To begin with, you must decide which area of linguistics you are interested in. You can decide between a paper in phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics or pragmatics. Once you have an idea of what area of linguistics you would like to explore, you need to think about the approach you will adopt. One can assume a theoretical approach or an applied approach but in both cases you will need to discuss data. Some examples of questions involving a theoretical approach or an applied approach are:

A. Theoretical: What rules of grammar are involved in the occurrence of phenomenon X? Can we develop rules to account for particular types of sounds, sentences, morphemes?Is phenomenon X related to the occurrence of a particular language universal/acquisition pattern/processing constraint?

B. Applied: How can the following rules of grammar be applied to teaching English, Spanish, or French… to high school students? What can be an appropriate methodology to teach/learn a particular sound/sentence pattern/morpheme? How can language universals and acquisition patterns help us understand phenomenon X and how can they help us develop solutions in the classroom?

II. Examples of some topics 1. Compare English to another language by focusing on some specific grammatical features of the languages: use of the imperfect, use of the subjunctive, etc

. 2. Analyze the style of a person or group of persons and the choice of certain linguistic features (lexical, sentence types or variety) in formal and informal situations.

3. Report on some issue related to language education in your local community

4. Compare two textbooks or handbooks featuring the teaching of one particular grammatical

aspect and using linguistics draw some conclusions about how they can be improved.

5. Gather information from books, journals, class observations, and interviews on how some area of language is taught in particular schools and evaluate the positive and negative aspects of those methods. No more than one of the three resources can be websites