I've been mulling over exactly how I should go about this inquiry project. I'm in the midst of working on my residency project this semester, which is on middle-school, African-American students' language attitudes towards code-switching between African American English and Standard English. I'm going to be interviewing students about their beliefs by having the students respond to scenarios about code-switching. These are research-based, short narratives that I've created about adolescents code-switching under a variety of circumstances. Participants will be asked to discuss their opinions about the characters in these stories. I'd like to use this project in some way for the research project for our course.

I'd also like to use this course as an opportunity to consider, evaluate, and try out some different methodologies. In thinking ahead towards the dissertation, I'd like to use this course as a chance to decide which methodologies work best for my interests and my beliefs as a researcher.

All that said, I am considering focusing on a text-based methodology--perhaps document analysis??? Because I'm already doing interviewing, I'd like to experiment with a methodology where I am analyzing written data. As I see it, there are two avenues I could take this: 1) I could have students write and create their own code-switching scenarios, or 2) I could look at samples of student writing to see if they are using code-switching in a variety of school assignments. Both of these appeal to me for different reasons. The first appeals because it would allow me to get more data on students' attitudes in an open-eneded format without the constraints of the scenarios that I've created. I also like that this approach may use some of the features of narrative research that we've been reading about. I like the 2nd approach because it would really address this question of whether code-switching is impacting students' school writing and, if so, how. Focusing on their school writing gives significance to this issue of code-switching for teaching and learning.