Research Project

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Convenor: Ann Lewis
• Assessment: an 8500-word research project (100%)

This research project module provides an alternative to the dissertation module, allowing you to develop a topic that has particularly interested you in your MA studies in greater detail by defining your own research question, and writing an extended essay on this subject. This may be a more professionally oriented project, for example, in the case of teachers, allowing you to explore how the theoretical paradigms/topics you have studied as part of the MA will inform your teaching practice, as long as you have a clearly defined body of evidence on which to base your argument. Taken in conjunction with one of our higher-level language modules, which include the Research Project: Independent Literature Review, this forms a substantial body of writing at an advanced level appropriate to postgraduate study, demonstrating your ability to formulate research questions, situate your work within existing critical and theoretical frameworks, showing evidence of independent enquiry and/or a thorough critical examination of a particular topic.

By the end of this module, you will:

• show awareness of appropriate theoretical and critical frameworks for thinking about subjects within French-/Spanish-/Italian-/German-/Japanese-/Portuguese-speaking cultures, and about comparative and cultural studies within the context of modern languages, and be able to formulate research questions
• be able to identify new areas for research, situate a project within the existing critical context and engage with this critical context
• be able to demonstrate relevant factual knowledge about the chosen corpus of texts, images and/or other cultural artefacts or historical phenomena, their contexts and the issues under discussion
• be able to analyse the chosen corpus of texts, images and/or other cultural artefacts at a thematic, linguistic and stylistic level
• be able to work within historical and theoretical frameworks in the interpretation of the chosen texts, images and other cultural artefacts or historical phenomena.