research proposal linguistics

Dissertation Proposal Information

Dissertation proposal guidelines, written proposal.

Each Ph.D. candidate must submit a written dissertation proposal (approximately 10-15 pages long), which must be approved by the candidate’s Reading Committee. The proposal should be written and submitted before the student undertakes the bulk of the dissertation research. It establishes the background, feasibility and interest of the proposed research, and it details the procedures for accomplishing it in a timely manner.

A dissertation proposal will clearly specify the leading research questions and hypotheses, the data relevant to answering those research questions, the theoretical framework and the methods of analysis. It will provide a brief literature review, elucidating the relationship of the proposed research to other current research, and a clear work plan. The proposal should also present and interpret progress to date if the research is already underway. Finally, it should briefly discuss any research costs involved and the anticipated sources of funding.

The written proposal is modeled on the project description for an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (DDRIG) in Linguistics. The project description is a major part of the full grant application, so the dissertation proposal can serve as a stepping stone towards a complete DDRIG application, if desired. For those who choose not to seek NSF funding, the proposal format will still be helpful for other types of fellowship and funding applications.

An example of a dissertation proposal that was also submitted for an NSF DDRIG:

• Scott Grimm NSF proposal   ( references )

Abstracts of successful NSF DDRIG proposals:

• NSF-awarded dissertation proposals

Proposal Meeting

After the approval of the written dissertation proposal, each student is required to meet with their reading committee plus one or more faculty members who are not members of the reading committee, who can provide a fresh perspective on the research. The purpose of the meeting is to provide the student with further guidance on how best to undertake the dissertation research and complete the dissertation in a timely matter. Topics to be discussed might include priorities among possible research avenues, the best formulation of the research questions and hypotheses, the design of experimental, corpus, or field studies, sources of research funding, and the preparation of grant applications.

For More Information

Further details about the dissertation proposal and the proposal meeting, including timeline for completion and the selection of additional faculty for the proposal meeting, can be found in the PhD Handbook available via the Resources for Graduate Students web page.

Guidelines for the Dissertation Proposal Document

Format of the exam paper.

The written proposal takes the form of a full research proposal using an established formatting style (APA, LSA; 12-point, Times New Roman).  The proposal is to be submitted in electronic format to committee members unless they explicitly request a hard copy.  The proposal, along with page limits, is as follows.

Abstract (1 page, double spaced)

The summary is a succinct presentation of the entire project.  Without headings, it should address the following areas:

• Background.
• Specific Aim(s), including research questions and/or hypotheses.
• Methods, including data sources and data collection procedures.
• Analysis, including coding and/or statistical procedures
• Significance, describing intellectual merit and broader implications

Research Proposal (no more than 25 pages, double-spaced, excluding references)

The research proposal is a detailed presentation of the problem, a review of the literature, the presentation of preliminary data analyses, and the description of the proposed project.  It should include the following sections, with headings.  Page limits are suggestive.

• Introduction (one paragraph). A brief articulation of the research topic (“This study will investigate…”) and the research questions to be addressed.
• Literature Review/Background (8-9 pages).  This is a review of the relevant literature.  As applicable, it should include a discussion and evaluation of competing or alternate theories, gaps in the literature, the strengths and limitations of particular analytic techniques, and promising directions for scholarship and practice.  The discussion should lead logically to demonstrate the importance of the overall research question(s) posed by the student.
• Preliminary Data/Data Analysis (4-5 pages).  If you have preliminary data,  then you can present the analysis of these data here.  Only data that speaks directly to your question, methods, or analytic techniques is appropriate.  Include details about the source of the data, information about data collection and preparation of the data for analysis (e.g. transcription and coding), description of interpretative or analytic methods, examples of the data, and summary of the results of the analysis. These analyses should show that you are familiar with the kind of data collection and analysis that you propose.
• Research Design (12-15 pages). This section should begin with a re-articulation of the research question(s) and/or hypotheses and a brief introduction to the design of the research (1/2 page).  However, it should not include information already presented in the literature review.  Rather, this section should present detailed information about the following:
• data sources and availability of these sources (e.g. corpora, media, human participants),
• data collection techniques (e.g. audio or audiovisual recording, interviews, structured tasks, use of archived data, etc),
• data preparation (e.g. transcription practices, spreadsheet management, etc),
• data analysis (e.g. coding schemes, interpretive methods, statistical tests, etc)
• a description of the range of expected results and implications.
• Timeline (1 page).  You should include a timeline that takes the form of a Gantt chart showing your estimated periods of data collection, data analysis, and dissertation write-up.
• Reference List.  No more than 35 references should be included.

We use cookies to enhance our website for you. Proceed if you agree to this policy or learn more about it.

• Essay Database >
• Essays Samples >
• Essay Types >
• Research Proposal Example

Linguistics Research Proposals Samples For Students

22 samples of this type

While studying in college, you will definitely have to compose a lot of Research Proposals on Linguistics. Lucky you if putting words together and turning them into relevant content comes easy to you; if it's not the case, you can save the day by finding an already written Linguistics Research Proposal example and using it as a template to follow.

This is when you will definitely find WowEssays' free samples collection extremely helpful as it includes numerous skillfully written works on most various Linguistics Research Proposals topics. Ideally, you should be able to find a piece that meets your criteria and use it as a template to develop your own Research Proposal. Alternatively, our skilled essay writers can deliver you an original Linguistics Research Proposal model crafted from scratch according to your custom instructions.

International Trade and Human Rights Research Proposal

Should english be made the official language of the usa research proposal examples, should english be made the official language of the usa, a study of some grammatical errors made by arab learners of english research proposal sample, problem statement.

Arab students learning English language in UK universities often commit grammatical errors in their written English. The reasons are far other than issues associated to the fact that the students are non-native English speakers and that is why this research study focuses on thorough investigation of the patterns of Arabic students’ grammatical errors in their writing.

Aim of research

Don't waste your time searching for a sample.

Get your research proposal done by professional writers!

Just from $10/page

Research Proposal On Two Languages, One Nation

[Client’s Name] [Client’s Professor] [Client’s Subject] [Date Passed]

Proper Research Proposal Example About Research Plan

[Subject/Course] [Submission Date] #1001168032 LIN200TUT5203

Archeology, DNA, And Genetics Research Proposal Samples

Cultural psychology bilingualism and its effect to emotional regulation research proposal example, example of research proposal on using cognition to enhance classroom effectiveness, a study of teaching english, english as a second language.

The influence of Arabic as a language is profound on many languages especially the influence on vocabulary. Indeed, many languages derive their vocabulary from Arabic in spite of the fact that the latter is largely used in Islamic countries. 1.2 billion Muslims worldwide employ the use of Arabic language in religious citations and prayers (Carter & MnCarthy, 2009).

Background of the Study

How nokia can reconnect with the consumers: exemplar research proposal to follow, how nokia can reconnect with the consumers protocol, sample research proposal on barriers in cross cultural communication.

Communication Theory

Free Pragmatics Research Proposal Example

The research project research proposal examples, doctor candidate:.

Philosophy of Transformation: Differentiation or Subtraction Summary in Key Words Philosophy of transformation; Deleuze; Badiou; differentiation, subtraction, (re-, de-) territorialization; folding; plane of consistency; events (interventions); truth procedure; subject; the capitalism; the democratic materialism

Summary of the Theme and the Aim of the Project

Sample research proposal on ielts test, questions: the first step in crafting a proposal.

What social factors lead a live language to become a dead language, or lead languages to stop evolving and fall out of use?

In what ways are the IELTS tests inaccurate in assessing the verbal and written performance levels of ESL learners?

Self-concept across cultures research proposal examples, how television affects communication in minors: research proposal you might want to emulate, free a review of relevant literature research proposal example, overview and research questions, free research proposal on effects of globalization on culture, research question.

How has globalization changed local culture?

Globalization has diluted and compromised most local cultures in developing countries

Development of Research Instruments

The research aims to determine the extent to which globalization has diluted local cultures in developing countries. The accomplishment of this goal will employ three research instruments, including; the statistical data method, comparative and field methods.

Statistical data Method

Research Proposal On The Case of the Kurdish Minority

The field of struggle for state power to understand of ethnic group in the southeast turkey.

The Kurdish community is a minority group living in Turkey. They are believed to be the largest ethnic group that are not recognized by any state. Because of this reason, they have been involved in a continuous struggle with the government of Turkey. They have been fighting for the right to be recognized and appreciated by the Turkish government (Kaya, 2011, p.15). This paper will give an insight look into the causes behind the struggle in relation to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the field.

Free Research Proposal About Social Media, Swearing And Gender: Identifying New Trends In Language

Good research proposal about the ethical considerations for the study are as follows, free bloomsburg university of pennsylvania research proposal sample.

Dr. David L. Soltz, President

Carver Hall 400 East Second Street

Bloomsburg, PA 17815-1301

Other research proposal examples, 23-october-2013.

Media Policy Analysis Introduction BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) is one of the leading national media groups in the United Kingdom and it operates under the Royal Charter. BBC was considered to be the most watched news channel in the country until 2005. Later on, ITV Plc became fully operational and grabbed a major place in media industry and stock exchange of the country. BBC is considered as one of the largest media groups in the world and it offers a wide range of services and channels for its both domestic and international viewers.

Analysis of Group

Password recovery email has been sent to [email protected]

Use your new password to log in

You are not register!

By clicking Register, you agree to our Terms of Service and that you have read our Privacy Policy .

Now you can download documents directly to your device!

Check your email! An email with your password has already been sent to you! Now you can download documents directly to your device.

or Use the QR code to Save this Paper to Your Phone

The sample is NOT original!

Short on a deadline?

Don't waste time. Get help with 11% off using code - GETWOWED

No, thanks! I'm fine with missing my deadline

• Short report
• Open access
• Published: 24 June 2016

An exploratory genre analysis of three graduate degree research proposals in applied linguistics

• Bin Yin   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5557-8983 1  

Functional Linguistics volume  3 , Article number:  7 ( 2016 ) Cite this article

8600 Accesses

2 Citations

5 Altmetric

Metrics details

This exploratory study investigated the rhetorical structure of three research proposals written by students who successfully sought entry into MA/PhD programs in applied linguistics at a Singapore university. Despite the abundance of research on published academic texts (such as the research article), not much is known about research proposals written for degree admission purposes, which are identified as an occluded genre. Following the Swales tradition of genre analysis, the proposals were analyzed in terms of their rhetorical “move” structure, complemented by interviews with the proposal writers and one expert informant to elicit contextual factors such as intended readership, authorial positioning, and institutional expectations for this genre. The results show that the rhetorical structuring and the realization of moves were shaped by the communicative purpose of research proposals and disciplinary expectations. Differences between subfields of applied linguistics can be seen in the presence/absence of moves such as those related to proposed methodology. While exploratory in nature, this study sheds light on an important, occluded genre, with pedagogical implications.

Introduction

The study of academic discourse in its various aspects has attracted much attention in genre analysis over the past two decades, to make explicit the values upheld and practices endorsed in various academic communities (Samraj 2004 ). The academic genres that have been investigated include various types of published texts, such as the much valorized research article (RA) (e.g., Swales 1990 ; Anthony 1999 ; Samraj 2002 ; Yang and Allison 2003 ; Lin and Evans 2012 ; Martín and León Pérez 2014 ), dissertations (e.g., Hopkins and Dudley-Evans 1988 ; Bunton 2002 ; Kwan 2006 ; Thompson 2009 ), data commentaries, research reports, abstracts and posters (Swales and Feak 1994 , 2000 ). However, research proposals written for entry into degree programs as an exemplar of occluded genres (Swales 1996 ) have so far not been looked into, partly due to the lack of access to this type of texts. Nonetheless, the importance of the research proposal as a means to gauge the competence of students and its gate-keeping role in selecting future players in the academic world is clear. This exploratory study investigated three research proposals written by successful applicants to MA/PhD programs in applied linguistics at a Singapore-based university. The study seeks to account for the rhetorical structure of the graduate degree research proposal in terms of its communicative purpose, institutional expectations and represented disciplinary culture. In the next section, I look in more detail at the Swalesian tradition of academic genre analysis, focusing on the CARS model (Creating a Research Space) and discussing its applications and adaptations. Then, I argue for the importance of examining the graduate degree research proposal as a genre.

Genre analysis of academic discourse in English for Specific Purposes (ESP)

Genre analysis of academic texts can operate at both micro and macro levels. At the micro level, researchers examine the way certain grammatical or lexical features are employed in writing, such as the use of hedging, modality and reporting verbs (Thompson and Ye 1991 ; Salager-Meyer 1992 ; Hyland 1996 ), metadiscourse markers (Hyland 2008 ), and lexical verbs (Williams 1996 ). At the macro level, especially within the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) tradition, researchers deal with the patterns of rhetorical organizations of academic texts in various disciplines. The rhetorical organization of a text is often described as being made up of series of rhetorical “moves”, defined as a segment of text that is shaped and constrained by a specific communicative function (Holmes 1997 ). Therefore, when a stretch of text is identified as containing a coherent rhetorical function, it will be analyzed as a move whose labeling unambiguously indicates its function. Within each move there are one or more further realizations known as “steps” or “strategies”. These functional components (moves, steps or strategies) can be identified for each genre and such knowledge (e.g., presence, absence, and sequence of components) can then be used in the context of ESP instruction.

The most prominent model for rhetorical moves analysis is Swales ( 1990 )’s Creating a Research Space (CARS) invented to capture the rhetorical content of research article introductions (see Table  1 ). As seen in Table  1 , Move 1 Establishing a territory is realized by three strategies: Claiming centrality , Making topic generalizations and Reviewing items of previous research . The other two moves: Establishing a niche and Occupying the niche are likewise realized by further steps. The labeling of the moves in CARS reflects the persuasive nature of article introductions: namely, readers are being persuaded to accept the research being presented. Rhetorical analyses inevitably come with some degree of subjectivity (Crookes 1986 ). In cases where a sentence or a chunk of text could be analyzed as serving more than one rhetorical function (move or step), the conventional practice in the field is to assign the most salient move or step (Crookes 1986 ; Holmes 1997 ). Another important point to note is that the original model was based on RAs in the disciplines of sciences and engineering, but has since been applied and adapted for different genres and disciplines, resulting in further refinements or modifications to the model. Here, I briefly discuss some of the well-known adaptations of the CARS model in the literature (Anthony 1999 ; Samraj 2002 ; Bunton 2002 ).

Anthony ( 1999 ) was concerned with the extent to which the CARS model can accurately account for article introductions in software engineering. He noted three aspects of the model that need modification to accommodate his corpus of 12 papers. Specifically, many steps in CARS appear to be redundant for software engineering writing (e.g., Step 1-1, 2-1A, 2-1C, 2-1D, and 3-1A; see Table  1 for the steps). Second, papers in his corpus included definitions of key terms and concepts in their introductions, a strategy that is not accounted for in CARS. Lastly, most of the papers in the corpus utilized a rhetorical strategy whereby the paper authors evaluated the research being presented either with respect to the practical applicability or the novelty of the research. Anthony ( 1999 ) termed this strategy Evaluation of research and included this as a new step under Move 3 ( Occupying the niche ). The near obligatory presence of this step and its prominent proportion in Move 3 was explained by the central concerns of the field of software engineering (models being developed need to be applicable; and authors may also need to show uniqueness).

Samraj ( 2002 ) is another well-known adaptation of the CARS model whereby two related sub-disciplines within environmental science were examined in 12 RA introductions: Wildlife Behavior and Conservation Biology. First, it was found that Reviewing items of previous research (Step 1-3 in CARS) does not occur just in the first move, but can be embedded within other steps, such as gap-indicating (Move 2) or goal specification (Move 3). Therefore, Samraj ( 2002 , 16) proposes removing Reviewing items of previous research as a step under Move 1, and instead treating it as a “free-standing sub-step that can be employed in the realization of any step in the introduction”. Further, Samraj ( 2002 ) found that centrality claims (in Move 1) and gap indications (in Move 2) can be couched in terms of both the phenomenal (real) world or the epistemic (research) world. Here, disciplinary variations were detected: while Wildlife Behavior tends to employ rhetorical strategies referring to the epistemic world, Conservation Biology tends to emphasize issues in the real world. Samraj ( 2002 ) suggested that the variations were due to the fact that Wildlife Behavior is a theoretical, disciplinary field with an established historical depth whereas Conservation Biology is an applied, interdisciplinary area that was still emerging. These new insights, and others were incorporated into a modified CARS model in Samraj ( 2002 , 15).

Lastly, Bunton ( 2002 ) adapted the CARS model for the analysis of 45 PhD theses written by students from a variety of disciplinary fields at the University of Hong Kong. While using the same moves in the CARS model (and those in Dudley-Evans 1986 ), Bunton ( 2002 ) developed 10 additional steps, mostly for Move 3 ( Announcing the present research or Occupying the niche ). Some of the additional steps include Defining terms (Move 1), Method , Materials or Subjects , Product of research/Model proposed , Chapter structure and Theoretical position (all under Move 3). Bunton ( 2002 ) notes that, compared with research articles, PhD introductions are necessarily more elaborate, given their more extensive scope.

These, together with numerous other works drawing on the CARS model (e.g., applied linguistics, Kwan 2006 ; Ozturk 2007 ; sports science and medicine, Zeng 2009 ; agricultural sciences, del Saz Rubio 2011 ; management, Lim 2012 ) have both demonstrated the usefulness of CARS as a framework of rhetorical descriptions for academic texts, and shown the existence of variations in text types and disciplines (Samraj 2002 ; Ozturk 2007 ). Another point to note is that the RA remains the text type receiving the most attention in rhetorical genre analysis due to its status in the academic community as the vehicle of knowledge production and transmission, and therefore the lifeblood of the academy (Hyland 2000 ). Nevertheless, a discourse community necessarily engages in a plurality of genres (Bhatia 2002 ), and understanding texts beyond the research article is important to uncovering the discourse community’s values and practices. In the two sections that follow, I discuss research proposals as an important, but occluded genre that forms part of the academic genre system.

