Methodology Section of Research Proposal

¶ … local school district has recently implemented a program designed to support students who are currently in need of training in English as a Second Language (ESL).ESL students come from a country and/or culture where they speak a language other than English in the home. Not being native English speakers put these students at a disadvantage, both verbally and in written form. The school district would like to measure the effectiveness of ESL programs, and the benefits that the ESL program offers to the students who use it.

There are a few other issues that the school would like to see addressed in the study. These are the link between the program and overall academic progress, the satisfaction level that the students have with the program, and the satisfaction levels of other stakeholder as well (teachers, parents and administrators). The study will measure the impact the ESL curriculum has had on student achievement levels. The null hypothesis is that there will be a positive correlation between enrollment in the ESL program and student academic performance.

The independent variable is participation in the ESL program. The dependent variable will be student grades. These are quantitative figures that the school keeps. When combined with records of student participation in the ESL program, it can be determined whether or not students participating in the ESL program experience an improvement in their grades over time. The underlying theory is that the students will see improved performance because the ESL program will increase their competence and confidence studying in English. The study will focus on the first grade level.

The control group will be data from prior years. In those years, a different curriculum was used for ESL students. The district has data on the academic performance of those students. The district also has demographic data, and this will be evaluated to ensure that the control group and the study group are comparable.

The performance of native English speakers can serve as a baseline in the sense that it is expected the ESL program students will start at a lower achievement level than their native English speaking peers, but will see their academic performance move towards the non-native level over time. The study will be set in the school district. The reason is that each district in the area runs its own ESL program, and the study intends to test the effectiveness of this district's program, not ESL programs in general.

Thus, the population the study will be the students in this district. The sample will be done on the basis of convenience sampling from a students at various schools in the district, chosen at random. If the population is small enough, then the entire population can be studied, but the district has not provided specific numbers on the population size as of yet. The population will be only first grade ESL students. The ESL program itself will be implemented in the classroom.

Quantitative data will be collected using the test results and a baseline established by testing the English as a Second Language students at the beginning of the study, and then continued testing throughout the school year. Vaterluas and Higgenbotham (2009) discovered that once the research questions have been established the data can then be gathered from the appropriate sources using the appropriate data gathering tools.

Once the data has been collected, an analysis using verifiable research methodologies and tools will allow the researcher to view the data in order to determine trends and patterns. The specific tools needed for this particular study includes questionnaires and testing. Testing will take place using the Stanford English Language Proficiency Test which will be administered at the beginning of the school year, preferably, periodically throughout the school year. Grades will also be used. The two output measure reflect English language proficiency and overall academic performance.

The effectiveness of the ESL program on both will be tested. This step is important in case there is no strong academic improvement -- it is necessary to determine if a lack of improvement was the result of a poor ESL curriculum that failed to deliver language improvements or if other factors should be explored. The survey and questionnaires will be distributed at the beginning of the school year in order to prepare all necessary participants.

The quantitative methodology will use a Chi Square test with a scatterplot diagram to display the data. A scatterplot allows the researcher to test a wide variety of participants and plot their specific grades in a chart that clusters the information in a way that patterns and graphs are easily defined with the data. In addition, the Chi Square test would be ideal for this situation as it is designed to measure the relationship between two categorical variables.

However, the sampling distribution can be made to approximate a chi-square distribution as closely as desired by making the sample size large enough. In this case, students in English as a Second Language classes should constitute a large enough sample size (Bagdonavicius, 2011). After the data has been analyzed, the results will be presented both in written format and in PowerPoint format. It is extremely important that the participants' privacy is protected. The study participants are children, and the research will require access to.