As a beginning language learner, I would be curious to compare learning styles and strategies across English and Mandarin. I would try to study language learning for children growing up speaking only English and only Mandarin, and then compare language learners who were native speakers of one language and beginning to study the other. To simplify this process, I would focus on school programs and compare children and college students to understand prevalent educational strategies, although a similar study on self-teaching in the future could also be beneficial. This would also allow me to control for age (I would set different age ranges to group the data I collected and compare experiences across time). One aspect I would be curious about would be which elements of language learners seem to grasp more instinctively or easily (for example, in English, the order of types of adjectives is something people generally assume but cannot necessarily explain), and I would want to contrast those topics between native speakers and new students to see which concepts they began to struggle with in their second language acquisition process. This would mostly focus on grammar – specifically syntax. I could also examine phonetics and pronunciation, comparing which pronunciation elements were most difficult to learn. I realized how helpful studying phonetic anatomy was, but I had never been introduced to it before – I would find it interesting to see if there was a correlation between learning pronunciation in a similarly detailed way and increased improvement. The research would probably include surveys and quizzes designed to measure progress against the HSK and TOEFL fluency tests, as well as interviews with the students when possible, and I would create scales for ranking items like time to learn a new concept or perceived difficulty.
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