The research proposal as an occluded academic genre

One important academic genre that has not been given due attention is the graduate degree research proposal (Swales 1996 ). It belongs to a group of “research process” texts written for a small-group audience (typically the admission committee), but may nonetheless be “seriously invested with demonstrated scholarship and . . . representing their authors in a favorable professional light” (46). As a genre hidden from the public, existing studies on research proposals written for graduate admission purposes are practically non-existent, although there is research on related genres, such as grant proposals written by established or junior researchers (Connor and Mauranen 1999 ; Connor 2000 ; Myers 1990 ; Feng 2008 ; Cheng 2014 ) or proposals written by existing graduate students as part of their candidature advancement requirements (Cadman 2002 ). It is evidently important to understand this genre both for theoretical and pedagogical reasons. Besides being part of a genre system that constitutes a discipline’s culture, research proposals serve an important gate-keeping role in higher research degree admission, and by implication, entry into the academic/discourse community. However, because the requirements for this genre are usually implicit, student applicants may have difficulties in matching their texts with the expectations of their targeted audience. This is especially so for students writing across linguistic and cultural boundaries, and who could therefore benefit from the findings of research into this occluded genre.

Given these, the present study investigated three graduate degree research proposals submitted by students applying for admission to a research degree program at a Singapore-based university. The objective of the study is to describe the rhetorical structure of the research proposals, how it relates to the communicative purposes and the expectations of the institutional context, and how the above facets may vary along disciplinary lines. Informed by current understandings of genre theory which stress the relationship between text and context (Swales 1990 ; Bhatia 1993 ), this study combines textual analysis of research proposals (rhetorical moves) with interview data from an expert informant as well as the authors of the proposals to achieve a preliminary understanding of research proposals in applied linguistics in a specific academic setting.

Existing studies on research proposals

In this section, I review existing genre studies on research proposals: Myers ( 1990 ), Connor and Mauranen ( 1999 ), Connor ( 2000 ), Feng ( 2008 ), Cheng ( 2014 ), Cadman ( 2002 ). The first five studies were actually on grant proposals, a type of research proposal written to request government or private funding. Only the last study by Cadman ( 2002 ) examined research proposals written by students for their degree programs and bears the closest resemblance to the present study.

As one of the earliest studies on the research proposal, Myers ( 1990 ) described grant research proposals as “the most basic form of scientific writing” (41) since researchers need to secure funds before engaging in their research projects. He studied drafts and final versions of two US biologists’ research proposals and examined their writing processes through interviews and observations of their writing activities. Myers ( 1990 )’s study highlighted the difficult balance that researchers try to strike between being original in their proposed research and being compliant with the existing body of literature in their field. Myers ( 1990 ) argues that the rhetoric of the proposal varies with each discipline (in this case, two subfields in biology) and also in terms of the researcher’s relation to the discipline.

Compared with Myers ( 1990 ), Connor and Mauranen ( 1999 )’s study of grant proposals is more textually grounded. Their study is concerned with the identification and description of rhetorical moves of grant proposals written by 34 established scientists from the European Union (EU). Drawing on the CARS model, the authors were able to identify 10 moves in the grant proposals: Territory , Gap , Goal , Means , Reporting previous research , Achievements , Benefits , Competence claim , Importance claim , and Compliance claim. Connor and Mauranen ( 1999 ) found that some of these moves, such as the competence and compliance claims are specific to grant proposals while others like Territory , Gap , and Means can be found in research articles as well. A follow-up study (Connor 2000 ) in the US context found that, compared with their European counterparts, US grant proposal writers tended to explicitly specify their research purpose by a Research question or Research hypothesis move. Connor ( 2000 ) speculated that this might be explained by stronger expectations about precise research question formulation on the part of American proposal reviewers, causing US researchers therefore to “pretend that their research is farther along than it actually is” (19).

While the studies reviewed above had been conducted in Western contexts, Feng ( 2008 ) took a comparative approach and examined the grant proposals written by nine social sciences/humanities Chinese scholars between 1996 and 2001. It was found that while the Chinese language proposals shared similarities with English language ones from a comparable study conducted in Canada (Feng and Shi 2004 ), stark differences emerged as well. For instance, in realizing the Niche move, while English language proposals offered detailed discussions and critiques of previous items of research, the Chinese language proposals provided vague criticisms on uncited work, which was interpreted as a practice of “face-saving”. The Means (i.e., methodology) move in the Chinese proposals also lacked specificity compared with the English language texts, which was interpreted as reflecting a lack of understanding on empirical research methodology in the Chinese research community.

Different from the above research on grant proposals by faculty members, Cheng ( 2014 ) looked at two US-based English as second language doctoral students’ process of writing dissertation grant proposals for biophysics and musicology. Cheng ( 2014 ) studied proposal writing through the metaphor of “game-playing” – namely that academic writing involves the learning of rules and conventions, as well as repeated participation. By mainly analyzing interviews with the two students, Cheng ( 2014 ) identified four themes in the two doctoral researchers’ writing process: “learning how to play”, “following or bending the rules”, “deciding whether to play”, and “identifying who to cite in the grant proposals”. The fact that one student eventually succeeded in obtaining grant funding whereas the other did not was tentatively attributed to the presence or absence of seasoned researchers who could guide the student in the writing process. Overall, the study showed the importance of the agentive role students play in negotiating through the grant genre system during their transition from the coursework to the dissertation stage of their graduate training.

Lastly, unlike the studies above which examined texts to some degree, Cadman ( 2002 ) focuses exclusively on the “context of situation relating to the research proposal as a definable genre” (90), instead of the text itself. Cadman ( 2002 ) surveyed faculty supervisors across various disciplines in an Australia university, asking them to prioritize the particular features they expected in a successful student research proposal. Some of the features uncovered include: "feasibility", " updated knowledge of the field ", and "appropriateness of methodology". In addition, the study reveals that the “discoursally constructed self” was considered more important than the substantive content of the proposal itself.

These studies, with their different approaches to the research proposal, have produced useful insights into this genre, such as the C ompetence claim and Compliance claim of the EU grant proposals in Connor and Mauranen ( 1999 ), Research question and/or hypothesis in Connor ( 2000 ), the “game-playing” metaphor in Cheng ( 2014 ) and the assessment of "discourse persona" in Cadman ( 2002 ). They have advanced our understanding of both the textual and contextual aspects of this genre and also provided a rough schema for the present study. Nonetheless, our knowledge of the research proposal is still in its infancy. Not excepting Cadman ( 2002 ), there are currently no genre investigations of student-written research proposals for purposes of gaining entry into graduate programs. The present study aims to fill the gap by adopting an integrative approach that combines textual and contextual analyses of student written research proposals.

Textual data

The three research proposals for this study were collected from three research students in 2006. They were at varying stages of pursuing a research degree in applied linguistics at a leading Singapore university where the working language is English (see Table  2 for author information). The proposals that participants provided are those that they had submitted when applying to the research programs to which they were eventually accepted. The respective authors signed consent forms to take part in the research project and their proposals are coded as P1, P2 and P3 in this paper.

Interview data

Interviews were conducted with the three authors for two purposes. One was to confirm with them the accuracy of the labeling of rhetorical moves/strategies. During the interview, I checked my analysis and labeling with each author, wherever I had doubts about the rhetorical purpose for a given stretch of texts. Where the authors disagreed with my reading and labeling of their text components, discussion followed to resolve such disagreements and arrive at the most accurate way of labeling each move/strategy. The second purpose of the interview with the authors was to elicit their perceptions on the research proposal as a genre. Questions were designed to elicit their understanding of the overall communicative purpose of the research proposal, its intended readership, prominent features of proposals and the rationale behind specific moves/strategies. In addition, data from an interview conducted with an established faculty member in linguistics research (Prof W) is also reported here. Footnote 1 Prof W was from the Department of English Language and Literature of the University and had a wealth of experience reading research proposals submitted for graduate degree applications. Questions designed for the faculty member were intended to elicit expert expectations and perceptions on the production and evaluation of this genre. Footnote 2

The institutional role of the research proposal

Historically, the research proposal for graduate degree admission represented part of the older graduate degree program structure at this University which used to adhere to a British style of graduate degree education. This meant that postgraduate programs by research consisted solely of a dissertation with practically no coursework component. In that context, the research proposal used to be a compulsory requirement for admission into the Department’s research degree programs. However, Prof W noted that the submission of a graduate degree research proposal was no longer required for application purposes, as a result of the “Americanization” of the university’s curriculum.

Though no longer formally obligatory, research proposals were important for applicants who applied for the competitive university research scholarship where evaluation of the applicant’s potential to conduct research became a decisive factor in the admission process. Since most applicants requested scholarship funding, the research proposal was considered a de facto requirement in their application. According to Prof W, the communicative purpose of the research proposal in the context of admission evaluation was generally to see that the applicant was able to construct a research project relevant to the program being applied for. Specifically, he highlighted that faculty members would like to see clear formulation of research questions, display of background knowledge and signs of compatibility to the department’s research profile.

Analytical framework

The present study follows the Swalesian tradition of rhetorical analysis, specifically the CARS model that was discussed earlier (see Table  1 ). To reiterate, the essential construct underlying Swales’ rhetorical analysis is the “move”, defined as “a text segment made up of a bundle of linguistic features, (lexical) meanings, propositional meanings, illocutionary forces, etc., which give the segment a uniform orientation and signal the content of discourse in it” (Nwogu 1997 , 114). Within each move, there are further smaller rhetorical units, referred to as “strategies Footnote 3 ” in this study. The naming of moves and strategies is largely in keeping with existing studies (e.g., Swales 1990 ; Connor 2000 ; Yang 2001 ). However, since CARS and its adaptations (see discussions in the introductory sections) were intended to describe a single section of the RA (i.e., introduction), they cannot fully accommodate the rhetorical structuring of full-length research proposals. Therefore, new moves and strategies have been identified in this study, as will be seen in the results/analysis section below. In addition, following existing practice (Crookes 1986 ; Holmes 1997 ), where a sentence/chunk of text seemed to denote more than one rhetorical function, the solution adopted was to assign the most salient rhetorical function to the text.

Results and analysis

Table  3 summarizes information on move structure, strategies and textual space allocated to each move across the three proposals. Textual space was measured in terms of the number or percentage of sentences for the move/strategy, following existing practice (e.g., Anthony 1999 ; Ozturk 2007 ). A sentence is defined here as a main clause with all its associated dependent clauses, and for the purposes of analysis, is identified by orthographical cues (i.e., begins with a capital letter and ends with a full stop, Aarts 2014 ). Tables  4 , 5 and 6 present the individual move sequence of the three proposals. In the analysis below, I focus on the prominent trends and contrasts observed across the three texts in terms of the use of rhetorical moves or strategies, while acknowledging that not all variations can receive a satisfactory explanation, given existing literature pointing to both inter- and intra-disciplinary variations in the generic structure of academic texts (e.g., computer engineering, Anthony 1999 ; applied linguistics, Ozturk 2007 ; environmental science, Samraj 2002 ). Most importantly, this is an exploratory study with a small corpus size, and attempting to remark on all aspects of rhetorical patterns in the three texts would seem to risk inappropriate generalization. Consequently, only the prominent trends and contrasts will be focused on.

With this caveat in mind, an examination of Table  3 in terms of allocation of textual space reveals Move 1 and Move 3 to be relatively important rhetorical components: the average textual space for Move 1 ( Establishing a territory ) across the three proposals is 46 % on average, and for Move 3 ( Occupying the niche ), 21 %. They constitute the two moves that take up the most space (67 %) in the three proposals. The textual prominence of Move 1 ( Establishing a territory ) is probably due to the importance and indispensability in displaying knowledge about the field.

Both published resources and the specialist informant in this study highlighted the importance of demonstrating familiarity with existing literature in the research proposal. In Allison ( 2002 ) for examples, prospective graduate degree applicants are advised to justify their proposed research by referring to existing knowledge, belief, or practice, including relevant research that already exists on the topic (222). Prof W likewise remarked that the applicant needed to demonstrate an understanding of the current state of art. It is therefore not surprising that, on average, Move 1 ( Establishing a territory ) occupies a proportionally large rhetorical space. Nevertheless, there is a noticeable difference between P3 (with 80 % of textual space devoted to Move 1) and the remaining two proposals (27 % for P1 and 32 % for P2). The first point to note is that, as already alluded to above, variation exists even within a single discipline in terms of rhetorical structure (e.g., Anthony 1999 ; Connor 2000 ; Samraj 2002 ; Ozturk 2007 ). For instance, one biology proposal studied in Connor ( 2000 ) contained 3.01 % of textual space for Move 1 (termed Territory in Connor 2000 ) compared with another biology proposal with 16.2 % of textual space for the same move. In the case of P3 in this study, the high percentage of textual space for Move 1 may have to do with the interdisciplinary topic being proposed which has to do with the linguistic construction of women in crime reports, a topic that encompasses several areas of study, including language, ideology, media, gender, and criminology. Indeed, it has been suggested that researchers working on interdisciplinary topics tend to provide more theoretical background to help the reader become familiar with “related or parent disciplines about the issues investigated” (Ozturk 2007 , 34).

Therefore, the author of P3 felt it necessary to provide a comprehensive overview of all relevant fields in the proposal, resulting in a substantial literature review section. Also, P3 is the shortest proposal in the data set, containing fewer than 1500 words, and it has been shown that shorter texts tend to contain proportionally more text for establishing territory (Connor 2000 ).

Despite containing a proportionally large textual space for Move 1 ( Establishing a territory ), P3 is missing Move 2 ( Establishing a niche ), in contrast to the other two proposals. This is perhaps not surprising, given existing findings that Move 2 seems to be optional in student written texts especially when the writing is for an immediate target audience (e.g., Soler-Monreal et al. 2011 ). Namely, when the text is not intended to be highly self-promotional or in need of demonstrating novelty, there is a trend for Move 2 to go missing.

As for Move 3 ( Occupying the niche ), both the faculty informant and proposal authors agreed that it is extremely important for research proposals to have clear and unambiguous research objectives and also to strengthen the statement of purpose by spelling out the significance of the proposed research (Move 3), hence the relatively high proportion of textual space assigned to this move. There is again some variation across the three proposals for this move too. Proportionally, P2 devotes almost twice as much textual space (30 %) to Move 3 than P1 (17 %) and P3 (16 %). The difference between P2 and P1 in the proportion of Move 3 is simply due to the difference in overall length of proposals (the two proposals are comparable in the number of sentences for Move 3; see Table  3 ). As to the difference between P2 and P3, two proposals of similar length and from the same discipline, I observe that P2 fulfills Move 3, Strategy 1 ( Outlining purposes ) by not only stating the overall objective, but also in the form of two main questions and seven specific questions, thereby resulting in a substantial Move 3. In comparison, P3 only states the overall objective. In this respect, P3 seems closer to the norm of humanities proposals than P2, in light of the observation that science disciplines, but not humanities tend to include both objectives and specific questions in their research proposals to occupy a research niche (Connor 2000 ).

Apart from the textual space devoted to particular moves/strategies, the absence of certain rhetorical components also deserves attention. For example, Strategy 3 of Move 1, Reviewing items of previous research is not present in P2. Although the author does make some general remarks regarding the status of knowledge in the field, the effort to specify previous findings and attribute them to specific researchers was not found in this proposal. Considering the importance of citing peers’ work to establish rapport and self-identity in the academic community, the absence of such rhetorical effort in P2 calls for an explanation, which I offer below where I discuss Strategy 3 of Move 1 ( Reviewing items of previous research ).

Spelling out methodology (Move 5) is another site where variation occurs across the three proposals. P1 seems to set itself apart from the other two proposals in having quite a detailed methodology move, making use of five rhetorical strategies. P2 contains a methodology section, but its rhetorical realization is not as complex, amounting to three strategies. Lastly, P3 contains only one strategy ( Indicating analytical framework ) in this move. The contrast between P1, on the one hand, and P2 and P3, on the other, could be attributed to the differences in the mode of enquiry in the research subfields. Namely, P1 is concerned with educational phonology. As a field that combines educational studies and phonetics, two areas that rely on well designed experiments to elicit research data, the writer has to present a rather detailed methodology section in the proposal to convince the reader that she does have a viable research design. In comparison, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the research area of P2 and P3, being a non-experimental field, relies more on problematizing issues in society and their reflection in discourse than in executing any experiment or defining any variables, which accounts for the lower textual emphasis given to the methodology move in these two proposals Footnote 4 (P2 and P3).

Having observed the distribution of moves in the three research proposals and explaining the prominent trends, the sections below offer a detailed description of and explanation for the realization of strategies.

Establishing a territory

Establishing a territory is a move in the research proposal that maps out the general research area in which the proposed research is located. It sets up the larger intellectual or real world background for the proposed topic via the use of four mutually inclusive strategies: Claiming centrality , Making topic generalizations , Reviewing items of previous research , and Stating personal interest . The first three strategies are from the CARS model (see Table  1 ). The last was formulated specifically for this study. The four strategies can occur together or independently as Tables  4 , 5 and 6 show.

Claiming centrality

According to Swales ( 1990 ), one rhetorical vehicle to establish a research territory is the centrality claim. This is a strategy where the author “makes appeals to the discourse community whereby members are asked to accept that the research about to be reported is part of a lively, significant or well-established research area” (Swales 1990 , 142). Centrality claims are signaled by such lexical items and their variants as “important ” , “central ” , “interesting ” and “indispensable ” . Centrality claims were found in P2 and P3, as shown by examples (1) and (2) below (emphases in all examples are mine):

… As such, it is important to denaturalize these ideologies which … The newspapers of societies play a powerful role in … (P3)

…I think it is significant and worthwhile ( imperative even for somebody like me who …) to make explicit this relationship and show how the most “natural” and “common-sensical” of discourses are … and potential harm if their assumptions are not questioned or challenged (P2)

In both examples, the authors assert the importance of their proposed research by using the positive evaluative words such as “important”, “powerful”, “significant”, “worthwhile” and “imperative”, thereby attempting to convince the reader that the research field is justified on account of its prominence. In addition, P2 also highlights the negative consequences (“potential harm”) in the event that the current status quo is allowed to continue, thereby indirectly conveying the importance of the proposed topic.

