I still feel far from actually narrowing down a topic—I tend to have big ideas and a hard time whittling them down into a feasible question. For now, here are some tentative thoughts:
In general, I am interested in world Englishes and classroom perceptions of them. I know that as a teacher I have corrected some student “mistakes” that turned out to be accepted in varieties of English that are not my own—this might not be too common, but for example: I corrected the student-written “at the weekend” and later realizing that in British English, “at” is the correct preposition in that phrase. I’m not sure what kind of research questions to turn this topic into, though. Perhaps I could look at the “damage” done by these types of corrections? Or the experiences of ESL students who speak/learned/write in one variety of English and then are immersed in another variety (speakers of Indian varieties studying in the U.S., for example)—and if and how their writing (and their attitudes toward writing) are affected.
Another, more specific, question I am interested in is when and how fossilization occurs in terms of ESL/EFL writing (and whether or not that differs in an ESL context vs. an EFL context). Knowing more about this might give new light to the error correction debate: when it is more important to correct, etc. Something of this sort could turn into a data study, but I think this sort of question would work better (toward a more comprehensible answer) by synthesizing research already done.
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