Classes have ended. Finals are turned in. Grades or ‘marks’ as Singapore calls them have been finalized. Time for long walks at the Botanic Gardens and leisurely chats over coffee and gelato with friends. Right?
Well, yes, but there are many things to do still in the life of an academic once summer rolls around. Two things specifically: research and curriculum development!
Research
The summer is usually reserved for research. For university professors, much of their career depends on publications, grants, and presentations at conferences.
So, what does research ‘look’ like? It begins with noticing a problem, or seeing something new or different. Check to see if anyone else has noticed the same topic by browsing Google Scholar and the library database. Read literature, first broadly and then increasingly more narrow on your topic. Form some sort of annotated bibliography or note system that can help keep track of your sources and their main ideas. Some like to use library database programs like Endnote or Mendeley.
Time to decide your research question. Think of how you’ll answer it- through interviewing people? reading articles? handing out surveys? analyzing media? conducting experiments? This is part of your research method.
Begin to write! Research involves lots of writing and rewriting. Each discipline has its own preferred way to write research papers, but for social sciences (which linguistics is part of), the format usually is Abstract, Introduction, Literature Review, Methodology, Results, Discussion, and Conclusion. A Reference List follows and an Appendix if needed. Each section has specific objectives and content required. I teach a whole course on this!
Curriculum Development
Summer is also when course material is written and developed. Lessons are reviewed. Activities are made. Readings are selected. Videos are recorded. Assignments are made. This usually involves a team of instructors. A new textbook may be adopted or written, as my department does.
The Language and Communication Centre (LCC) writes unique course texts per class. Examples are related to Singapore and to the students specifically, such as Singapore’s hawker culture, or open-air food courts that serve a variety of local foods. The texts are also tailored to students’ disciplines. Since the LCC teaches across the university, students are from the humanities, social sciences, business, science, engineering, and arts. So, an academic writing class for English students may emphasize more description and argumentation while engineering students learn proposal writing.