I've sent the first draft of my thesis

Alhamdullilah. I've already sent all the chapters to my supervisory committee members although I noticed some typo-errors here and there (ouch!!). I hope my main supervisor is happy with the content of the thesis. It took me quite sometime to write all the chapters. I did the collection of data, analysis of data and writing data all in six months. I pray to Allah that my endeavor is easy and smooth. My hubby helped me in compiling all the chapters. It was not a day work when it comes to paging, preparing Table of Contents, converting document from Words to PDF. Concerning converting Words to PDF, I learned that chapters, appendices and other doc. for thesis can be combined to make a complete thesis. I didn't know how to do this before (I am not IT savvy, but like technology).

On the day of submitting the draft, my husband and the kids stayed in the hotel since we didn't want to troublesome our in-laws staying in KL and Ulu Kelang. Luckily, the internet service in the hotel is free. The breakfast was not bad either. I guess this is made common in other hotels as well (wireless internet service). Right after the thesis was printed and bound, we headed home. The weather was very cloudy. So, we only stopped at my sister in law's house to perform solat qasr (maghrib and insya'). And of course, dinner that was pre-ordered. Her house is near to food stores, and hence, we ordered food for dinner.

What I can say is that, I feel bless that my attempt to send the first draft is realised although I'm not sure of the responses. I really hope, again, that my draft is accepted..and I'll make changes if they require me to do so. I received a sms from my friends telling me that her friend took a year for editing stuffs after her submission of the first draft thesis. I hope mine is easier and smoother.

Back to square one

I'm done writing Chapter 5. I guess I've described what I need to describe in the chapter. In the chapter, I guessed I've justified the findings of my study that I described in Chapter 4. Also, I relate them (findings) with that of findings from previous studies. It was a challenging task and required critical analysis to write one sentence to another. Now, I'm back to square one. In other words, at this stage, I need to check back all the chapters I wrote last time. First, I need to check Literature Review because I know there are so many things/ points to be edited. More importantly this chapter is not only about summarising but I also need to do "some critical assessment of material". Another "adventure" (***!!???) is in the making (*-*)

Writing Implication

What does implication for a study mean? I need to think of the implications of my study base on the findings I gathered. It has to be along these lines:

Implication of research 1

"If you are including a Conclusions/Implications section in your dissertation make sure you really present conclusions and implications. Often the writer uses the conclusions/implications section to merely restate the research findings. Don't waste my time. I've already read the findings and now, at the Conclusion/Implication section, I want you to help me understand what it all means. This is a key section of the dissertation and is sometimes best done after you've had a few days to step away from your research and allow yourself to put your research into perspective. If you do this you will no doubt be able to draw a variety of insights that help link your research to other areas. I usually think of conclusions/implications as the "So what" statements. In other words, what are the key ideas that we can draw from your study to apply to my areas of concern".

Source: http://www.learnerassociates.net/dissthes/#27

Implications of Research 2

1. what new knowledge will the proposed project produce that we do not already know?
2. why is it worth knowing, what are the major implications?

Implications of Research 3

It answers the question of how the research findings may impact on the topic and the field.

Phrases that might be helpful to support findings

While writing chapter 5, I find it difficult to produce sentences that 'sound' academic. Due to this, I analysed few theses to help me find the 'right' expressions to support my findings. Some of the phrases that I gathered from the theses were typed below. Hope this helps.

