Thesis supervision

Information for students interested in writing their final thesis under my supervision

I am available as a supervisor for BA and MA theses and Zulassungsarbeiten in English Linguistics. If you are interested in working under my supervision you should ideally have attended at least one of my Hauptseminare and written a term paper based on this.

In any case, you should contact me by email at least six months before you plan to submit your thesis. In this email, please state the topic you’re interested in and give a brief outline (like 3-5 sentences) of what you plan to do in your thesis. This could include a working title, a research question and/or hypothesis and the data you plan to use. We will then meet in my office hour to discuss your outline and if I feel you are heading in the right direction, we will agree on the general aspects of your thesis, such as theoretical frameworks, data, variables, etc.

You will then submit a research proposal of approx. 2,000 words (excluding references and adhering to the style sheet - see guidelines below), which contains the aims and objectives of your project, a short summary of the background to your study, your research questions and/or hypotheses, the data you use, methodology and expected results.

Here are some research areas and topics I would be particularly happy to supervise:

• English in Africa (both synchronic and diachronic, corpus linguistic approaches, grammar, lexis, phonetics and phonology)
• World Englishes (as for English in Africa)
• Scottish English
• Corpus linguistics
• Acoustic phonetics
• Sociolinguistics (sociophonetics, language variation and change, language attitudes)
• Youth language

Please go my GRIPS course for more detailed information on regulations and guidelines.