Dr.

Carter
English 677 Spring 2010

Research Proposal

Description: Your research proposal is your plan for data collection. It is necessarily flexible,
and things may not always go according to plan (that’s okay!). Even so, it is crucial that you
have a plan. The research proposal asks you to question what you know, what you don’t know,
and what you hope to know. Also crucial are the ways in which you are going to treat the
community you are investigating and the data you are collecting to represent them (all with
great respect, of course!).

Purpose: To flesh out your research plan and circumvent as many problems as possible to
ensure a graceful entry into your fieldsite and/or archives and a productive experience all
around.

Components: Your Research Proposal must include:

1. a discussion of what you hope to accomplish

2. an explanation of why the research is important to you (local) and how you have framed
the central questions or lines of inquiry for your research (background)
3. a statement describing the ways in which you will approach your data collection,
analysis, and write up that will ensure the participants in your study will be treated with
the utmost respect and that the process will follow the ethical practices set by university
researchers and the Institutional Review Boards that oversee such research (who will
you approach for permission and why? How will you approach them?)
4. a discussion of how you will obtain signatures on the requisite forms and a draft of the
permission forms you intend to use (signatures due very soon!)
5. a detailing of your research plan (when and where will you research, and how?)
6. a description of the methodology for your research (how will you collect the data and
why this method as opposed to another?)
7. a discussion of how your research connects to the wider scholarly community discussing
such subjects (Where’s the literacy? How will this project contribute to the larger
scholarly conversation in literacy studies, especially as represented in our required
course readings?)

As you write, keep in mind that your responses to the guiding questions listed above should be
integrated into a coherent essay. Your paragraphs should not stand as separate, isolated
responses to the questions but should be held together as a cohesive proposal by the
exploration of what you want to research, why you want to research what makes it important,
and the connection you can make between your research in this local context and the larger
scholarly conversation in literacy studies.

Resources: You should find many useful details among the support materials developed for
English 102.

See http://faculty.tamu-commerce.edu/scarter/research_proposal for important questions that

should help you get started, provide a possible format for this Research Proposal, and offer
information regarding what I will be looking for as I evaluate it.

Other important information:

• On the “Research Proposal” (see http://www.faculty.tamu-

commerce.edu/scarter/research_proposal)
• On obtaining requisite permissions (see http://faculty.tamu-
commerce.edu/scarter/getting_permission.htm)
• On the Research Portfolio (see http://faculty.tamu-
commerce.edu/scarter/research_portfolio.htm
• More on the Research Portfolio (see http://www.scribd.com/doc/23412622/Research-
Portfolio)
 Dr. Carter
English 677 Spring 2010