and add to or refine your research problem and purpose statement process. Add other comments that summarize the development of your research ideas. In the pursuit to populate the second chapter of my investigation into the drivers leading to ESOL and ELL low scores in the State of Maryland’s standardized testing, I realize that the veracity of my paper depends on the literature review section (Zhang & Wildemuth, 2016). I have identified several theories that will help me conduct a coherent literature review, and I expect that I will be able to contribute to research on how pedagogy in the country can best be structured to benefit ELL students. While writing the first chapter, I noted that the educational system in the U.S is skewed towards native speakers, making it unnecessarily difficult for ELL learners to benefit from the system. The background investigation also revealed that there is a need to investigate which processes and practices can best be implemented to help ELL students come to terms with the U.S education system as well as a need to ensure states design standardized tests to benefit both native English students as well as ELL learners. These practices, as captured in my research questions, must be implemented by educators, and therefore, there is a need for measuring educators’ perception to state standardized tests especially from an ELL and ESOL perspective. The literature review section will strive to address these conditions. In relation to the proposed methodology, I have come to realize that to answer the research questions, it is imperative to learn of the experiences of educators engaged with ELL students as well as ELL and ESOL students. Through interviews, observations, and questionnaires, it will be possible to answer the research questions as well as address the study’s problem statement. Finding out these things as I write head into the second chapter of the paper has proven to be immeasurably informative. I would also like to conduct a brief literature analysis, which may result in a mixed methodology approach in the attempt of furthering my understanding of the statement problem, as well as in the pursuit of filling the knowledge gap in ELL standardized testing mechanisms (Zhang & Wildemuth, 2016). References Zhang, Y., & Wildemuth, B. M. (2016). Qualitative analysis of content. Applications of social research methods to questions in information and library science, 318. Prospectus.docx (47.563 KB)