This page contains some ideas for projects in Vocabulary Acquisition. These ideas are things that I would have liked to do if I hadn't retired in 2010. If you want to discuss any of these ideas, please feel free to contact me. Some of these projects might be suitable for PhD level work. If this is what you are interested in, please note that I won't be able to offer you formal supervision for your thesis, but am happy to give you informal advice for free. Most of these projects are NOT suitable for MA projects - they are all a bit off the wall, and develop some ideas that are not at all mainstream thinking. You pick them up at your peril! _lognostics runs a small grants scheme which can provide start-up funding for interesting research projects.
posted: 25.06.11	Word association networks in L2 learners Most studies of word association in L2 learners rely on a very small number of stimulus words, testing these words out with relatively large numbers of subjects. I have been working for a while on a complete inventory of the word associations made by a single subject to a set of 900 stimulus words. Each possible pair of words from this set is tested and a log of the associated pairs is kept. Three questions arise from this: a) it would be useful to know how typical the associations made by my subject are. b) the testing process is extremely tedious, and it would be useful for someone to explore the data with a view assessing whether we really need to test all possible pairs of words, or whether a smaller network of associations is enough to reveal the underlying structure of the data. c) this study needs to be repeated with L2 speakers as subjects.	working on this idea Paul Meara: p.m.meara@gmail.com
posted: 25.06.11	Visualisation tools for word association networks The work described in the previous project generates enormously complicated networks of associations. It would be really useful to have a set of good visualisation tools that highlighted the important features of networks of this sort.	working on this idea Steve Williams: s.j.williams@swansea.ac.uk
posted: 25.06.11	What sort of L2 networks are implicit in Course Books I am curious to know what sort of word association network learners are exposed to as the work their way through a course book. This project involves building a network of semantic links out of the language material a course uses and working out just how adequate it is as a source. I am particularly interested to know what the structural properties of this network are, and how these structural properties change as the input increases in complexity.	working on this idea Eugene Mollet?
posted: 25.06.11	Can vocabulary overload serve as a predictor of dropping out in Adult Education classes? The idea behind this topic is that vocabulary overload might be one of the major factors that lead to students dropping out of language classes aimed at adult learners. Every course has an expected level of vocabulary uptake, but some learners are going to fail to keep up with the implicit targets. It is possible that these students are particularly vulnerable to dropping out. Two questions arise from this: Can we identify vulnerable students by plotting their vocabulary uptake rates? Can we reduce dropout by intervening with these students?	posted: 25.06.11 working on this idea no-one
posted: 25.06.11	Vocabulary size tests for Welsh Meara and Awbery 2010 is the second edition of a set of Welsh vocabulary tests based on the Yes/No methodology. This work has never been properly evaluated. It would be useful for someone to do a proper Rasch analysis on the items.	working on this idea no-one