Making topic generalizations

A second rhetorical device used for territory establishing, according to Swales ( 1990 ), involves making topic generalizations about the field. This is a neutral statement where the writer expresses “in general terms the current state of the art – of knowledge, of technique…” (Swales 1990 , 146). Following Samraj ( 2002 ), a further distinction is made between topic generalizations in the research world as opposed to the real world, which can be seen in examples (3) and (4) respectively.

(3) Making generalization in research:

For the most part, I subscribe to its main tenet that there is a …, that any use of language is informed or influenced by…, that language and one’s use of it are always ideological. (P2)

(4) Making generalization in real world:

Singapore is an Asian society strongly grounded in its eastern values. …Marriage is seen as a partnership where the woman serves the husband, is a mother and caregiver to the children and is a comfort provider for the home. These constructs of women lie within the ideology of patriarchy. (P3)

The bolded phrase “main tenet” in (3) serves as a lexical signal that what follows is a description of the beliefs and practices in the field being proposed for study. In the subsequent three parallel that-clauses, the writer spells out the basic theoretical underpinnings that constitute her proposed field – CDA. In (4), the author is not so much referring to the status of knowledge in the field but rather making generalizations on the social conditions surrounding the subjects she wishes to analyze. Throughout the two examples, words such as “be” and “lie”, known as relational processes in Systemic Functional Linguistics and which are usually used to denote incontestable truths, serve to remind the reader that topic generalizations are being made, either about the research world or about the real world.

Reviewing items of previous research

Reviewing items of previous research is a rhetorical device where writers specify previous findings, attribute the findings to their authors, and adopt a stance towards the findings (Swales 1990 ). It is an important rhetorical strategy in the sense that this is the place where writers demonstrates their familiarity with the field and also seek to establish rapport and self-identity within the community by citing peers’ works. Two proposals (P1 and P3) make use of this strategy (see Table  3 ). Indeed, it is the opening sentence in P1 (see Table  4 ):

Jenkins (2002, 195) calls for a major reconsideration of the way in which pronunciation is currently dealt with, not only in L2 English classrooms but also in phonology teacher education and in research. (P1)

By referring to a recognized expert, the author conveys the message that her proposed area is relevant because even experts are emphatically demanding work to fix this particular issue in the field. By doing so, the author maps out the terrain for her research. Reviewing items of previous research is a strategy used by P3 as well, though not in the initial position of the proposal. This strategy seems to feature rather prominently in terms of textual space in the two proposals that employ it: 27 and 64 % of sentence count in P1 and P3 respectively.

Curiously this strategy seems to go completely missing in P2. Although the author does make some mention of the current status of knowledge in the field, the attempt to cite specific research is absent in P2. Generally, scholars would view the lack of this rhetorical feature in a negative light, as indicated by the comment made by Prof W in the interview:

“…it (lack of reference to literature) would be bad, right? I mean, this is postgraduate work; so you need to indicate some awareness or at least some attempt in trying to understand what is going on in terms of the current state of art”

P2 author explained that she was pressed for time and therefore was not able to include a detailed literature review in the proposal. Interestingly, the author also indicated that she did not think it was important to cite relevant works in the proposal and that showing a basic understanding of the field would be sufficient Footnote 5 , a comment that seems to reveal some discrepancy between this student’s perceptions of research proposals and faculty’s expectations. When pressed on this point, Prof W noted that the Department reviewed an application in its totality, and that other factors such as grades and reference letters might be able to make up for possible deficiencies in research proposals. Future research on occluded genres should therefore look into examining a cluster of text types (e.g., research proposals, personal essays, reference letters) to understand how they might interact and complement with each other in these relatively high-stakes situations.

Stating personal interest

This study has identified a new strategy to realize Move 1 in graduate degree research proposals: Stating personal interest . This is the place where the author explicitly expresses his/her own interest in the proposed subject and by doing so introduces the field into the discourse. This is different from the Claiming centrality strategy which points to the research community as being collectively interested in the proposed subject. Examples of Stating personal interest are shown below in examples (7) and (8):

For years now, I have been interested in the notions of female identity, subjectivity, and agency … (P2)

I am particularly concerned with the workings of language in these discourses… More to the point , I am interested in the connection between discursive change and social change …  In the end , I’d like to see how female identity has been transcribed, … (P2)

It is interesting that the author resorted to personal interest to carve out a research territory in applied linguistics, given the façade of scientific research generally being impersonal and detached. On expressing interest in developing a research proposal, Allison ( 2002 , 166) notes that evidence of a researcher’s expressed interest could be “positive” in an proposal for small scale projects but he cautions that a personal interest would “not be sufficient in itself to justify admitting a student to a higher degree by research”. Perhaps there are two reasons for the occurrence of such a strategy in P2 that had been accepted into a PhD program. First, statement of personal interest in P2 is complemented by the avowed potential contribution of the proposed research to the current state of knowledge, thereby making the proposed research relevant to the larger academic community as well. As will be shown below, P2 makes use of Strategy 2 of Move 3 ( Spelling out contribution/significance of proposed research ), whereby the author argues that among other things, her proposed research will attempt to address the structural limitations of CDA. Fusing personal interest with potential contribution to knowledge is desirable, as remarked by Prof W: “… you need to say that, why your personal interest is worth translating into an actual research project is because it is also relevant to on-going debates or issues”. Second, as revealed during the interview, the author of the proposal said she wished to foreground the sustainability of the proposed research arising from her strong interest in the topic:

“…if I am not interested in it, I don’t think I will be able to do it. I mean, given, for instance, the extent of PhD…, one could be spending a few years dealing with the same thing. I think you have to be personally invested in it before you can actually start doing it…”

Having examined Move 1, Establishing a territory , I now turn to Move 2, Establishing a niche .

Establishing a niche

Establishing a niche is the move where the author, after having identified a general research area, goes on to lay the rhetorical foundation for the research to be announced or presented. Such foundation work can be achieved using any of the four strategies suggested in the CARS model, namely, Counter–claiming , Indicating a gap , Question-raising or Continuing a tradition .

As shown in Table  3 , two of the three proposals (P1 and P2) utilized the niche establishing move. Although the CARS model identifies four strategies for the Establishing niche move, I observe only one strategy in my data, namely Indicating a gap . This confirms previous research where Indicating a gap was found to be the most common strategy used to realize Move 2 (e.g., Chin 1993 ) possibly because it sounds less confrontational to academic reviewers than other possible options, say, bluntly countering a previous claim.

For the Indicating a gap strategy, this study makes a distinction between a real-world gap and a gap in research, following Samraj ( 2002 ). P1, a proposal on educational phonology, makes use of both types of gaps. The proposed research is supposed to fix a real world problem (namely, current classroom instruction) and at the same time, add to the understanding of research in phonology pedagogy; hence, the occurrence of the two types of gap indication. P2, a proposal on CDA however, contains only an indication of a gap in research. This is interesting, given that CDA does seek to solve real-world problems relating to power and ideology. An example of a real-world gap in P1, and an example of a gap in research are provided below in (9) and (10):

In the Malaysian school curriculum very little attention is paid to the teaching of pronunciation as … (Rajadurai, 2001). (P1)

…in CDA which proposes history as a helpful framework in the study of language, diachronic studies are still underrepresented … Much of CDA continues to be synchronic … (P2)

Most gap-indicating, either in the real world or in research, is signaled by negative or quasi-negative quantifiers (Swales 1990 ) such as the bolded “little” in (9). In (10), the adjective “underrepresented” serves to indicate a gap in research. In addition, the bolded verb “continue” serves to remind the reader that despite the presence of problems, the research community has yet to fix these problems, thereby justifying the proposed research. I found that most signals of gap indicating are neutral (“little”, “few”, “however”, “under-represented”, “continue to”…), as opposed to potentially confrontational signals via the use of negation words such as “not”, “rarely” and “ill” as noted by Swales ( 1990 ). The fact that the writers in this study have refrained from using such highly confrontational gap-signaling could be interpreted as an effort to sound duly cautious, especially so as an academic apprentice who has yet to acquire membership in the community in order to speak authoritatively.

Occupying the niche

Occupying the niche is the third move in Swales’ CARS model. Its rhetorical function is to “turn the niche established in Move 2 into a research space that justifies the present article” (Swales 1990 , 159). Typically, this move is realized by three strategies, with two further sub-categorizations within Strategy 1 (1A and 1B). The strategies are: Strategy 1A: Outlining purpose , where “the author or authors indicate their main purpose or purposes” (Swales 1990 , 159); Strategy 1B: Announcing present research where “the author or authors describe what they consider to be the main features of their research” (Swales 1990 , 159); Strategy 2: Announcing principal findings where the main findings of the research are presented; and, Strategy 3: Indicating RA structure , where the RA structure is presented for an overview of the content of the whole article. Strategies 2 and 3 are only relevant to published articles and therefore, are not found in my data, consisting of research proposals with ideas about research yet to be executed. In addition, one new strategy for Occupying the niche is found in my data, which is labeled: Spelling out contribution/significance of proposed research , where the author talks about the potential worth of the proposed research.

In terms of the sequence of Move 3 in relation to the other moves, it is observed that in P2 (see Table  5 ), two out of four times, Move 3 ( Occupying the niche ) follows Move 2 ( Establishing a niche) . Researchers elsewhere have noted such a “slot-and-filler” relationship between Move 2 and Move 3 (e.g., Swales 1990 ; Connor 2000 ). This relationship is also attested in the present study. Below, I discuss in more detail the two strategies of Move 3 in the research proposals: Outlining purposes and Spelling out contribution/significance of proposed research .

Outlining purposes

As shown in Table  3 , 4 , 5 and 6 , Outlining purposes is characterized by its obligatory presence, a tendency to occur early and also to recur. All three proposals make use of this strategy, thus offering grounds to postulate its obligatory presence in research proposals generally. In terms of the position of this strategy, there is a trend to foreground Outlining purposes in both P2 and P3. In P2, this strategy initially occurs in the fifth sentence of the proposal. P3 emphasizes this strategy even more, by placing it in the very first sentence of the research proposal. Besides the relatively early positioning of this strategy, I also noted its recursion. In both P2 and P3, this strategy occurs three times (see Tables  5 and 6 ). In addition, in both P1 and P2, Outlining purposes occurs as an independent section, titled “Objectives of Study” and “Preliminary Research Questions” respectively.

The obligatory presence, early positioning, recursion and clear sectional signaling of the Outlining purposes strategy observed in the proposals point to a rhetorical prominence assigned to this strategy. The foregrounding of this strategy is very likely a generic characteristic of research proposals in that a graduate degree research proposal serves, above all, to inform future supervisors and the admission board of the research being proposed. Supervisors are most concerned about whether the student researcher has a viable research question to pursue (Cadman 2002 ), a concern shared by the specialist informant in the present study. As Prof W remarked:

“… I think the student needs to make sure that s/he has a clear sense of what kind of questions they want to answer… I think this (research purpose/question) is the most important thing. Whether the answer itself is satisfactory or appropriate, correct, or whatever, this is of course something which will be evaluated later on, but if the student does not have a clear idea of what kind of questions he is trying to grapple with, then there is a problem...”

Two of the proposal writers likewise mentioned that they consider getting their research purpose/objective across as the most important element in constructing a research proposal. Examples (11) – (13) illustrate the Outlining purposes strategies from my data:

…I am particularly concerned with the identities, subjectivities, and agencies … To show the connection between discursive change on the one hand and social change on the other, I would like to propose a diachronic study, which will cover roughly ten years of policy making as engaged in, and/or initiated or challenged by the CATW. (P2)

The broader concern of this study is with how sociocultural ideologies are constructed and maintained in the mass media…(P3)

The specific concern of this study is to determine whether women’s representation and construction in the Straits Times, Singapore’s oldest newspaper, are congruent to the ideologically determined roles of women in Singapore (P3)

The word “concern”, the purposive infinitive phrase “to show the connection…” and the deictic “this” as in “this study” are clear indications that the writers of P2 and P3 are about to announce the purpose of the proposed research. In addition, when this strategy is repeated in P3 (12 and 13), the specificity in terms of content increases, as indicated by the adjective “specific” (13) and the more complex propositions expressed than those in the first appearance of Outlining purposes in P3.

Spelling out contribution/significance of proposed research

This strategy sets out to persuade the reader that the proposed research can make a contribution or be of significance to the research community. This strategy is found in P1 and P2, as shown in Table  3 . Its appearance deserves comment and explanation since previous researchers (e.g., Allison 2002 ) have found this rhetorical strategy to be quite visible in proposal writing. The following examples are instances of this strategy in my data:

The findings from this research will be especially beneficial to curriculum designers, … It is hoped that this study will provide insights into the nature of ILT, …Eventually, the study hopes to make suggestions on the improvement on…. (P1)

I would like to see, … how my own study would perhaps challenge it. Maybe, what I actually fear is that in the end, after CDA, after having identified and made sense of these notions of identity, subjectivity, and agency in discourse, I will be left with once again only discourse and no real possibility of changing it or getting out of it . My study, therefore, hopes to engage with CDA’s notion of discourse, that which not only locates language in its sociopolitical context, but also which provides it with a conceptually more powerful theorization that inscribes in it the possibility of change while, at the same, defining its structural limitations . (P3)

In these examples, lexical signals for this strategy include “beneficial to…”, “provide insight into…”, “make suggestion on…”, “challenge…”, and “provide… with more powerful theorization”. In (15), the author first announces her intention to “challenge” the subjectivity in CDA, which could be construed as a proposed contribution to the field. However, note how the challenge is made with a modal adverb “perhaps”, which tones down what might otherwise be perceived as a presumptuous aim, since challenging an existing research paradigm is no small enterprise. In the next sentence, the writer acknowledges the formidable task she has set for herself, and admits there might be “no real possibility of changing it or getting out of it”. After acknowledging the possible negative outcome, she nonetheless re-asserts the significance of her proposed research, which, to sum it up, is to “provide (CDA) with a conceptually more powerful theorization” and also to “define its structural limitations”. It would seem that when authors highlight the potential contribution of their proposed research, they might do so with much qualification so as not to sound too ambitious and to avoid the risk of offending expert members of the community. Such a rhetorical strategy could be construed as a reflection of the writer’s awareness of the sensitivities and expectations of the academic community. Insofar as research students are still apprentices yet to be inducted into the academic community and the proposed research has not been put to the test of actual execution, it is important to be cautious when advancing claims on proposed research.

Establishing theoretical basis

I now turn to the fourth move identified in the proposals: Establishing theoretical basis , as shown in Table  3 . The main purpose of this move is to “explicate the theories on which the proposed research is based” (Yang 2001 , 86). Of the three proposals, only P1 showed this move, which is not surprising since it is more relevant to experiment-based fields. This move seems to be realized by three strategies, namely, Reviewing literature relevant to theory , Defining theory and Explaining theory . The development and sequencing of such rhetorical strategies is found in Table  5 , which details the move/strategy sequence in P1. In terms of textual space, the strategy of Explaining theory occupies more textual space than the other two strategies. In terms of move development, there is a cyclic pattern here where strategy 2 and strategy 3 tend to recur together. This is because more than one theory is being provided. Therefore, repeated patterns of definition and explanation are necessary to provide clear and adequate ground for the theories being adopted in the proposed research.

In Yang’s ( 2001 ) analysis of published RAs, she found other rhetorical elements in this section as well, such as Evaluating theory and Relating theory and proposed research . These rhetorical elements are missing from P1. The discrepancy between Yang’s observation and my data can be explained on the grounds that Yang examined published RAs whose authors command more rhetorical diversity and force than the author in the present study, who are apprentices, yet to be initiated into the community and who may therefore not have command of the full range of rhetorical capabilities.

Spelling out methodology

In this move, the authors discuss in varying details, the planned procedures for data collection, analysis and interpretation. This move was found in all three proposals. There were altogether seven strategies found within this move: Delimiting the scope of study , Defining terms , Describing data , Describing subjects , Describing experiment , Describing analytical procedure and Indicating analytical framework . The distribution and textual space assigned to those strategies can be found in Table  3 . As shown in Table  3 , P1 uses significantly more Move 5 strategies than P2 and P3 (5: 3: 1), likely because P1 involves an experiment and thus needs to include such extra information as subject selection and experimental procedures. Below I describe the seven strategies in detail.

The first strategy in Spelling out methodology is Delimiting the scope of study , where the author unambiguously states the specific variable, among many possible others, that she intends to examine, as shown in (16)

This study will only look at the phonological factors that affect intelligibility as opposed to factors that are related to grammar and lexis… (P1)

As the example shows, there are other competing factors that could contribute to the problem the author intends to investigate. Therefore, it is important that irrelevant factors be ruled out to bring out the focus of study. The bolded adverb “only” is a lexical signal that the author is narrowing down the research variable.

Defining terms is a strategy found in P1 where all the important terms and concepts used in the proposal are defined and explained. Some instances of Defining terms appear in (17)

… Intelligibility refers to the production and recognition of the formal properties of words and utterances and the ability to produce and receive phonological form… (P1) … NNS refers to non-native speakers of English with a ‘reasonable competence’ in English … (P1)

As revealed during the interview with the author of P1, the employment of this strategy is related to the state of affairs in the proposed field where one term could be used in different senses. By explicitly stating the meanings of technical terms used in the proposed research, the author avoids unnecessary ambiguity/confusion surrounding usage of terminology, which will likely translate into a more positive evaluation of the proposal by potential supervisors or admission board members.

