68 5 The Introductory Chapter
research questions are posed accordingly. Chap. 3 deals with the methodological issues
and research design providing the philosophical foundations, case study context (i.e. SA),
theoretical and procedural description of instruments used in the study to collect, present,
and analyse data.
In PART II (Chap. 4, 5, & 6), I present the results of data analysis of the place of FC in
policy, instructors’ practice, and pre-service teachers’ EFL learning respectively. PART III
(Chap. 7 & 8) contains the discussion, recommendations, and conclusions of the current
study. In Chap. 7, the discussion on the key findings is expanded and appropriate concepts
to integrate FC into EFL pre-service teacher education are developed. Based on that, impli-
cations and recommendations are drawn to inform the policy and practice of pre-service
SEFL teacher education. Finally, Chap. 8 contains the conclusions and reflective evaluation
of the study and suggests further research agendas.An examiner who read this would have a clear idea of not only how the thesis was
going to develop, but also of how the various parts of it relate to each other.
I suggest you call this section ‘Overview of the Study’, rather than ‘Method’
or ‘Research Approach’, even though it describes the method that you will use for
your whole research project. The difficulty is that most people use the word method
to describe the method used in the part of the total research program they have de-
signed themselves—their own surveys, interviews, observations, analyses, experi-
ments, and so on. They then often give Chaps. 4 or 5, which introduces this research
program within a research program, the heading ‘Method’. The point is that you are
in danger of using the word in two senses: the method used to develop the whole of
the report or thesis, and the method used for that part of the research program that
you designed yourself. I recommend that you reserve the word ‘method’ specifi-
cally for the part of the work designed by you, the researcher, and to use overview
of the study to describe the approach used in the whole project—which will include
historical reviews, reviews of theory and practice, accounts of the researcher’s own
work, and synthesis of all of these to permit conclusions to be drawn.
Research Questions and Hypotheses
Should research questions and hypotheses go in the first chapter? Some supervisors
would say that it was an absolute necessity; others that they should only be stated
after the background, and not before; others would tell you that they are not required
at any stage of a thesis (but they’re wrong). As you read other theses, and become a
member of a specific research community, you can make up your own mind on this
matter. If you asked me, however, I would tell you to at least make a general state-
ment of the research questions or a hypothesis in the first chapter, or alternatively,
make sure these are clear in the statement of your aim. Otherwise the examiner may
struggle to understand what the point of the thesis is, and an unmotivated reader is
an unhappy reader.
It is certainly true that research questions can only be generated after an area is
reviewed and gaps are identified. For many of my students, this requires that they
read widely and, in the process of reading and writing, sharpen their critical think-