1. Dissertation Research Design
Yupeng Kou
Second Language Acquisition Ph.D. Program
The University of Iowa

2. About the research
The investigator intends to teach a specific Chinese language construction to English-speaking learners based on a proposed pedagogical model, and see the instruction’s effectiveness by measuring these learners’ acquisition outcomes.

3. Details
About the participants: 14 non-heritage, English-speaking learners of Chinese, among them 7 are at the novice Chinese proficiency level ( in the raw data), and the other 7 are at the intermediate level ( in the raw data);
About the construction: 5 typical forms (Type 1-Type 5 in the raw data) of the construction are taught;
About the acquisition measurement: 4 separate tasks (Contextualized Production, Translation, Grammaticality Judgment, and Cloze)

4. About the tasks
Contextualized Production: 10 points in total, and each type/form of the construction takes 2 points;
Translation: 10 points in total, and each type/form takes 2 points;
Grammaticality Judgment: 20 points in total, and each type/form takes 4 points;
Cloze: 10 points in total, and each type/form takes 2 points.
Contextualized production and translation are both tasks that test students’ production of the construction, so the scores can be combined as “production test scores”.

5. Procedures Pre-test: all participants complete all tasks
4 consecutive instruction sessions for all participants;
Post-test (administered one week after the last instruction session): all participants complete all tasks
Delayed post-test (administered two weeks after the post-test): all participants complete all tasks
The pre-test, post-test and delayed post-test use parallel forms of the 4 tasks

6. Research questions
1: Are the instruction sessions effective in explaining the construction and facilitating learners’ acquisition?
2: Are the instruction sessions beneficial to learners’ understanding of different types/forms of the construction?
3: Do the effects of the instruction sessions vary for learners at different proficiency levels?
For the first research question, I am thinking of 1) comparing students’ overall scores (summing up all points of 4 tasks) across pre, post and delayed, 2) comparing students’ scores on each task across pre, post and delayed, and 3) comparing students’ production scores (summing up the 2 production tasks) across pre, post and delayed;
For the second question, I intend to do the factor analysis upon results of the first question by considering the points a student gets for each type/form of the construction as one factor which contributes to the score he/she gets for a task or for his/her overall scores. I assume this analysis will indicate that on which specific type(s)/form(s) this student performs better (I’m not sure if this thought is right since I am not that familiar with factor analysis);
For the third question, it’s adding the non-assignable proficiency level as another dimension to the first and second questions, and do split-plot analyses (if the data turn out not pointing to non-parametric analyses).