Describing data is a strategy that describes data sources in some detail, wherever possible, thus specifying the scope of data selection as example (18) demonstrates:

My time frame will be from the time CATW first came out with its newsletter (1994) to the present time. (P2)

Describing subjects provides details with regard to the specifics of subjects for the experiment to be conducted. The difference between Describing data and Describing subjects is that the former applies to non-human sources of data (texts, for example) whereas the latter refers to human participants. Describing subjects is achieved by the author’s stating the background of subjects, explicating the criteria and providing justification for subject selection, as the following 2 examples show:

The subjects of this study will be 30 students of various races (Malay, Chinese and Indians) aged between 16 and 17 years of age. (P1)

Subjects will have to be from different classes so that they are not familiar with each other. Subjects will need to have a ‘reasonable’ competence in English but … (P1)

Describing experiment is where the author describes in detail the experiment designed in the research proposal. By this strategy, the author not only introduces the experiment procedures but also explains the rationale of the experiment, as example (21) shows.

Subjects will be divided into pairs. Each subject will be required to interact in two conditions, i.e. same L1 and different L1 …Subjects will be given visual cues. Each pair will … They will then be instructed to …

Describing analytical procedure is found in both P1 and P2. It sets out in some detail how the author would treat the data elicited either from experiments and/or discourse in light of the aim of research. While Describing experiment explicates experimental details, Describing analytical procedure is related to post-experiment analysis. Two examples appear below for illustrative purposes:

All interactions … will be transcribed… However, only sounds that are identified as phonological errors will be transcribed phonetically … …Non parametric tests will be carried out …The tests will be carried out …This will be to look at the features that are most recurrent in the breakdown of communication between NNS-NNS. (P1)

I will examine how identity, subjectivity, and agency of women in prostitution are constructed and made sense of …I will also examine … In the end , I’d like to see… In the context of this diachronic study, I will look into… Then , I will examine … On a more global level , I would like to make sense of these constructions vis-à-vis the global issue of trafficking Filipino women. (P2)

Understandably, this move is characterized by the future tense as indicated by the bolded auxiliary “will ” across both examples, since it denotes events that will happen after the reference time of the writing. Also, the bolded meta-discourse signals that imply logical sequence such as “also”, “in the end”, “then”, and “on a more global level” are indicative of the procedural details being spelt out.

Indicating analytical framework , the last strategy identified for the move Spelling out methodology , is where the author explicitly states the theoretical framework to be used for the analysis of data, as shown in the following example:

Using a critical linguistic approach ( a combined/modified framework based mainly on the works of Michael Halliday , Norman Fairclough and Sara Mills ) to analyze the language used in crime reports, I hope to foreground the patriarchal ideologies surrounding women in Singapore. (P3)

By stating the well established models, the author conveys an impression that she is familiar with the existing theories and that her research is not blindly re-inventing the wheel.

Achieving closure

Two proposals, P1 and P2 contain explicit concluding sections that signal the end of writing, though with varying content and degree of specificity. In terms of the actual section heading used, P1 uses “Limitations” and P2 “Concluding Statement”. I have analyzed both section headings as serving the function of bringing closure to the research proposal, and discuss them together under the move labeled Achieving closur e. Achieving closure is realized through the use of three strategies: Reiterating purpose , Restating significance of proposed research and Indicating limitation of proposed research , as shown in Table  3 .

Restating purpose of proposed research serves to recap and remind the reader of the focus of proposed research, as shown in (25):

Given that female offenders are viewed in their traditional female roles within the study of criminology, this study of language used in media reporting of crimes committed by female offenders should reveal the types of gender attributes and roles assigned to these offenders by society and so uncover the hidden sociocultural ideologies of that society. (P3)

As explained earlier, the importance of having a clear purpose is acknowledged by both the proposal authors and the specialist informant and is reflected textually in terms of the positioning and frequency of the Outlining purposes strategy in Move 3. Reiterating this rhetorical content in the concluding section of the proposal represents further evidence that having a clear purpose is the fulcrum around which the whole proposal is constructed.

Restating significance of proposed research is a place where the value of the proposed research is mentioned again, the first time being in Move 3, Strategy 2, as illustrated by (26):

In the end, this research proposal will attempt to do what Critical Discourse Analysis sets out to do… in the hope that such an attempt will work not only toward a more engaging and engaged theorizing of discourse and feminism in the country but also toward a better set of conditions and choices for those for whom all this theorizing is meant. (P2)

This strategy once again puts the proposed research in proper perspective in terms of justification, thus likely increasing the persuasive and rhetorical force of the proposal.

Indicating limitation of proposed research is found in the concluding remarks section of P1. This element has been found in the concluding sections of RAs where reference is usually made to factors such as the size of the sample, an aspect of research that the author tends to have less control over (Yang 2001 ) rather than any real serious defects in conceptualization or research design. By acknowledging limitations, the author brings balance to the overall argument and also preempts possible criticisms from readers. In P1, this is achieved by indicating the limited focus in research design, as (27) shows:

The focus of this study is on the phonological variations of ILT. Therefore any breakdown in communication by lexical items and/or grammar will not be taken into consideration. The phonological breakdowns that will be considered are only those based on the five features of the Lingua Franca Core as proposed by Jenkins (2000, 2002). (P1)

The exclusion of factors such as lexical items and grammar from analysis is already implied in P1’s avowed research aim that examines only the phonological aspect of communication breakdown. One wonders if criticisms would actually be leveled at a research design for excluding areas that the researcher has already declared as outside the focus of study. Staying focused in one’s research design is more likely considered a merit rather than a limitation. However, the author chooses to declare her focused aim as a limitation. As revealed by the proposal author during the interview, in this part she is actually indirectly showing her awareness of other research possibilities:

“I know there are other factors that are important. But for my purposes, I can only look at phonological variations and not these two others… This is what I mean by limitation”

Therefore, by showing the “limitation” of her proposed research, the author is restating the focus of her research as well as showing her familiarity with research conventions, which might translate into a positive reading of the proposal as one coming from a scholar rhetorically and academically competent.

Based upon and expanding Swales’ ( 1990 ) rhetorical analysis, this study has presented a genre investigation of three research proposals submitted to a Singapore-based university for the purposes of securing admission to graduate research programs in applied linguistics. Although textual analysis forms the main part of the study, interviews conducted with both the proposal authors and one faculty member provide valuable insight into the context and expectations for the graduate degree research proposals, thus complementing and enriching the textual analysis.

In addition to those already existing in the CARS model (Table  1 ), new moves/strategies have been observed in the student written proposals, reflecting both the relevance of the CARS model to my study and the necessity of amendments in order to fully account for the graduate degree research proposal. New moves identified in the data set include Establishing theoretical basis (Move 4), Spelling out methodology (Move 5), and Achieving closure (Move 6). I have explained the occurrence of these moves in terms of the communicative purpose, institutional expectations and disciplinary epistemology.

Looking closely at the moves/strategies, there seems to be a resistance to rigid structuring and categorization of graduate degree research proposals, in terms of the move structure and realizations. In addition, the realization of each move in terms of strategies shows great degrees of latitude in each proposal. The absence of fixed structures in these proposals is not surprising, as flexibility in realization is one key characteristic of the academic genre (e.g., Kwan 2006 ).

However, the occurrence of certain moves/strategies seems to follow loose trends. For example, it has been observed that Move 2 tends to occur between Move 1 and Move 3, due to the transitional status of Move 2, and the slot-and-filler relationship between Move 2 and Move 3, as has been observed elsewhere (e.g., Chin 1993 ; Connor 2000 ). Besides Move 2, Moves 1 and 3 also exhibit some common behavior across the three proposals. These two moves seem to be assigned rhetorical prominence in terms of early positioning, recursion, obligatory presence, and relatively high textual space assigned. The relative textual prominence assigned to Moves 1 and 3 might point to a rhetorical rationale to display familiarity with existing state of the art and also to articulate one’s own clear research objectives, both of which seem to be valued in the academic discourse communities, as evidence by comments from the expert informant.

Common to all three proposals is an effort of the author to project a persona of a competent researcher. Such a persona is constructed through the use of moves/strategies related to epistemic knowledge (all three authors), and occasionally also through non-epistemic appeals (P2). The research proposals in this study have attempted to demonstrate the writers’ familiarity with literature via the use of Move 1, their ability to carve out a research niche via Move 2, and their ability to formulate research questions by the use of Move 3, which are three elements emphasized in all standard research genres (such as the RA). In addition, the author of P2 resorted to non-epistemic appeals as well, through for example, Stating personal interest to prove the sustainability of one’s research topic in terms of strong motivation. However, aware of their status as apprentices, proposal writers sound duly cautious when advancing their own claims and indicating gaps in existing research, in order not to sound too bold or arrogant.

The realization of moves in terms of strategies is reflective of disciplinary proclivity as well. Specifically, the use of strategies seems to be conditioned by the concerns of discipline/subfields. In this regard, P1, representing educational phonology, seems to set itself apart from the other two texts. Educational phonology is a field concerned with both real world problems (namely, classroom instruction) and also with theoretical issues in acquisition research. This dual purpose of the discipline predisposes the author of P1 to indicate gaps in both the real world and research world in Move 1; as well as pointing out research contributions to both real and research worlds. In addition, as an experiment-based field, P1 instantiates a much more elaborate Move 5 (methodology) than the other two proposals whose discipline is text-based and interpretation-driven.

The rhetorical structures identified in this study could be used by English for Academic Purposes instructors as examples of possible ways of structuring graduate degree research proposals. Students could benefit from explicit instruction on which elements seem to be valued by faculty members so that they could construct their proposals with this in mind. Most importantly, students could benefit from an explicit understanding of the communicative purpose and faculty expectations of the graduate degree research proposal: to convey a persona of a budding and yet relatively competent researcher with sufficient motivation and focus, to undertake long-term research projects.

Although two specialist informants were interviewed for this project, one from linguistics and the other literature, I focus on the commentary from the linguistics faculty member here, given the focus of the present paper.

Data collections took place in 2006. Therefore, observations regarding the role of the research proposal in graduate degree admission reflect policies/expectations at that time. As noted in the paper, research proposals were not mandatory for the batch of students in this study. Therefore, no official university documentary requirements existed at that time for the applicants to consult for writing a proposal. The “institutional expectations” laid out in this paper therefore had to rely on interviews with faculty members. The departmental policies of the university in this study have since changed. At present (2016), applicants are required to submit a “Preliminary Research Proposal” of 2000–5000 words. Though the topic of the proposal can be tentative, the applicant must demonstrate “seriousness and ability” through this document. This additional information regarding present institutional expectations is provided here for completeness only. Since such requirements were not in effect at the time of the research conducted for the present study, they will not be commented on or referred to further in the paper.

As shown in the introduction and literature review, such small units were originally called “steps” in the CARS model. However, in keeping with more recent literature (e.g., Kwan 2006 ), the term “strategy” is used in lieu of “step” in this study. The difference between step and strategy is that the former tends to refer to “obligatory and sequential constituents” of a Move whereas the latter refers to the “non-obligatory and non-sequential constituents” (Kwan 2006 , 34). However, as shown in the results/analyses section, none of the constituents simultaneously fulfill the two conditions of being “obligatory” and “sequential”, to merit the status of “step”. Therefore the term Strategy is adopted to label and describe the different realizations of moves in this study.

As an anonymous reviewer pointed out, there is a difference between P2 and P3 in the proportion of text for Move 5, even though they belong to the same field (CDA). While iterating the exploratory nature of the study, and the existence of intra-disciplinary variation observed in the genre analysis literature (e.g., Anthony 1999 ; Connor 2000 ; Samraj 2002 ; Ozturk 2007 ), I also note that the discrepancy here is at least partially due to the method of analysis adopted for this study. It is well known in genre analysis that a sentence/chunk of text may denote more than one rhetorical functions (e.g., Crookes 1986 ; Holmes 1997 ; Anthony 1999 ; Ozturk 2007 ; Graves, Moghaddasi, and Hashim 2014 ). As indicated in the section on “Analytical framework”, when faced with such situations in the analysis, I followed Crookes ( 1986 ) and Holmes ( 1997 ) in assigning the most prominent rhetorical function to the sentence/chunk of text. This also consequently means that the secondary rhetorical function is ignored, which explains the depressed proportion of Move 5 in P3. Specifically, some of the text in P3 assigned Move 1 ( Establishing a territory ) also serves a secondary function of indicating methodology of research (i.e., Move 5). Future research should look into the possibility of accounting for both (or even multiple) functions in a sentence/chunk of text.

I also speculate that the lack of explicit citations in P2 might be due to a lack of access to the most recent literature, which is not uncommon for applicants from developing countries (see Belcher 2007 ’s discussion of problems faced by off-network scholars ). While journals may not accept a paper lacking adequate citations, when it comes to research proposals for admission purposes, difficulties in accessing the latest research literature are generally “sympathetically understood” (Allison 2002 , 223), but the applicant is still needed to demonstrate a “reasonably good” knowledge of the research field.

Abbreviations

Creating a Research Space

Critical Discourse Analysis

research article

Aarts, Bas. 2014. Sentence. In The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar, ebook, accessed 25 May 2016 from Oxford Reference Online (Premium) Database.

Allison, Desmond. 2002. Approaching English language research . Singapore: Singapore University Press.

Google Scholar  

Anthony, Laurence. 1999. Writing research article introductions in software engineering: how accurate is a standard model? IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 42: 38–46.

Article   Google Scholar  

Belcher, Diane. 2007. Seeking acceptance in an English-only research world. Journal of Second Language Writing 16: 1–22.

Bhatia, Vijay K. 1993. Analyzing genre: language use in professional settings. New York: Longman.

Bhatia, Vijay K. 2002. A generic view of academic discourse. In Academic discourse , ed. John Flowerdew, 21–39. New York: Longman.

Bunton, David. 2002. Generic moves in PhD thesis introductions. In Academic discourse , ed. John Flowerdew, 57–75. New York: Longman.

Cadman, Kate. 2002. English for academic possibilities: the research proposal as a contested site in postgraduate genre pedagogy. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 1: 85–104.

Cheng, Ying-Hsueh. 2014. Dissertation grant proposals as ‘writing games’: An exploratory study of two L2 graduate students’ experiences. English for Specific Purposes 36: 74–84.

Chin, Pik Yee. 1993. Genre analysis: research article introductions in particle physics. Master’s thesis, National University of Singapore.

Connor, Ulla. 2000. Variation in rhetorical moves in grant proposals of US humanists and scientists. Text 20: 1–28.

Connor, Ulla, and A. Anna Mauranen. 1999. Linguistic analysis of grant proposals: European Union research grants. English for Specific Purposes 18: 47–62.

Crookes, Graham. 1986. Towards a validated analysis of scientific text structure. Applied Linguistics 7: 57–70.

del SazRubio, Ma Milagros. 2011. A pragmatic approach to the macro-structure and metadiscoursal features of research article introductions in the field of Agricultural Sciences. English for Specific Purposes 30: 258–271.

Dudley-Evans, Tony. 1986. Genre analysis: an investigation of the introduction and discussion sections of M.Sc dissertations. In Talking about text , ed. Coulthard Malcolm, 128–145. Birmingham: English Language Research, University of Birmingham.

Feng, Haiying. 2008. A genre-based study of research grant proposals in China. In Contrastive rhetoric: reaching into intercultural rhetoric , ed. Ulla Connor, Ed Nagelhout, and William V. Rozycki, 63–86. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Feng, Haiying, and Ling Shi. 2004. Genre analysis of research grant proposals. LSP & Professional Communication 4: 8–32.

Graves, Heather, Shahin Moghaddasi, and Azirah Hashim. 2014. ‘Let G = (V, E) be a graph’: turning the abstract into the tangible in introductions in mathematics research articles. English for Specific Purposes 36: 1–11.

Holmes, Richard. 1997. Genre analysis, and the social sciences: an investigation of the structure of research article discussion sections in three disciplines. English for Specific Purposes 16: 321–337.

Hopkins, Andy, and Tony Dudley-Evans. 1988. A genre-based investigation of the discussion sections in articles and dissertations. English for Specific Purposes 7: 113–121.

Hyland, Ken. 1996. Writing without conviction? Hedging in science research articles. Applied Linguistics 17: 433–454.

Hyland, Ken. 2000. Disciplinary discourses: social interactions in academic writing . New York: Longman.

Hyland, Ken. 2008. Metadiscourse: exploring interaction in writing. Reprinted. Continuum Discourse Series . London: Continuum.

Kwan, Becky S.C. 2006. The schematic structure of literature reviews in doctoral theses of applied linguistics. English for Specific Purposes 25: 30–55.

Lim, Jason Miin-Hwa. 2012. How do writers establish research niches? A genre-based investigation into management researchers’ rhetorical steps and linguistic mechanisms. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 11: 229–245.

Lin, Ling, and Stephen Evans. 2012. Structural patterns in empirical research articles: a cross-disciplinary study. English for Specific Purposes 31: 150–160.

Martín, Pedro, and Isabel Karely León Pérez. 2014. Convincing peers of the value of one’s research: a genre analysis of rhetorical promotion in academic texts. English for Specific Purposes 34: 1–13.

Myers, Greg. 1990. Writing biology: texts in the social construction of scientific knowledge . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Nwogu, K.N. 1997. The medical research paper: structure and function. English for Specific Purposes 16: 119–138.

Ozturk, Ismet. 2007. The textual organisation of research article introductions in applied linguistics: variability within a single discipline. English for Specific Purposes 26: 25–38.

Salager-Meyer, François. 1992. A text-type and move analysis study of verb tense and modality distribution in medical English abstracts. English for Specific Purposes 11: 93–113.

Samraj, Betty. 2002. Introductions in research articles: variations across disciplines. English for Specific Purposes 21(1): 1–17.

Samraj, Betty. 2004. Discourse features of the student-produced academic research paper: variations across disciplinary courses. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 3: 5–22.

Soler-Monreal, Carmen, María Carbonell-Olivares, and Luz Gil-Salom. 2011. A contrastive study of the rhetorical organisation of English and Spanish PhD thesis introductions. English for Specific Purposes 30: 4–17.

