In the interests of posting everything I do on a single blog, here’s something which will be unreadable for most people; my MA dissertation, finished a month-and-a-half ago, and now handed in, marked and returned (I passed, by the way).
My MA was in Applied Linguistics, and this dissertation looks at an aspect of a subfield of that subfield – Motivation in Second Language Acquisition. I suppose research is always that obscure – the obvious stuff has either been done years ago or requires such a high level of funding that it’s never been able to be done. Still, it seems like an interesting and relevant topic to me, and the results I found have given me all sorts of ideas for further research which, for the meantime, I’ll have to keep on the back-burner. Still, expect further developments sometime around 2012. The statistical analysis part of this paper is severely lacking (due entirely to my own inexperience), and I really hope to find time to go over my results before then, but I’ll probably be too busy getting on with life.

So, anyway, here it is – Motivation, International Posture and Chinese Core Cultural Values; Toward a Theory of Motivation in Chinese ESL.