Finding a viable graduate research topic may seem like a simple idea. You just need to look back and reflect on your own teaching experience and then zoom in on some of the important problems that your students encountered. Popular ‘problems’ include the following:
- Grammar problems. Your students seem to make lots of grammatical mistakes so you want to explore this topic.
- Pronunciation problems. You notice that your students’ pronunciation is heavily accented and you want to find ways to help them develop native-like accents
- Speaking problems. Your students are not able to speak fluently, i.e., they struggle a lot when trying to express their ideas in English. Why is that, you ask?
- etc.
These are pedagogically important questions and the topics may be of great relevance to you. But hundreds or even thousands of empirical research studies may have already been conducted on these topics. In addition, these studies may have examined the topics above from multiple perspectives and in diverse contexts.
In other words, while the topics may be relevant to you, they may not be current. They are still important pedagogically speaking, but they may not be of interest to the research community.
If your research goal includes completing your thesis/dissertation and getting it published in an international journal, you will need to find a topic that is of interest to you AND the international research community. This community include research scholars, journal editors and reviewers, i.e., people who have the potential of reviewing your journal submission and who decide whether your submission meets their stringent criteria of acceptance, some of which are listed below:
- Does your manuscript offer any new and signification information?
- Is your research supported by current and relevant literature?
- Is there theoretical framework clearly explained and appropriately used in the research?
- Does the research have a wide, international appeal?
- etc.
It is clear then that a piece of graduate research needs to be both current and relevant. More importantly, it has to offer new and significant information that contributes to the further development of our understanding about a topic in question. In other words, a graduate research study needs to address an important gap in the literature, one that has not been fully addressed by other researchers and one that further expands the field in new and exciting directions.
In order to identify a gap in the literature, you will need to get hold of relevant literature, examine what has been done in the past 10 or 20 years, what has been learned and what areas of research need to be further explored.
In my guest lecture delivered to some 100 graduate students of Universitas Negeri Malang, I discussed the following key issues:
- What is literature-supported research?
- What are the benefits of this type of research?
- How does one go about identifying a viable research topic that meets two major criteria: Currency and Relevance?
- How does one find relevant literature?
- What is a state-of-the-art article? What sort of information does this type of article provide?
My presentation slides can be viewed or downloaded here.