Swales, John. 1990. Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Swales, John. 1996. Occluded genres in the academy. In Academic writing: intercultural and textual issues , ed. Eija Ventola and Anna Mauranen, 45–58. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Swales, John, and Christine Feak. 1994. Academic writing for graduate students: essential tasks and skills . Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Swales, John, and Christine Feak. 2000. English in today’s research world: A writing guide . Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Thompson, Geoff, and Yiyun Ye. 1991. Evaluating in the reporting verbs used in academic papers. Applied Linguistics 12: 365–382.

Thompson, Paul. 2009. Literature reviews in applied PhD theses: Evidence and problems. In Academic Evaluation and Review Genres, ed. Ken Hyland and G Giuliana Diani, 50–67. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Williams, Ian A. 1996. A contextual study of lexical verbs in two types of medical research reports: clinical and experimental. English for Specific Purposes 15: 175–197.

Yang, Ruiying, and Desmond Allison. 2003. Research articles in applied linguistics: moving from results to conclusions. English for Specific Purposes 22: 365–385.

Yang, Ruiying. 2001. A genre analysis of research articles in applied linguistics. PhD thesis. National University of Singapore.

Zeng, Ya-Jun. 2009. CARS model in analyzing the introduction of research articles: an example from the field of sports science and medicine. US–China Foreign Language: 61–65.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Nanyang Technological University National Institute of Education, Singapore, Singapore

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bin Yin .

Additional information

Availability of data and materials.

To preserve the anonymity of the participants in the study, their original proposal texts are not provided. However, a complete rhetorical structure analysis of the three proposals is provided in Tables  4 , 5 and 6 .

Competing interests

The author declares there are no competing interests, financial or non-financial in the publication of this work.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Yin, B. An exploratory genre analysis of three graduate degree research proposals in applied linguistics. Functional Linguist. 3 , 7 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40554-016-0032-2

Download citation

Received : 02 March 2016

Accepted : 15 June 2016

Published : 24 June 2016

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s40554-016-0032-2

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Genre analysis
• Academic discourse
• English for Specific Purposes
• Research proposals
• Occluded genre
• Applied linguistics

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS. A lock ( Lock Locked padlock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Linguistics

Important information for proposers.

All proposals must be submitted in accordance with the requirements specified in this funding opportunity and in the NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) that is in effect for the relevant due date to which the proposal is being submitted. It is the responsibility of the proposer to ensure that the proposal meets these requirements. Submitting a proposal prior to a specified deadline does not negate this requirement.

Supports research on human language — encompassing investigations of the properties of individual human languages and natural language in general — and the intersections of linguistics with cognition, society and other areas of science.

The Linguistics Program supports basic science in the domain of human language, encompassing investigations of the grammatical properties of individual human languages, and of natural language in general. Research areas include syntax, semantics, morphology, phonetics and phonology.

The program encourages projects that are interdisciplinary in methodological or theoretical perspective, and that address questions that cross disciplinary boundaries, such as (but not limited to):

• What are the psychological processes involved in the production, perception, and comprehension of language?
• What are the computational properties of language and/or the language processor that make fluent production, incremental comprehension or rapid learning possible?
• How do the acoustic and physiological properties of speech inform our theories of natural language and/or language processing?
• What role does human neurobiology play in shaping the various grammatical properties of language?
• How does language develop in natural learning contexts across the life-span?
• What social and cultural factors underlie language variation and change?

Because NSF's mandate is to support basic research, the Linguistics Program does not fund research that takes as its primary goal improved clinical practice or applied policy, nor does it support work to develop or assess pedagogical methods or tools for language instruction.

The Linguistics Program accepts proposals for a variety of project types: research proposals from scholars with PhDs or equivalent degrees, proposals for Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement (LING-DDRI) awards, and CAREER proposals. We will also consider proposals for conferences. Funding requests for conference support should be submitted in accordance with the Conference Proposals section of Chapter II of NSF's Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) .

NSF's Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (BCS), in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities and in collaboration with programs in other NSF Directorates, supports efforts to develop and advance knowledge and infrastructure that will enable the analysis of languages that are both understudied and at risk of falling out of use. In recognition of the critical relevance of these languages to understanding the range and limits of human linguistic and cultural variation, BCS accepts research and dissertation proposals in response to solicitations NSF Dynamic Language Infrastructure - NEH Documenting Endangered Languages (DLI-DEL) and Dynamic Language Infrastructure - Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants (DLI-DDRI) .

For more information about Multidisciplinary Research and Training Opportunities, please visit the SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities web site.

Updates and announcements

The linguistics and dli-del programs are seeking reviewers and panelists, job opening: program director for linguistics, program contacts, additional program resources.

• Linguistics Program - Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants (Ling-DDRI)
• NSF programs to stop accepting proposals via FastLane website

Awards made through this program

Related programs.

• NSF Dynamic Language Infrastructure - NEH Documenting Endangered Languages (DLI-DEL)
• Dynamic Language Infrastructure-Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants (DLI-DDRI)
• Arctic Social Sciences
• Cognitive Neuroscience (CogNeuro)
• Developmental Sciences (DS)
• Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER)
• Major Research Instrumentation Program (MRI)
• Perception, Action & Cognition (PAC)
• Facilitating Research at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions:

Organization(s)

• Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE)
• Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (SBE/BCS)

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Front Psychol

Trends and hot topics in linguistics studies from 2011 to 2021: A bibliometric analysis of highly cited papers

Associated data.

The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found in the article/ supplementary material .

High citations most often characterize quality research that reflects the foci of the discipline. This study aims to spotlight the most recent hot topics and the trends looming from the highly cited papers (HCPs) in Web of Science category of linguistics and language & linguistics with bibliometric analysis. The bibliometric information of the 143 HCPs based on Essential Citation Indicators was retrieved and used to identify and analyze influential contributors at the levels of journals, authors, and countries. The most frequently explored topics were identified by corpus analysis and manual checking. The retrieved topics can be grouped into five general categories: multilingual-related , language teaching , and learning related , psycho/pathological/cognitive linguistics-related , methods and tools-related , and others . Topics such as bi/multilingual(ism) , translanguaging , language/writing development , models , emotions , foreign language enjoyment (FLE) , cognition , anxiety are among the most frequently explored. Multilingual and positive trends are discerned from the investigated HCPs. The findings inform linguistic researchers of the publication characteristics of the HCPs in the linguistics field and help them pinpoint the research trends and directions to exert their efforts in future studies.

1. Introduction

Citations, as a rule, exhibit a skewed distributional pattern over the academic publications: a few papers accumulate an overwhelming large citations while the majority are rarely, if ever, cited. Correspondingly, the highly cited papers (HCPs) receive the greatest amount of attention in the academia as citations are commonly regarded as a strong indicator of research excellence. For academic professionals, following HCPs is an efficient way to stay current with the developments in a field and to make better informed decisions regarding potential research topics and directions to exert their efforts. For academic institutions, government and private agencies, and generally the science policy makers, they keep a close eye on and take advantage of this visible indicator, citations, to make more informed decisions on research funding allocation and science policy formulation. Under the backdrop of ever-growing academic outputs, there is noticeable attention shift from publication quantity to publication quality. Many countries are developing research policies to identify “excellent” universities, research groups, and researchers ( Danell, 2011 ). In a word, HCPs showcase high-quality research, encompass significant themes, and constitute a critical reference point in a research field as they are “gold bullion of science” ( Smith, 2007 ).

2. Literature review

Bibliometrics, a term coined by Pritchard (1969) , refers to the application of mathematical methods to the analysis of academic publications. Essentially this is a quantitative method to depict publication patterns within a given field based on a body of literature. There are many bibliometric studies on natural and social sciences in general ( Hsu and Ho, 2014 ; Zhu and Lei, 2022 ) and on various specific disciplines such as management sciences ( Liao et al., 2018 ), biomass research ( Chen and Ho, 2015 ), computer sciences ( Xie and Willett, 2013 ), and sport sciences ( Mancebo et al., 2013 ; Ríos et al., 2013 ), etc. In these studies, researchers tracked developments, weighed research impacts, and highlighted emerging scientific fronts with bibliometric methods. In the field of linguistics, bibliometric studies all occurred in the past few years ( van Doorslaer and Gambier, 2015 ; Lei and Liao, 2017 ; Gong et al., 2018 ; Lei and Liu, 2018 , 2019 ). These bibliometric studies mostly examined a sub-area of linguistics, such as corpus linguistics ( Liao and Lei, 2017 ), translation studies ( van Doorslaer and Gambier, 2015 ), the teaching of Chinese as a second/foreign language ( Gong et al., 2018 ), academic journals like System ( Lei and Liu, 2018 ) or Porta Linguarum ( Sabiote and Rodríguez, 2015 ), etc. Although Lei and Liu (2019) took the entire discipline of linguistics under investigation, their research is exclusively focused on applied linguistics and restricted in a limited number of journals (42 journals in total), leaving publications in other linguistics disciplines and qualified journals unexamined.

Over the recent years, a number of studies have been concerned with “excellent” papers or HCPs. For example, Small (2004) surveyed the HCPs authors’ opinions on why their papers are highly cited. The strong interest, the novelty, the utility, and the high importance of the work were among the most frequently mentioned. Most authors also considered that their selected HCPs are indeed based on their most important work in their academic career. Aksnes (2003) investigated the characteristics of HCPs and found that they were generally authored by a large number of scientists, often involving international collaboration. Some researchers even attempted to predict the HCPs by building mathematical models, implying “the first mover advantage in scientific publication” ( Newman, 2008 , 2014 ). In other words, papers published earlier in a field generally are more likely to accumulate more citations than those published later. Although many papers addressed HCPs from different perspectives, they held a common belief that HCPs are very different from less or zero cited papers and thus deserve utmost attention in academic research ( Aksnes, 2003 ; Blessinger and Hrycaj, 2010 ; Yan et al., 2022 ).

Although an increased focus on research quality can be observed in different fields, opinions diverge on the range and the inclusion criterion of excellent papers. Are they ‘highly cited’, ‘top cited’, or ‘most frequently cited’ papers? Aksnes (2003) noted two different approaches to define a highly cited article, involving absolute or relative thresholds, respectively. An absolute threshold stipulates a minimum number of citations for identifying excellent papers while a relative threshold employs the percentile rank classes, for example, the top 10% most highly cited papers in a discipline or in a publication year or in a publication set. It is important to note that citations differ significantly in different fields and disciplines. A HCP in natural sciences generally accumulates more citations than its counterpart in social sciences. Thus, it is necessary to investigate HCPs from different fields separately or adopt different inclusion criterion to ensure a valid comparison.

The present study has been motivated by two considerations. First, the sizable number of publications of varied qualities in a scientific field makes it difficult or even impossible to conduct any reliable and effective literature research. Focusing on the quality publications, the HCPs in particular, might lend more credibility to the findings on trends. Second, HCPs can serve as a great platform to discover potentially important information for the development of a discipline and understand the past, present, and future of the scientific structure. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate the hot topics and publication trends in the Web of Science category of linguistics or language & linguistics (shortened as linguistics in later references) with bibliometric methods. The study aims to answer the following three questions:

• Who are the most productive and impactful contributors of the HCPs in WoS category of linguistics or language & linguistics in terms of publication venues, authors, and countries?
• What are the most frequently explored topics in HCPs?
• What are the general research trends revealed from the HCPs?

3. Materials and methods

Different from previous studies which used an arbitrary inclusion threshold (e.g., Blessinger and Hrycaj, 2010 ; Hsu and Ho, 2014 ), we rely on Essential Science Indicator (ESI) to identify the HCPs. Developed by Clarivate, a leading company in the areas of bibliometrics and scientometrics, ESI reveals emerging science trends as well as influential individuals, institutions, papers, journals, and countries in any scientific fields of inquiry by drawing on the complete WoS databases. ESI has been chosen for the following three reasons. First, ESI adopts a stricter inclusion criterion for HCPs identification. That is, a paper is selected as a HCP only when its citations exceed the top 1% citation threshold in each of the 22 ESI subject categories. Second, ESI is widely used and recognized for its reliability and authority in identifying the top-charting work, generating “excellent” metrics including hot and highly cited papers. Third, ESI automatically updates its database to generate the most recent HCPs, especially suitable for trend studies for a specified timeframe.

3.1. Data source

The data retrieval was completed at the portal of our university library on June 20, 2022. The methods to retrieve the data are described in Table 1 . The bibliometric indicators regarding the important contributors at journal/author/country levels were obtained. Specifically, after the research was completed, we clicked the “Analyze Results” bar on the result page for the detailed descriptive analysis of the retrieved bibliometric data.

Retrieval strategies.

Several points should be noted about the search strategies. First, we searched the bibliometric data from two sub-databases of WoS core collection: Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI). There is no need to include the sub-database of Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) because publications in the linguistics field are almost exclusively indexed in SSCI and A&HCI journals. WoS core collection was chosen as the data source because it boasts one of the most comprehensive and authoritative databases of bibliometric information in the world. Many previous studies utilized WoS to retrieve bibliometric data. van Oorschot et al. (2018) and Ruggeri et al. (2019) even indicated that WoS meets the highest standards in terms of impact factor and citation counts and hence guarantees the validity of any bibliometric analysis. Second, we do not restrict the document types as HCPs selection informed by ESI only considers articles and reviews. Third, we do not set the date range as the dataset of ESI-HCPs is automatically updated regularly to include the most recent 10 years of publications.

The aforementioned query obtained a total of 143 HCPs published in 48 journals contributed by 352 authors of 226 institutions. We then downloaded the raw bibliometric parameters of the 143 HCPs for follow-up analysis including publication years, authors, publication titles, countries, affiliations, abstracts, citation reports, etc. A complete list of the 143 HCPs can be found in the Supplementary Material . We collected the most recent impact factor (IF) of each journal from the 2022 Journal Citation Reports (JCR).

3.2. Data analysis

3.2.1. citation analysis.

A citation threshold is the minimum number of citations obtained by ranking papers in a research field in descending order by citation counts and then selecting the top fraction or percentage of papers. In ESI, the highly cited threshold reveals the minimum number of citations received by the top 1% of papers from each of the 10 database years. In other words, a paper has to meet the minimum citation threshold that varies by research fields and by years to enter the HCP list. Of the 22 research fields in ESI, Social Science, General is a broad field covering a number of WoS categories including linguistics and language & linguistics . We checked the ESI official website to obtain the yearly highly cited thresholds in the research field of Social Science , General as shown in Figure 1 ( https://esi.clarivate.com/ThresholdsAction.action ). As we can see, the longer a paper has been published, the more citations it has to receive to meet the threshold. We then divided the raw citation numbers of HCPs with the Highly Cited Thresholds in the corresponding year to obtain the normalized citations for each HCP.

Highly cited thresholds in the research field of Social Sciences, General.

3.2.2. Corpus analysis and manual checking

To determine the most frequently explored topics in these HCPs, we used both corpus-based analysis of word frequency and manual checking. Specifically, the more frequently a word or phrase occurs in a specifically designed corpus, the more likely it constitutes a research topic. In this study, we built an Abstract corpus with all the abstracts of the 143 HCPs, totaling 24,800 tokens. The procedures to retrieve the research topics in the Abstract corpus were as follows. First, the 143 pieces of abstracts were saved as separate .txt files in one folder. Second, AntConc ( Anthony, 2022 ), a corpus analysis tool for concordancing and text analysis, was employed to extract lists of n-grams (2–4) in decreasing order of frequency. We also generated a list of individual nouns because sometimes individual nouns can also constitute research topics. Considering our small corpus data, we adopted both frequency (3) and range criteria (3) for topic candidacy. That is, a candidate n-gram must occur at least 3 times and in at least 3 different abstract files. The frequency threshold guarantees the importance of the candidate topics while the range threshold guarantees that the topics are not overly crowded in a few number of publications. In this process, we actually tested the frequency and range thresholds several rounds for the inclusion of all the potential topics. In total, we obtained 531 nouns, 1,330 2-grams, 331 3-grams, and 81 4-grams. Third, because most of the retrieved n-grams cannot function as meaningful research topics, we manually checked all the candidate items and discussed extensively to decide their roles as potential research topics until full agreements were reached. Finally, we read all the abstracts of the 143 HCPs to further validate their roles as research topics. In the end, we got 118 topic items in total.

4.1. Main publication venues of HCPs

Of the 48 journals which published the 143 HCPs, 17 journals have contributed at least 3 HCPs ( Table 2 ), around 71.33% of the total examined HCPs (102/143), indicating that HCPs tend to be highly concentrated in a limited number of journals. The three largest publication outlets of HCPs are Bilingualism Language and Cognition (16), International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (11), and Modern Language Journal (10). Because each journal varies greatly in the number of papers published per year and the number of HCPs is associated with journal circulations, we divided the total number of papers (TP) in the examined years (2011–2021) with the number of the HCPs to acquire the HCP percentage for each journal (HCPs/TP). The three journals with the highest HCPs/TP percentage are Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (2.26), Modern Language Journal (2.08), and Bilingualism Language and Cognition (1.74), indicating that papers published in these journals have a higher probability to enter the HCPs list.

Top 17 publication venues of HCPs.

N: the number of HCPs in each journal; N%: the percentage of HCPs in each journal in the total of 143 HCPs; TP: the total number of papers in the examined timespan (2011–2021); N/TP %: the percentage of HCPs in the total journal publications in the examined time span; TC/HCP: average citations of each HCP; R: journal ranking for the designated indicator; IF: Impact Factor in the year of 2022.

In terms of the general impact of the HCPs from each journal, we divided the number of HCPs with their total citations (TC) to obtain the average citations for each HCP (TC/HCP). The three journals with the highest TC/HCP are Journal of Memory and Language (837.86), Computational Linguistics (533.75), and Journal of Pragmatics (303.75). It indicates that even in the same WoS category, HCPs in different journals have strikingly different capability to accumulate citations. For example, the TC/HCP in System is as low as 31.73, which is even less than 4% of the highest TC/HCP in Journal of Memory and Language .

