Capstone Project: Publishing A Review Article
For your capstone project, you are asked to collaborate with classmates to conduct a research project and prepare an 8000-10,000-word manuscript for publication in the peer-reviewed scholarly journal World Englishes. Read the role descriptions below, choose a role you feel most qualified for, and write a 300-word pitch explaining why you’re uniquely qualified to excel in that role.
Co-Authors
Project Management: This team is responsible for human resource management, nurturing strong morale for all teams, logistics, technical troubleshooting, time management, setting and meeting deadlines, and ensuring timely deliverables. This team is responsible for vetting candidates for various roles, determining the optimal number of team members and manuscripts to be produced (1-4 manuscripts), designating team leaders, and surveying classmates to ensure each is satisfied with their role and makes meaningful contributions. The team must also support every student in their tasks and make sure that high quality work is produced even if sometimes managers do some of that work. If the entire class works on one manuscript, the topic will be: English, Economic and Labor Market Success, and Earnings. This team will most closely coordinate with the professor and submit the manuscript to the journal before the semester ends. Management team members must have strong leadership and/or technical skills.
Manuscript Writing and Revision Team: This team writes the 8000-10,000-word manuscript for submission to the academic journal. Members read the academic journal’s guidelines and coordinate with other teams assisting them to prepare a manuscript that meets expectations and has the highest chances of publication. Team members must be excellent writers, who write meaningfully, with concision, precision, and in an academic style.
Research Assistants
Literature Review Team: The literature review team is asked to carefully select, read, summarize, analyze, and synthesize 45 peer-reviewed academic sources other than ones we read in class. The sources can be books and/or online journal article(s) found through the Baruch library website and Google Scholar. Team members must be strong researchers, readers and notetakers, and be able to summarize and paraphrase information effectively and meaningfully.
Data Collection and Research Methodology Team: This team is responsible for carefully developing systematic criteria for selecting the scholarly sources for the review article. Team members must have strong analytical skills, ideally have a statistics and/or data background, and have strong organization skills.
Low-stakes Assignments
Reading Summary/Response: To meet this requirement of the course, at three different points during the semester, you will write a 150-word summary, a 150-word analysis, and 1-3 discussion questions about what you learned from class readings. During each day labeled as a “Reviewing” day in the course schedule, you are asked to bring to class a copy of a one-page handout with your summary, your analysis, and your discussion questions of the class readings completed up to that point.
At the top of your handout, write your name, the date, and a title of your summary/response. Thanks to your summaries, responses and discussion questions, we will use the information in the readings to debate some of the controversies surrounding Global Englishes, as well as analyzing examples of language practices. In addition to summarizing the main ideas you learned from the latest readings in the summary portion, use the analysis portion to critique concepts and models we study in class, add your own personal experiences or other information, connect course readings to your research on your topic, etc.
Final Presentations: Once the manuscript is written, it will be presented with a PowerPoint toward the end of the semester, followed by a Q&A. As a class, prepare one PowerPoint presentation of 15-20 minutes in which you present your capstone project’s results as you’d present it at a conference. The talk should follow the same organizational structure as the manuscript, stating the research questions, reviewing the literature, explaining the methodology, and finally introducing and interpreting the results.
Reflections: Submit a 500 word reflection in which you discuss 1. your contributions to the capstone project (e.g. share all guides you may have created, sections your wrote, summaries you created, data tables you may have created, etc.). Share them in a folder along with the reflection; 2. what you learned from the project and how it might be useful to you personally or professionally in the future. 3. Share one or more resources that you want me to give future students to make their experience easier with logistics and collaboration. These could be guides, documents, readings, etc.
Note: State in your reflection whether you wish to be included as a co-author. and if so, explain why your contribution is significant enough to warrant it.