In regards to the latest journal impact factor (IF) in 2022, the top four journals with the highest IF are Computational Linguistics (7.778) , Modern Language Journal (7.5), Computer Assisted Language Learning (5.964), and Language Learning (5.24). According to the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) quantile rankings in WoS category of linguistics , all the journals on the list belong to the Q 1 (the top 25%), indicating that contributors are more likely to be attracted to contribute and cite papers in these prestigious high impact journals.

4.2. Authors of HCPs

A total of 352 authors had their names listed in the 143 HCPs, of whom 33 authors appeared in at least 2 HCPs as shown in Table 3 . We also provided in Table 3 other indicators to evaluate the authors’ productivity and impact including the total number of citations (TC), the number of citations per HCP, and the number of First author or Corresponding author HCPs (FA/CA). The reason we include the FA/CA indicator is that first authors and corresponding authors are usually considered to contribute the most and should receive greater proportion of credit in academic publications ( Marui et al., 2004 ; Dance, 2012 ).

Authors with at least 2 HCPs.

N: number of HCPs from each author; FA/CA: first author or corresponding author HCPs; TC: total citations of the HCPs from each author; C/HCP: average citations per HCP for each author.

In terms of the number of HCPs, Dewaele JM from Birkbeck Univ London tops the list with 7 HCPs with total citations of 492 (TC = 492), followed by Li C from Huazhong Univ Sci & Technol (#HCPs = 5; TC = 215) and Saito K from UCL (#HCPs = 5; TC = 576). It is to be noted that both Li C and Saito K have close academic collaborations with Dewaele JM . For example, 3 of the 5 HCPs by Li C are co-authored with Dewaele JM . The topics in their co-authored HCPs are mostly about foreign language learning emotions such as boredom , anxiety , enjoyment , the measurement , and positive psychology .

In regards to TC, Li, W . from UCL stands out as the most influential scholar among all the listed authors with total citations of 956 from 2 HCPs, followed by Norton B from Univ British Columbia (TC = 915) and Vasishth S from Univ Potsdam (TC = 694). The average citations per HCP from them are also the highest among the listed authors (478, 305, 347, respectively). It is important to note that Li, W.’ s 2 HCPs are his groundbreaking works on translanguaging which almost become must-reads for anyone who engages in translanguaging research ( Li, 2011 , 2018 ). Besides, Li, W. single authors his 2 HCPs, which is extremely rare as HCPs are often the results from multiple researchers. Norton B ’s HCPs are exploring some core issues in applied linguistics such as identity and investment , language learning , and social change that are considered the foundational work in its field ( Norton and Toohey, 2011 ; Darvin and Norton, 2015 ).

From the perspective of FA/CA papers, Li C from Huazhong Univ Sci and Technol is prominent because she is the first author of all her 5 HCPs. Her research on language learning emotions in the Chinese context is gaining widespread recognition ( Li et al., 2018 , 2019 , 2021 ; Li, 2019 , 2021 ). However, as a newly emerging researcher, most of her HCPs are published in the very recent years and hence accumulate relatively fewer citations (TC = 215). Mondada L from Univ Basel follows closely and single authors her 3 HCPs. Her work is mostly devoted to conversation analysis , multimodality , and social interaction ( Mondada, 2016 , 2018 , 2019 ).

We need to mention the following points regarding the productive authors of HCPs. First, when we calculated the number of HCPs from each author, only the papers published in the journals indexed in the investigated WoS categories were taken in account ( linguistics; language & linguistics ), which came as a compromise to protect the linguistics oriented nature of the HCPs. For example, Brysbaert M from Ghent University claimed a total of 8 HCPs at the time of the data retrieval, of which 6 HCPs were published in WoS category of psychology and more psychologically oriented, hence not included in our study. Besides, all the authors on the author list were treated equally when we calculated the number of HCPs, disregarding the author ordering. That implies that some influential authors may not be able to enter the list as their publications are comparatively fewer. Second, as some authors reported different affiliations at their different career stages, we only provide their most recent affiliation for convenience. Third, it is highly competitive to have one’s work selected as HCPs. The fact that a majority of the HCPs authors do not appear in our productive author list does not diminish their great contributions to this field. The rankings in Table 3 does not necessarily reflect the recognition authors have earned in academia at large.

4.3. Productive countries of HCPs

In total, the 143 HCPs originated from 33 countries. The most productive countries that contributed at least three HCPs are listed in Table 4 . The USA took an overwhelming lead with 59 HCPs, followed distantly by England with 31 HCPs. They also boasted the highest total citations (TC = 15,770; TC = 9,840), manifesting their high productivity and strong influence as traditional powerhouses in linguistics research. In regards to the average citations per HCP, Germany , England and the USA were the top three countries (TC/HCP = 281.67, 281.14, and 267.29, respectively). Although China held the third position with 19 HCPs published, its TC/HCP is the third from the bottom (TC/HCP = 66.84). One of the important reasons is that 13 out of the 19 HCPs contributed by scholars in China are published in the year of 2020 or 2021. The newly published HCPs may need more time to accumulate citations. Besides, 18 out of the 19 HCPs in China are first author and/or corresponding authors, indicating that scholars in China are becoming more independent and gaining more voice in English linguistics research.

Top 18 countries with at least 3 HCPs.

Two points should be noted here as to the productive countries. First, we calculated the HCP contributions from the country level instead of the region level. In other words, HCP contributions from different regions of the same country will be combined in the calculation. For example, HCPs from Scotland were added to the HCPs from England . HCPs from Hong Kong , Macau , and Taiwan are put together with the HCPs from Mainland China . In this way, a clear picture of the HCPs on the country level can be painted. Second, we manually checked the address information of the first author and corresponding author for each HCP. There are some cases where the first author or the corresponding author may report affiliations from more than one country. In this case, every country in their address list will be treated equally in the FA/CA calculation. In other word, a HCP may be classified into more than one country because of the different country backgrounds of the first and/or the corresponding author.

4.4. Top 20 HCPs

The top 20 HCPs with the highest normed citations are listed in decreasing order in Table 5 . The top cited publications can guide us to better understand the development and research topics in recent years.

Top 20 HCPs.

To save space, not full information about the HCPs is given. Some article titles have been abbreviated if they are too lengthy; for the authors, we report the first two authors and use “et al” if there are three authors or more; RC: raw citations; NC: normalized citations

By reading the titles and the abstracts of these top HCPs, we categorized the topics of the 20 HCPs into the following five groups: (i) statistical and analytical methods in (psycho)linguistics such as sentimental analysis, sentence simplification techniques, effect sizes, linear mixed models (#1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 14), (ii) language learning/teaching emotions such enjoyment, anxiety, boredom, stress (#11, 15, 16, 18, 19), (iii) translanguaging or multilinguilism (#5, 13, 20, 17), (iv) language perception (#2, 7, 10), (v) medium of instruction (#8, 12). It is no surprise that 6 out of the top 20 HCPs are about statistical methods in linguistics because language researchers aspire to employ statistics to make their research more scientific. Besides, we noticed that the papers on language teaching/learning emotions on the list are all published in the year of 2020 and 2021, indicating that these emerging topics may deserve more attention in future research. We also noticed two Covid-19 related articles (#16, 19) explored the emotions teachers and students experience during the pandemic, a timely response to the urgent need of the language learning and teaching community.

It is of special interest to note that papers from the journals indexed in multiple JCR categories seem to accumulate more citations. For example, Journal of Memory and Language , American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology , and Computational Linguistics are indexed both in SSCI and SCIE and contribute the top 4 HCPs, manifesting the advantage of these hybrid journals in amassing citations compared to the conventional language journals. Besides, different to findings from Yan et al. (2022) that most of the top HCPs in the field of radiology are reviews in document types, 19 out of the top 20 HCPs are research articles instead of reviews except Macaro et al. (2018) .

4.5. Most frequently explored topics of HCPs

After obtaining the corpus based topic items, we read all the titles and abstracts of the 143 HCPs to further validate their roles as research topics. Table 6 presents the top research topics with the observed frequency of 5 or above. We grouped these topics into five broad categories: bilingual-related, language learning/teaching-related, psycho/pathological/cognitive linguistics-related, methods and tools-related, and others . The observed frequency count for each topic in the abstract corpus were included in the brackets. We found that about 34 of the 143 HCPs are exploring bilingual related issues, the largest share among all the categorized topics, testifying its academic popularity in the examined timespan. Besides, 30 of the 143 HCPs are investigating language learning/teaching-related issues, with topics ranging from learners (e.g., EFL learners, individual difference) to multiple learning variables (e.g., learning strategy, motivation, agency). The findings here will be validated by the analysis of the keywords.

Categorization of the most explored research topics.

N: the number of the HCPs in each topic category; ELF: English as a lingua franca; CLIL: content and language integrated learning; FLE: foreign language enjoyment; FLCA: foreign language classroom anxiety

Several points should be mentioned regarding the topic candidacy. First, for similar topic expressions, we used a cover term and added the frequency counts. For example, multilingualism is a cover term for bilinguals, bilingualism, plurilingualism, and multilingualism . Second, for nouns of singular and plural forms (e.g., emotion and emotions ) or for items with different spellings (e.g., meta analysis and meta analyses ), we combined the frequency counts. Third, we found that some longer items (3 grams and 4 grams) could be subsumed to short ones (2 grams or monogram) without loss of essential meaning (e.g., working memory from working memory capacity ). In this case, the shorter ones were kept for their higher frequency. Fourth, some highly frequent terms were discarded because they were too general to be valuable topics in language research, for example, applied linguistics , language use , second language .

5. Discussion and implications

Based on 143 highly cited papers collected from the WoS categories of linguistics , the present study attempts to present a bird’s eye view of the publication landscape and the most updated research themes reflected from the HCPs in the linguistics field. Specifically, we investigated the important contributors of HCPs in terms of journals, authors and countries. Besides, we spotlighted the research topics by corpus-based analysis of the abstracts and a detailed analysis of the top HCPs. The study has produced several findings that bear important implications.

The first finding is that the HCPs are highly concentrated in a limited journals and countries. In regards to journals, those in the spheres of bilingualism and applied linguistics (e.g., language teaching and learning) are likely to accumulate more citations and hence to produce more HCPs. Journals that focus on bilingualism from a linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neuroscientific perspective are the most frequent outlets of HCPs as evidenced by the top two productive journals of HCPs, Bilingualism Language and Cognition and International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism . This can be explained by the multidisciplinary nature of bilingual-related research and the development of cognitive measurement techniques. The merits of analyzing publication venues of HCPs are two folds. One the one hand, it can point out which sources of high-quality publications in this field can be inquired for readers as most of the significant and cutting-edge achievements are concentrated in these prestigious journals. On the other hand, it also provides essential guidance or channels for authors or contributors to submit their works for higher visibility.

In terms of country distributions, the traditional powerhouses in linguistics research such as the USA and England are undoubtedly leading the HCP publications in both the number and the citations of the HCPs. However, developing countries are also becoming increasing prominent such as China and Iran , which could be traceable in the funding and support of national language policies and development policies as reported in recent studies ( Ping et al., 2009 ; Lei and Liu, 2019 ). Take China as an example. Along with economic development, China has given more impetus to academic outputs with increased investment in scientific research ( Lei and Liao, 2017 ). Therefore, researchers in China are highly motivated to publish papers in high-quality journals to win recognition in international academia and to deal with the publish or perish pressure ( Lee, 2014 ). These factors may explain the rise of China as a new emerging research powerhouse in both natural and social sciences, including English linguistics research.

The second finding is the multilingual trend in linguistics research. The dominant clustering of topics regarding multilingualism can be understood as a timely response to the multilingual research fever ( May, 2014 ). 34 out of the 143 HCPs have such words as bilingualism, bilingual, multilingualism , translanguaging , etc., in their titles, reflecting a strong multilingual tendency of the HCPs. Multilingual-related HCPs mainly involve three aspects: multilingualism from the perspectives of psycholinguistics and cognition (e.g., Luk et al., 2011 ; Leivada et al., 2020 ); multilingual teaching (e.g., Schissel et al., 2018 ; Ortega, 2019 ; Archila et al., 2021 ); language policies related to multilingualism (e.g., Shen and Gao, 2018 ). As a pedagogical process initially used to describe the bilingual classroom practice and also a frequently explored topic in HCPs, translanguaging is developed into an applied linguistics theory since Li’s Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language ( Li, 2018 ). The most common collocates of translanguaging in the Abstract corpus are pedagogy/pedagogies, practices, space/spaces . There are two main reasons for this multilingual turn. First, the rapid development of globalization, immigration, and overseas study programs greatly stimulate the use and research of multiple languages in different linguistic contexts. Second, in many non-English countries, courses are delivered through languages (mostly English) besides their mother tongue ( Clark, 2017 ). Students are required to use multiple languages as resources to learn and understand subjects and ideas. The burgeoning body of English Medium Instruction literature in higher education is in line with the rising interest in multilingualism. Due to the innate multidisciplinary nature, it is to be expected that, multilingualism, the topic du jour, is bound to attract more attention in the future.

The third finding is the application of Positive Psychology (PP) in second language acquisition (SLA), that is, the positive trend in linguistic research. In our analysis, 20 out of 143 HCPs have words or phrases such as emotions, enjoyment, boredom, anxiety , and positive psychology in their titles, which might signal a shift of interest in the psychology of language learners and teachers in different linguistic environments. Our study shows Foreign language enjoyment (FLE) is the most frequently explored emotion, followed by foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA), the learners’ metaphorical left and right feet on their journey to acquiring the foreign language ( Dewaele and MacIntyre, 2016 ). In fact, the topics of PP are not entirely new to SLA. For example, studies of language motivations, affections, and good language learners all provide roots for the emergence of PP in SLA ( Naiman, 1978 ; Gardner, 2010 ). In recent years, both research and teaching applications of PP in SLA are building rapidly, with a diversity of topics already being explored such as positive education and PP interventions. It is to be noted that SLA also feeds back on PP theories and concepts besides drawing inspirations from it, which makes it “an area rich for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization of ideas” ( Macintyre et al., 2019 ).

It should be noted that subjectivity is involved when we decide and categorize the candidate topic items based on the Abstract corpus. However, the frequency and range criteria guarantee that these items are actually more explored in multiple HCPs, thus indicating topic values for further investigation. Some high frequent n-grams are abandoned because they are too general or not meaningful topics. For example, applied linguistics is too broad to be included as most of the HCPs concern issues in this research line instead of theoretical linguistics. By meaningful topics, we mean that the topics can help journal editors and readers quickly locate their interested fields ( Lei and Liu, 2019 ), as the author keywords such as bilingualism , emotions , and individual differences . The examination of the few 3/4-grams and monograms (mostly nouns) revealed that most of them were either not meaningful topics or they could be subsumed in the 2-grams. Besides, there is inevitably some overlapping in the topic categorizations. For example, some topics in the language teaching and learning category are situated and discussed within the context of multilingualism. The merits of topic categorizations are two folds: to better monitor the overlapping between the Abstract corpus-based topic items and the keywords; to roughly delineate the research strands in the HCPs for future research.

It should also be noted that all the results were based on the retrieved HCPs only. The study did not aim to paint a comprehensive and full picture of the whole landscape of linguistic research. Rather, it specifically focused on the most popular literature in a specified timeframe, thus generating the snapshots or trends in linguistic research. One of the important merits of this methodology is that some newly emerging but highly cited researchers can be spotlighted and gain more academic attention because only the metrics of HCPs are considered in calculation. On the contrary, the exclusion of some other highly cited researchers in general such as Rod Ellis and Ken Hyland just indicates that their highly cited publications are not within our investigated timeframe and cannot be interpreted as their diminishing academic influence in the field. Besides, the study does not consider the issue of collaborators or collaborations in calculating the number of HCPs for two reasons. First, although some researchers are regular collaborators such as Li CC and Dewaele JM, their individual contribution can never be undermined. Second, the study also provides additional information about the number of the FA/CA HCPs from each listed author, which may aid readers in locating their interested research.

We acknowledge that our study has some limitations that should be addressed in future research. First, our study focuses on the HCPs extracted from WoS SSCI and A&HCI journals, the alleged most celebrated papers in this field. Future studies may consider including data from other databases such as Scopus to verify the findings of the present study. Second, our Abstract corpus-based method for topic extraction involved human judgement. Although the final list was the result of several rounds of discussions among the authors, it is difficult or even impossible to avoid subjectivity and some worthy topics may be unconsciously missed. Therefore, future research may consider employing automatic algorithms to extract topics. For example, a dependency-based machine learning approach can be used to identify research topics ( Zhu and Lei, 2021 ).

Data availability statement

Author contributions.

SY: conceptualization and methodology. SY and LZ: writing-review and editing and writing-original draft. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This work was supported by Humanities and Social Sciences Youth Fund of China MOE under the grant 20YJC740076 and 18YJC740141.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1052586/full#supplementary-material

• Aksnes D. W. (2003). Characteristics of highly cited papers . Res. Eval. 12 , 159–170. doi: 10.3152/147154403781776645 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Anthony L. (2022). AntConc (version 4.0.5) Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. Available at: https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software (Accessed June 20, 2022).
• Archila P. A., Molina J., Truscott de Mejía A.-M. (2021). Fostering bilingual scientific writing through a systematic and purposeful code-switching pedagogical strategy . Int. J. Biling. Educ. Biling. 24 , 785–803. doi: 10.1080/13670050.2018.1516189 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Blessinger K., Hrycaj P. (2010). Highly cited articles in library and information science: an analysis of content and authorship trends . Libr. Inf. Sci. Res. 32 , 156–162. doi: 10.1016/j.lisr.2009.12.007 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Chen H., Ho Y. S. (2015). Highly cited articles in biomass research: a bibliometric analysis . Renew. Sust. Energ. Rev. 49 , 12–20. doi: 10.1016/j.rser.2015.04.060 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Clark S. (2017). Translanguaging in higher education: beyond monolingual ideologies . Int. J. Biling. Educ. Biling. 22 , 1048–1051. doi: 10.1080/13670050.2017.1322568 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Dance A. (2012). Authorship: Who’s on first? Nature 489 , 591–593. doi: 10.1038/nj7417-591a, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Danell R. (2011). Can the quality of scientific work be predicted using information on the author’s track record? J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 62 , 50–60. doi: 10.1002/asi.21454 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Darvin R., Norton B. (2015). Identity and a model of Investment in Applied Linguistics . Annu. Rev. Appl. Linguist. 35 , 36–56. doi: 10.1017/S0267190514000191 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Dewaele J.-M., MacIntyre P. D. (2016). “ Foreign language enjoyment and foreign language classroom anxiety: the right and left feet of the language learner ” in Positive psychology in SLA . eds. Peter D. M., Tammy G., Sarah M. (Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters; ), 215–236. [ Google Scholar ]
• Gardner R. (2010). Motivation and second language acquisition: The socio-educational model . New York: Peter Lang. [ Google Scholar ]
• Gong Y., Lyu B., Gao X. (2018). Research on teaching Chinese as a second or foreign language in and outside mainland China: a bibliometric analysis . Asia Pac. Educ. Res. 27 , 277–289. doi: 10.1007/s40299-018-0385-2 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hsu Y., Ho Y. S. (2014). Highly cited articles in health care sciences and services field in science citation index Expanded . Methods Inf. Med. 53 , 446–458. doi: 10.3414/ME14-01-0022, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lee I. (2014). Publish or perish: the myth and reality of academic publishing . Lang. Teach. 47 , 250–261. doi: 10.1017/S0261444811000504 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lei L., Liao S. (2017). Publications in linguistics journals from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau (2003–2012): a bibliometric analysis . J. Quant. Ling. 24 , 54–64. doi: 10.1080/09296174.2016.1260274 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lei L., Liu D. (2018). The research trends and contributions of System’s publications over the past four decades (1973–2017): a bibliometric analysis . System 80 , 1–13. doi: 10.1016/j.system.2018.10.003 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lei L., Liu D. (2019). Research trends in applied linguistics from 2005 to 2016: a bibliometric analysis and its implications . Appl. Linguis. 40 , 540–561. doi: 10.1093/applin/amy003 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Leivada E., Westergaard M., Duabeitia J. A., Rothman J. (2020). On the phantom-like appearance of bilingualism effects on neurocognition: (how) should we proceed? Biling. Lang. Congn. 24 , 197–210. doi: 10.1017/S1366728920000358 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Li W. (2011). Moment analysis and translanguaging space: discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain . Energy Fuel 43 , 1222–1235. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2010.07.035 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Li W. (2018). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language . Appl. Linguis. 39 , 9–30. doi: 10.1093/applin/amx039 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Li C. (2019). A positive psychology perspective on Chinese EFL students’ trait emotional intelligence, foreign language enjoyment and EFL learning achievement . J. Multiling. Multicult. Dev. 41 , 246–263. doi: 10.1080/01434632.2019.1614187 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Li C. (2021). A control-value theory approach to boredom in English classes among university students in China . Mod. Lang. J. 105 , 317–334. doi: 10.1111/modl.12693 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Li C., Dewaele J. M., Hu Y. (2021). Foreign language learning boredom: conceptualization and measurement . Appl. Ling. Rev. doi: 10.1515/applirev-2020-0124 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Li C., Dewaele J. M., Jiang G. (2019). The complex relationship between classroom emotions and EFL achievement in China . Appl. Ling. Rev. 11 , 485–510. doi: 10.1515/applirev-2018-0043 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Li C., Jiang G., Jean-Marc D. (2018). Understanding Chinese high school students’ foreign language enjoyment: validation of the Chinese version of the foreign language enjoyment scale . System 76 , 183–196. doi: 10.1016/j.system.2018.06.004 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Liao S., Lei L. (2017). What we talk about when we talk about corpus: a bibliometric analysis of corpus-related research in linguistics (2000-2015) . Glottometrics 38 , 1–20. [ Google Scholar ]
• Liao H., Tang M., Li Z., Lev B. (2018). Bibliometric analysis for highly cited papers in operations research and management science from 2008 to 2017 based on essential science indicators . Omega 88 , 223–236. doi: 10.1016/j.omega.2018.11.005 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Luk G., Sa E. D., Bialystok E. (2011). Is there a relation between onset age of bilingualism and enhancement of cognitive control? Biling. Lang. Cogn. 14 , 588–595. doi: 10.1017/S1366728911000010 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Macaro E., Curle S., Pun J., Dearden J. (2018). A systematic review of English medium instruction in higher education . Lang. Teach. 51 , 36–76. doi: 10.1017/S0261444817000350 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Macintyre P., Gregersen T., Mercer S. (2019). Setting an agenda for positive psychology in SLA: theory, practice, and research . Mod. Lang. J. 103 , 262–274. doi: 10.1111/modl.12544 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Mancebo F. P., Sapena A. F., Herrera M. V., González L., Toca H., Benavent R. A. (2013). Scientific literature analysis of judo in web of science . Arch. Budo 9 , 81–91. doi: 10.12659/AOB.883883 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Marui M., Bozikov J., Katavi V., Hren D., Kljakovi-Gapi M., Marui A. (2004). Authorship in a small medical journal: a study of contributorship statements by corresponding authors . Sci. Eng. Ethics 10 , 493–502. doi: 10.1007/s11948-004-0007-7, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• May S. (2014). The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and bilingual education . New York: Routledge. [ Google Scholar ]
• Mondada L. (2016). Challenges of multimodality: language and the body in social interaction . J. Socioling. 20 , 336–366. doi: 10.1111/josl.1_12177 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Mondada L. (2018). Multiple temporalities of language and body in interaction: challenges for transcribing multimodality . Res. Lang. Soc. Interact. 51 , 85–106. doi: 10.1080/08351813.2018.1413878 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Mondada L. (2019). Contemporary issues in conversation analysis: embodiment and materiality, multimodality and multisensoriality in social interaction . J. Pragmat. 145 , 47–62. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2019.01.016 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Naiman N. (1978). The good language learner . Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. [ Google Scholar ]
• Newman M. (2008). The first-mover advantage in scientific publication . Eplasty 86 , 68001–68006. doi: 10.1209/0295-5075/86/68001 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Newman M. (2014). Prediction of highly cited papers . Eplasty 105 :28002. doi: 10.1209/0295-5075/105/28002 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Norton B., Toohey K. (2011). Identity, language learning, and social change . Lang. Teach. 44 , 412–446. doi: 10.1017/S0261444811000309 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ortega L. (2019). SLA and the study of equitable multilingualism . Mod. Lang. J. 103 , 23–38. doi: 10.1111/modl.12525 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ping Z., Thijs B., Glnzel W. (2009). Is China also becoming a giant in social sciences? Scientometrics 79 , 593–621. doi: 10.1007/s11192-007-2068-x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Pritchard A. (1969). Statistical bibliography or bibliometrics . J. Doc. 25 , 348–349. [ Google Scholar ]
• Ríos L. J. C., Tamao I. M., Olmos J. (2013). Bibliometric study (1922-2009) on rugby articles in research journals . South Afr. J. Res. Sport Phys. Educ. Rec. 17 , 313–109. doi: 10.3176/tr.2013.3.06 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ruggeri G., Orsi L., Corsi S. (2019). A bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature on Fairtrade labelling . Int. IJC 43 , 134–152. doi: 10.1111/ijcs.12492 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Sabiote C. R., Rodríguez J. A. (2015). Bibliometric study and methodological quality indicators of the journal porta Linguarum during six year period 2008-2013 . Porta Ling. 24 , 135–150. doi: 10.30827/Digibug.53866 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Schissel J. L., De Korne H., López-Gopar M. E. (2018). Grappling with translanguaging for teaching and assessment in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts: teacher perspectives from Oaxaca, Mexico . Int. J. Biling. Educ. Biling. 24 , 340–356. doi: 10.1080/13670050.2018.1463965 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Shen Q., Gao X. (2018). Multilingualism and policy making in greater China: ideological and implementational spaces . Lang. Policy 18 , 1–16. doi: 10.1007/s10993-018-9473-7 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Small H. (2004). Why authors think their papers are highly cited . Scientometrics 60 , 305–316. doi: 10.1023/B:SCIE.0000034376.55800.18 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Smith D. R. (2007). The New Zealand timber economy, 1840–1935 . N. Z. Med. J. 120 , U2871–U2313. doi: 10.1016/0305-7488(90)90044-C, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• van Doorslaer L., Gambier Y. (2015). Measuring relationships in translation studies. On affiliations and keyword frequencies in the translation studies bibliography . Perspectives 23 , 305–319. doi: 10.1080/0907676X.2015.1026360 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• van Oorschot J. A. W. H., Hofman E., Halman J. (2018). A bibliometric review of the innovation adoption literature . Technol. Forecast. Soc. Chang. 134 , 1–21. doi: 10.1016/j.techfore.2018.04.032 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Xie Z., Willett P. (2013). The development of computer science research in the People’s republic of China 2000–2009: a bibliometric study . Inf. Dev. 29 , 251–264. doi: 10.1177/0266666912458515 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Yan S., Zhang H., Wang J. (2022). Trends and hot topics in radiology, nuclear medicine and medical imaging from 2011–2021: a bibliometric analysis of highly cited papers . Jpn. J. Radiol. 40 , 847–856. doi: 10.1007/s11604-022-01268-z, PMID: [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Zhu H., Lei L. (2021). A dependency-based machine learning approach to the identification of research topics: a case in COVID-19 studies . Lib. Hi Tech 40 , 495–515. doi: 10.1108/LHT-01-2021-0051 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Zhu H., Lei L. (2022). The research trends of text classification studies (2000–2020): a bibliometric analysis . SAGE Open 12 , 215824402210899–215824402210816. doi: 10.1177%2F21582440221089963 [ Google Scholar ]

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Research Proposal Template for Linguistics and Literature

Related Papers

Fiaz Hussain

Wan Mohd Farid Wan Yusof

Taiwo Abioye

Aksha Memon

A research proposal is a pre-written document which gives an overview of the research tactics. It gives a general idea of the objectives to be achieved and the ways and means to achieve it. Writing research proposal is however a challenging feat. Due to lack of clear guidance from any source, there are many substandard research proposals which are placed before evaluation committee. The researcher came across various people who had no clear understanding of the process and structure of research proposal or research design. This problem has led the researcher to develop a framework to guide the prospective researchers in framing their research design based on the following research questions.1) what is the procedure of writing the research proposal 2) what are the components of the research proposal.So, to give a clear picture about the problem the paper is divided into two parts I) Procedure of writing the research proposal II) Components of the research proposal. The procedure for writing the research proposal is discussed with regards to: 1) Identifying the problem 2) Deciding on the topic 3) Deciding the locale of study 4) Deciding on the data needs 5) Planning the source of data collection 6) Plotting down ways to collect data 7) Identifying methods for analyzing data collection 8) Establishing a basis for designing the Proposal. While the components of research proposal are discussed with regards to : 1) Cover page 2) Abstract 3) Keywords 4) Introduction 5) Review of literature 6) Statement of problem 7) Objectives of the study 8) Hypothesis of the study 9) Period of study 10) Methodology 11) Data analysis 12) Limitation of the study 13) Chapter framework 14) References 15) Appendices.

Dewinta Vikantari

Pleasery Myman

This is a guidelines to dissertation thesis for UPSI student.

Gezahegn Gezmu

Nelleke Bak

Some practical steps to consider when developing a research proposal

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

Department of Language and Linguistic Science

University | A to Z | Departments

• Language and Linguistic Science
• Postgraduate study
• MA in Linguistics by Research
• Research Proposal
• Language and Linguistic Science home
• For current students
• Staff area (login required)
• Undergraduate study
• Frequently asked questions
• Taught Masters
• How to apply
• Fees and funding
• Student profiles
• PhD Programmes
• Languages at York
• CPD courses
• Language Teaching Forum
• Visiting scholars
• For schools
• News and events
• You said, we did
• Equality and Diversity
• Contact and find us

Research Proposals for MA in Linguistics by Research

In the 'Research Proposal' section of the main application form, please include only 100 words outlining your topic, and upload a fuller research proposal as a separate document, in the 'supporting documents' section.

This proposal should be between 1500 and 2500 words in length , and should contain at least the following:

1. Title of proposed research project

This should allow the reader to place the research, at a glance, within an academic sub-field, as well as identifying the main issue to be addressed.  It should not be more than 20 words long.

2. Background

Outline the linguistic area in which you propose to conduct research.  Why is it important and interesting? What is the need for further research in this area? You should provide a context for your research.  Do this by referencing and briefly reviewing a number of key works in your chosen field, showing how your work is built on this prior research.

3. Research questions

You should give at least one overarching research question, plus a number of more specific sub-questions.  Make sure these questions all emerge from and are firmly grounded in the literature you have reviewed.  Ensure that these questions - particularly the specific sub-questions - are researchable; that is, they should not be too broad or too general.  You should also explain how these research questions can be considered original.

4. Data and data analysis

All projects will involve the collection of data of some kind.  In some cases, this will be based on native-speaker judgements.  Other projects will require experimental data, the use of existing or specially-created corpora, longitudinal observation, or sociolinguistic interviews - to name but a few data sources.  Will you be able to gain access to the data in the quantities required? Are there ethical concerns which need to be overcome? You should also be as specific as you can at this stage about the kinds of analysis you will perform.  What specific techniques will you use? What statistical analyses will you be performing (if any)? Mention any software you envisage using.

5. Fit with Departmental Research Interests

Before you formulate your proposal, you should look carefully through the Department of Language and Linguistic Science web pages to identify staff members who might be able to supervise your research.  You may mention the person or people by name.  You are also encouraged (though you are not obliged) to contact individual staff members to find out if they believe your ideas to be viable and if they would in principle be interested in supervising your project.

6. References

You should provide a list of the works you have referred to in your proposal. Don't list other works which may be relevant: this is to assure the reader that you have read and understood the literature you have cited.

Department of Language and Linguistic Science University of York , York , YO10 5DD , UK Tel: work +44 (0)1904 322650 | [email protected]

Legal statements | Privacy | Cookies | Accessibility © University of York | Modify | Direct Edit

• How It Works
• PhD thesis writing
• Master thesis writing
• Bachelor thesis writing
• Dissertation writing service
• Dissertation abstract writing
• Thesis proposal writing
• Thesis editing service
• Thesis proofreading service
• Thesis formatting service
• Coursework writing service
• Research paper writing service
• Architecture thesis writing
• Computer science thesis writing
• Engineering thesis writing
• History thesis writing
• MBA thesis writing
• Nursing dissertation writing
• Psychology dissertation writing
• Sociology thesis writing
• Statistics dissertation writing
• Buy dissertation online
• Write my dissertation
• Cheap thesis
• Cheap dissertation
• Custom dissertation
• Dissertation help
• Pay for thesis
• Pay for dissertation
• Senior thesis
• Write my thesis

211 Research Topics in Linguistics To Get Top Grades

Many people find it hard to decide on their linguistics research topics because of the assumed complexities involved. They struggle to choose easy research paper topics for English language too because they think it could be too simple for a university or college level certificate.

All that you need to learn about Linguistics and English is sprawled across syntax, phonetics, morphology, phonology, semantics, grammar, vocabulary, and a few others. To easily create a top-notch essay or conduct a research study, you can consider this list of research topics in English language below for your university or college use. Note that you can fine-tune these to suit your interests.

Linguistics Research Paper Topics

If you want to study how language is applied and its importance in the world, you can consider these Linguistics topics for your research paper. They are:

• An analysis of romantic ideas and their expression amongst French people
• An overview of the hate language in the course against religion
• Identify the determinants of hate language and the means of propagation
• Evaluate a literature and examine how Linguistics is applied to the understanding of minor languages
• Consider the impact of social media in the development of slangs
• An overview of political slang and its use amongst New York teenagers
• Examine the relevance of Linguistics in a digitalized world
• Analyze foul language and how it’s used to oppress minors
• Identify the role of language in the national identity of a socially dynamic society
• Attempt an explanation to how the language barrier could affect the social life of an individual in a new society
• Discuss the means through which language can enrich cultural identities
• Examine the concept of bilingualism and how it applies in the real world
• Analyze the possible strategies for teaching a foreign language
• Discuss the priority of teachers in the teaching of grammar to non-native speakers
• Choose a school of your choice and observe the slang used by its students: analyze how it affects their social lives
• Attempt a critical overview of racist languages
• What does endangered language means and how does it apply in the real world?
• A critical overview of your second language and why it is a second language
• What are the motivators of speech and why are they relevant?
• Analyze the difference between the different types of communications and their significance to specially-abled persons
• Give a critical overview of five literature on sign language
• Evaluate the distinction between the means of language comprehension between an adult and a teenager
• Consider a native American group and evaluate how cultural diversity has influenced their language
• Analyze the complexities involved in code-switching and code-mixing
• Give a critical overview of the importance of language to a teenager
• Attempt a forensic overview of language accessibility and what it means
• What do you believe are the means of communications and what are their uniqueness?
• Attempt a study of Islamic poetry and its role in language development
• Attempt a study on the role of Literature in language development
• Evaluate the Influence of metaphors and other literary devices in the depth of each sentence
• Identify the role of literary devices in the development of proverbs in any African country
• Cognitive Linguistics: analyze two pieces of Literature that offers a critical view of perception
• Identify and analyze the complexities in unspoken words
• Expression is another kind of language: discuss
• Identify the significance of symbols in the evolution of language
• Discuss how learning more than a single language promote cross-cultural developments
• Analyze how the loss of a mother tongue affect the language Efficiency of a community
• Critically examine how sign language works
• Using literature from the medieval era, attempt a study of the evolution of language
• Identify how wars have led to the reduction in the popularity of a language of your choice across any country of the world
• Critically examine five Literature on why accent changes based on environment
• What are the forces that compel the comprehension of language in a child
• Identify and explain the difference between the listening and speaking skills and their significance in the understanding of language
• Give a critical overview of how natural language is processed
• Examine the influence of language on culture and vice versa
• It is possible to understand a language even without living in that society: discuss
• Identify the arguments regarding speech defects
• Discuss how the familiarity of language informs the creation of slangs
• Explain the significance of religious phrases and sacred languages
• Explore the roots and evolution of incantations in Africa

Sociolinguistic Research Topics

You may as well need interesting Linguistics topics based on sociolinguistic purposes for your research. Sociolinguistics is the study and recording of natural speech. It’s primarily the casual status of most informal conversations. You can consider the following Sociolinguistic research topics for your research:

• What makes language exceptional to a particular person?
• How does language form a unique means of expression to writers?
• Examine the kind of speech used in health and emergencies
• Analyze the language theory explored by family members during dinner
• Evaluate the possible variation of language based on class
• Evaluate the language of racism, social tension, and sexism
• Discuss how Language promotes social and cultural familiarities
• Give an overview of identity and language
• Examine why some language speakers enjoy listening to foreigners who speak their native language
• Give a forensic analysis of his the language of entertainment is different to the language in professional settings
• Give an understanding of how Language changes
• Examine the Sociolinguistics of the Caribbeans
• Consider an overview of metaphor in France
• Explain why the direct translation of written words is incomprehensible in Linguistics
• Discuss the use of language in marginalizing a community
• Analyze the history of Arabic and the culture that enhanced it
• Discuss the growth of French and the influences of other languages
• Examine how the English language developed and its interdependence on other languages
• Give an overview of cultural diversity and Linguistics in teaching
• Challenge the attachment of speech defect with disability of language listening and speaking abilities
• Explore the uniqueness of language between siblings
• Explore the means of making requests between a teenager and his parents
• Observe and comment on how students relate with their teachers through language
• Observe and comment on the communication of strategy of parents and teachers
• Examine the connection of understanding first language with academic excellence

Language Research Topics

Numerous languages exist in different societies. This is why you may seek to understand the motivations behind language through these Linguistics project ideas. You can consider the following interesting Linguistics topics and their application to language:

• What does language shift mean?
• Discuss the stages of English language development?
• Examine the position of ambiguity in a romantic Language of your choice
• Why are some languages called romantic languages?
• Observe the strategies of persuasion through Language
• Discuss the connection between symbols and words
• Identify the language of political speeches
• Discuss the effectiveness of language in an indigenous cultural revolution
• Trace the motivators for spoken language
• What does language acquisition mean to you?
• Examine three pieces of literature on language translation and its role in multilingual accessibility
• Identify the science involved in language reception
• Interrogate with the context of language disorders
• Examine how psychotherapy applies to victims of language disorders
• Study the growth of Hindi despite colonialism
• Critically appraise the term, language erasure
• Examine how colonialism and war is responsible for the loss of language
• Give an overview of the difference between sounds and letters and how they apply to the German language
• Explain why the placement of verb and preposition is different in German and English languages
• Choose two languages of your choice and examine their historical relationship
• Discuss the strategies employed by people while learning new languages
• Discuss the role of all the figures of speech in the advancement of language
• Analyze the complexities of autism and its victims
• Offer a linguist approach to language uniqueness between a Down Syndrome child and an autist
• Express dance as a language
• Express music as a language
• Express language as a form of language
• Evaluate the role of cultural diversity in the decline of languages in South Africa
• Discuss the development of the Greek language
• Critically review two literary texts, one from the medieval era and another published a decade ago, and examine the language shifts

Linguistics Essay Topics

You may also need Linguistics research topics for your Linguistics essays. As a linguist in the making, these can help you consider controversies in Linguistics as a discipline and address them through your study. You can consider:

• The connection of sociolinguistics in comprehending interests in multilingualism
• Write on your belief of how language encourages sexism
• What do you understand about the differences between British and American English?
• Discuss how slangs grew and how they started
• Consider how age leads to loss of language
• Review how language is used in formal and informal conversation
• Discuss what you understand by polite language
• Discuss what you know by hate language
• Evaluate how language has remained flexible throughout history
• Mimicking a teacher is a form of exercising hate Language: discuss
• Body Language and verbal speech are different things: discuss
• Language can be exploitative: discuss
• Do you think language is responsible for inciting aggression against the state?
• Can you justify the structural representation of any symbol of your choice?
• Religious symbols are not ordinary Language: what are your perspective on day-to-day languages and sacred ones?
• Consider the usage of language by an English man and someone of another culture
• Discuss the essence of code-mixing and code-switching
• Attempt a psychological assessment on the role of language in academic development
• How does language pose a challenge to studying?
• Choose a multicultural society of your choice and explain the problem they face
• What forms does Language use in expression?
• Identify the reasons behind unspoken words and actions
• Why do universal languages exist as a means of easy communication?
• Examine the role of the English language in the world
• Examine the role of Arabic in the world
• Examine the role of romantic languages in the world
• Evaluate the significance of each teaching Resources in a language classroom
• Consider an assessment of language analysis
• Why do people comprehend beyond what is written or expressed?
• What is the impact of hate speech on a woman?
• Do you believe that grammatical errors are how everyone’s comprehension of language is determined?
• Observe the Influence of technology in language learning and development
• Which parts of the body are responsible for understanding new languages
• How has language informed development?
• Would you say language has improved human relations or worsened it considering it as a tool for violence?
• Would you say language in a black populous state is different from its social culture in white populous states?
• Give an overview of the English language in Nigeria
• Give an overview of the English language in Uganda
• Give an overview of the English language in India
• Give an overview of Russian in Europe
• Give a conceptual analysis on stress and how it works
• Consider the means of vocabulary development and its role in cultural relationships
• Examine the effects of Linguistics in language
• Present your understanding of sign language
• What do you understand about descriptive language and prescriptive Language?

List of Research Topics in English Language

You may need English research topics for your next research. These are topics that are socially crafted for you as a student of language in any institution. You can consider the following for in-depth analysis:

• Examine the travail of women in any feminist text of your choice
• Examine the movement of feminist literature in the Industrial period
• Give an overview of five Gothic literature and what you understand from them
• Examine rock music and how it emerged as a genre
• Evaluate the cultural association with Nina Simone’s music
• What is the relevance of Shakespeare in English literature?
• How has literature promoted the English language?
• Identify the effect of spelling errors in the academic performance of students in an institution of your choice
• Critically survey a university and give rationalize the literary texts offered as Significant
• Examine the use of feminist literature in advancing the course against patriarchy
• Give an overview of the themes in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”
• Express the significance of Ernest Hemingway’s diction in contemporary literature
• Examine the predominant devices in the works of William Shakespeare
• Explain the predominant devices in the works of Christopher Marlowe
• Charles Dickens and his works: express the dominating themes in his Literature
• Why is Literature described as the mirror of society?
• Examine the issues of feminism in Sefi Atta’s “Everything Good Will Come” and Bernadine Evaristos’s “Girl, Woman, Other”
• Give an overview of the stylistics employed in the writing of “Girl, Woman, Other” by Bernadine Evaristo
• Describe the language of advertisement in social media and newspapers
• Describe what poetic Language means
• Examine the use of code-switching and code-mixing on Mexican Americans
• Examine the use of code-switching and code-mixing in Indian Americans
• Discuss the influence of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” on satirical literature
• Examine the Linguistics features of “Native Son” by Richard Wright
• What is the role of indigenous literature in promoting cultural identities
• How has literature informed cultural consciousness?
• Analyze five literature on semantics and their Influence on the study
• Assess the role of grammar in day to day communications
• Observe the role of multidisciplinary approaches in understanding the English language
• What does stylistics mean while analyzing medieval literary texts?
• Analyze the views of philosophers on language, society, and culture

English Research Paper Topics for College Students

For your college work, you may need to undergo a study of any phenomenon in the world. Note that they could be Linguistics essay topics or mainly a research study of an idea of your choice. Thus, you can choose your research ideas from any of the following:

• The concept of fairness in a democratic Government
• The capacity of a leader isn’t in his or her academic degrees
• The concept of discrimination in education
• The theory of discrimination in Islamic states
• The idea of school policing
• A study on grade inflation and its consequences
• A study of taxation and Its importance to the economy from a citizen’s perspectives
• A study on how eloquence lead to discrimination amongst high school students
• A study of the influence of the music industry in teens
• An Evaluation of pornography and its impacts on College students
• A descriptive study of how the FBI works according to Hollywood
• A critical consideration of the cons and pros of vaccination
• The health effect of sleep disorders
• An overview of three literary texts across three genres of Literature and how they connect to you
• A critical overview of “King Oedipus”: the role of the supernatural in day to day life
• Examine the novel “12 Years a Slave” as a reflection of servitude and brutality exerted by white slave owners
• Rationalize the emergence of racist Literature with concrete examples
• A study of the limits of literature in accessing rural readers
• Analyze the perspectives of modern authors on the Influence of medieval Literature on their craft
• What do you understand by the mortality of a literary text?
• A study of controversial Literature and its role in shaping the discussion
• A critical overview of three literary texts that dealt with domestic abuse and their role in changing the narratives about domestic violence
• Choose three contemporary poets and analyze the themes of their works
• Do you believe that contemporary American literature is the repetition of unnecessary themes already treated in the past?
• A study of the evolution of Literature and its styles
• The use of sexual innuendos in literature
• The use of sexist languages in literature and its effect on the public
• The disaster associated with media reports of fake news
• Conduct a study on how language is used as a tool for manipulation
• Attempt a criticism of a controversial Literary text and why it shouldn’t be studied or sold in the first place

Finding Linguistics Hard To Write About?

With these topics, you can commence your research with ease. However, if you need professional writing help for any part of the research, you can scout here online for the best research paper writing service.

There are several expert writers on ENL hosted on our website that you can consider for a fast response on your research study at a cheap price.

As students, you may be unable to cover every part of your research on your own. This inability is the reason you should consider expert writers for custom research topics in Linguistics approved by your professor for high grades.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comment * Error message

Name * Error message

Email * Error message

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

As Putin continues killing civilians, bombing kindergartens, and threatening WWIII, Ukraine fights for the world's peaceful future.

Ukraine Live Updates

Study at Cambridge

About the university, research at cambridge.

• Events and open days
• Fees and finance
• Student blogs and videos
• Why Cambridge
• Qualifications directory
• How to apply
• Fees and funding
• Frequently asked questions
• International students
• Continuing education
• Executive and professional education
• Courses in education
• How the University and Colleges work
• Visiting the University
• Term dates and calendars
• Video and audio
• Find an expert
• Publications
• International Cambridge
• Public engagement
• Giving to Cambridge
• For current students
• For business
• Colleges & departments
• Libraries & facilities
• Museums & collections
• Email & phone search
• Postgraduate Study in MMLL

Applying & Funding

Writing an MPhil Research Proposal

• About overview
• Governance of the Faculty overview
• Governance at MML
• Faculty Board overview
• Board Overview
• Membership and Contacts
• Student Engagement
• Staff-Student Liaison Committee overview
• Committee Overview
• News & Events
• Academic Visitors
• Public Engagement
• IT Services
• The University Library
• Language Centre
• Research Facilities
• MMLL privacy policy
• Health and Safety at MMLL
• Subjects overview
• Modern Greek
• Spanish and Portuguese
• Slavonic Studies overview
• Slavonic Studies virtual event for Years 11 & 12
• Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
• Undergraduates overview
• The Courses: Key Facts overview
• Course costs
• The courses we offer
• The MML Course overview
• MML: The First Year
• MML: The Second Year
• MML: The Year Abroad
• MML: The Fourth Year
• The Linguistics Course
• The History and Modern Languages Course overview
• Course structure overview
• How We Teach
• How You Learn
• Resources for teachers and supporters
• Careers and Employment
• Alumni testimonials overview
• Matthew Thompson
• Rosie Sargeant
• Mark Austin
• Esther Wilkinson
• Katherine Powlesland
• Gillian McFarland
• Katya Andrusz
• Frequently asked questions overview
• Choosing your course
• Applications
• Resources and reading lists for prospective students
• Did you know...?
• Student Perspectives overview
• Alfie Vaughan
• Romany Whittall
• Postgraduates
• Offer Holders overview
• French overview
• Summer Preparation
• German overview
• Beginners Course overview
• Post A-Level Course overview
• Italian and Greek overview
• Portuguese overview
• Spanish overview
• History & Modern Languages Tripos
• From Our Students
• Current undergraduates overview
• Year Abroad overview
• Current Students
• Thinking about your Year Abroad overview
• Studying overview
• Finance overview
• Turing Scheme
• Safety and Insurance
• Year Abroad FAQs
• Year Abroad Project FAQs
• Modern and Medieval Languages Tripos overview
• MML Part IA List of Papers
• Part I Oral Examination A and B
• MML Part IB List of Papers
• MML IB Assessment by Long Essay
• The Year Abroad Project
• MML Part II List of Papers overview
• MML Part II List of Borrowed Papers
• CS5: The Body
• CS6: European Film
• Oral C Examination
• MML Part II Optional Dissertation
• MML with Classics
• Linguistics within the Modern and Medieval Languages Tripos
• Linguistics Tripos overview
• Linguistics Tripos - List of Papers
• Transferable Skills
• History and Modern Languages Tripos
• Marking Criteria
• Supervision Guidelines
• Teaching Provision
• Examinations Data Retention Policy (PDF)
• Learning Resources
• Additional Course Costs
• Faculty guidance on plagiarism
• Translation Toolkit overview
• 1. Translation as a Process
• 2. Translation as a Product
• 3. Equivalence and Translation Loss
• Email etiquette at MMLL
• Overall Degree Classification
• Current postgraduates
• Research in MMLL overview
• Research by Section overview
• Italian overview
• CIRN Home overview
• CIRN Events overview
• CIRN Annual Lecture 2015
• CIRN Annual Lecture 2016
• CIRN Annual Lecture 2017
• CIRN Annual Lecture 2018
• CIRN Annual Lecture 2019
• CIRN Annual Lecture 2019-20
• CIRN Annual Symposium 2015
• CIRN Annual Symposium 2016
• CIRN Annual Symposium 2017
• CIRN Annual Symposium 2018
• CIRN Annual Symposium 2019
• CIRN News and Events archive
• Slavonic Studies
• Research by Language overview
• Research by Period overview
• Medieval and Pre-Modern
• Early Modern
• Eighteenth Century
• Nineteenth Century
• 1900 - 1945
• 1945 - present
• Research by Thematic Field overview
• Literature, Visual Culture and the Arts overview
• Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies
• Contemporary Culture and Society
• Drama, Music and Performance
• Environmental Criticism and Posthumanism
• Film and Visual Culture
• Gender, Feminism and Queer Studies
• Intellectual and Cultural History
• Literary Theory, Philosophy and Political Thought
• Material Culture and History of the Book
• Poetry, Rhetoric and Poetics
• Language and Linguistics overview
• Comparative Syntax
• Computational Linguistics
• Dialectology
• Experimental Phonetics and Phonology
• Historical Linguistics
• Language Acquisition
• Language Change
• Language Contact
• Multilingualism
• Psycholinguistics
• Semantics, Pragmatics and Philosophy
• Translation Theory and Practice
• Funded Projects
• Apply for Research Funding overview
• Research Strategy Committee
• Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships
• British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowships
• Management of Ongoing Grants
• Funding Opportunities
• Centres overview
• Cambridge Film and Screen
• Cambridge Italian Research Network (CIRN)
• Centre of Latin American Studies (CLAS)
• Cambridge Language Sciences
• Cambridge Endangered Languages and Cultures Group (CELC) overview
• Seminar Series
• Past conferences
• Cambridge Centre for Greek Studies
• Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement
• Equality and Diversity overview
• EDI Committee
• Accessibility Statement
• Accessible Materials
• Recording Lectures
• Athena SWAN
• Mentoring and Career Development
• Parents and Carers
• EDI Related Links
• Harassment and Discrimination
• Outreach overview
• Resources overview
• Open Day Resources for Prospective Students
• CCARL A-level Resources overview
• Why Not Languages? resources overview
• Student Q&A
• Events for Students overview
• Events for Teachers overview
• Diversity in French and Francophone Studies: A CPD workshop series for teachers of French
• Diversity in German Studies - CPD Workshop series aimed at secondary teachers of German
• Workshop for Spanish Teachers
• Workshop for Teachers of German: Diversity in German Culture
• Access and Widening Participation
• Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics
• Applying: MPhil in Euro, LatAm, Comp Lit and Cultures
• Applying: MPhils in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
• Applying: MPhils in Film and Screen Studies
• Applying: PhD
• PG Guide for applicants
• Writing an MPhil research proposal
• Mallinson MPhil Studentship (ELAC)
• Scandinavian Studies Fund
• Postgraduate Study
• MPhil Courses
• PhD Courses
• Postgraduate Committees
• Cambridge Virtual Postgraduate Open Days
• Visitors and Erasmus
• Information for current Students
• Postdoctoral Affiliation
• Consortium in Latin American Cultural Studies
• Postgraduate Contacts
• Current student profiles

Your MPhil research proposal should be approximately one page in length.

• Your research proposal should clearly articulate what you want to research and why. It should indicate a proposed approach to your given field of study. It should nevertheless retain sufficient flexibility to accommodate any changes you need to make as your research progresses.
• You should try to show how your postgraduate plans emerge from your undergraduate work and may move it on.
• You should try to show how your proposed research will build on existing knowledge or address any gaps or shortcomings.  You should accordingly mention existing scholarship, if necessary with certain qualifications – (eg. ‘Smith has written extensively on the theatre of Pirandello, but fails to mention…).
• Identify a potential Supervisor.

Search form

Related links

• Student Support
• Wellbeing at Cambridge
• Year Abroad FAQ
• Polyglossia Magazine
• The Cambridge Language Collective
• Information for current undergraduates
• Visiting and Erasmus Students

Keep in touch

• University of Cambridge Privacy Policy
• Student complaints and Examination Reviews

© 2024 University of Cambridge

• University A-Z
• Contact the University
• Accessibility
• Freedom of information
• Terms and conditions
• Undergraduate
• Spotlight on...
• About research at Cambridge