General Phrases
o the fact that in this study different kinds of contextual clues were relied on
lends support for constructionist hypothesis (Graesser, Singer & Trabasso, 1994) which claims that ...
o The finding supported a few studies for instance ...
o The above finding supported Nation’s and Scholfield’s...
o Moreover, the advantage of a dictionary was corroborated in a study of 293 Japanese EFL university students by Luppescu and Day (1993)...
o Such a finding about how the students approach learning L2 vocabulary supported Sanaoui’s (1995)...
o Some encouraging findings on this issue could be found in some 1960s research.
o Kachroo (1962) finds that ...
o Crothers and Suppes (1967) discover ..
o Similarly, Lado, Baldwin and Lobo (1967) present...
o Tinkham (1993), like many other researchers, finds that..
o Still in an interesting experiment by Nagy, McClure, and Mir (1997) state...
o There are a few studies which could be referred to clarify the situation. A thought could be given to a study done by Pillai (2004)...
o To understand such a phenomenon, a study done by Nation and Coady (1988) should be scrutinized...
o Several studies proved that rehearsal has some benefits to students’ vocabulary learning. Teh (2004) studied three conditions...
o This view was supported by research done by Wang et al (1993)...
o Similar results can be found in Seibert (1927, 1930)...
o Their progress was parallel with the one discussed by Henriksen (1999)...
o In conclusion, it could be safely proclaimed that the students’ breadth of vocabulary knowledge did develop although slow ...
o The findings above initiate some discussions ...
o This is similar to White (2008)’s finding but contrary to Gilligan (1989)...
o This finding was also consistent in this study ...
o This study confirmed the findings of the study carried ...
o The knowing events identified in this study were similar to the studies of ...
o The data in this study was similar to the data collected by ...
o This assumption is in common with Perry’s ...
o This organisational learning process support the theory provided by ….and concurred the study by ...
o The Malaysian aviation industry met Senge’s framework of learning in the five key disciplines ...
o The industry learning process agrees with Dogson (1993)...
o The…conforms to the organisational learning mechanism as discussed by Arvin...
o The process was also similar ...
o The findings from the study resembles findings from Minerva’s (2003) study...
o The study contradicts Hoang findings but concurred with the study conducted by

Implications for Theory or Practice

The acquisition process can also be explained by Bandura’s (1986) Social Learning Theory....
The research contributed to the study by ...on the …
The study addresses the literature gaps left by organisation learning practitioners in Duncan and Weiss (1989)...
In terms of theoretical implications, the study has provided ...
The findings of the study to a certain extent concurred with the formal learning model of Marsick

Writing Chapter 5

I started writing Chapter 5 since yesterday. In this chapter, I need to match the finding of my study with previous studies. It was a slow process for me because I need to find findings that can support my finding to all the research questions and hypotheses I have in my study. Moreover, if my finding contradict to previous studies, it therefore requires me to state why such happens. In this chapter, relevant theories need to also be discussed. This is another challenge. One analogy best fit to explain my situation is like I'm walking in the bushes. Slowly and carefully. In the end, I know I need to get out from there...

The spirit of writing needs to be consistent for I need to review Chapter 1-3 after I've done with Chapter 5. For that, I hope that Allah can keep my motivation alive because at the moment they are too many challenges. For the past 2 weeks I didn't send my youngest to the kindy because of ear problem. I send my eldest back and forth to school, wake-up all the kids, iron my husband's attire every morning, take the two kids to bath, then send again the eldest to KAFA. Due to this busy schedule, I remembered that I forgot to lock the door of my house one day. So these days writing was not really comfortable for me. However, I cannot give that as an excuse. Anyway, back to the story about my youngest staying at home, as a consequence of that, I often cook..this leads to another thing- a cooking blog. Errmm..if you're interested to look at the recipes I cooked these days, check this link http://maklangrecipesgalore.blogspot.com/...

Academic phrasebank- A guide to thesis writing

Academic Phasebank is a resourceful link to assist research writers in their theses writing. My friend gave this link to me and I found it's very useful especially to those who are thinking of the appropriate phrases for their thesis regardless in any chapter. Do browse this website http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/links.htm to benefit from it.

Determining normality of data

I learned new thing in my quest to know what normality test base on Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk is. Despite the fact that the normality test can be determined using the table, I can also refer to graphical representations of the few other measures. This is because Kolmogorov-Smirnov is sensitive and stringent. Han & Yoon (2008) in their book; Introduction to Statistical Analysis in Social Sciences write that normality test from the table (Normality test table of Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilkis) sensitive and stringent. For that matter, a researcher may use boxplot, Normal q-q plot and Detrended Q-q plot. All these have their own interpretations of how we can determine that our data is normally distributed. Once we are clear with these, we can now concentrate on outliers. In determining outliers, Pallant (2006) in her book SPSS Survival Manual; A step by Step Guide to Data Analysis Using SPSS, affirms that extreme value needs to be eliminated from the data. However, value with symbol 'O' may be eliminated or may not be. In deciding to retain the 'O' value, we need to refer to 5% Trimmed Mean. If the 5% Trimmed Mean does not differ that much from the mean values (need to refer to Descriptive table in the SPSS output) we can decide to retain the value. For instance 26.73 and 26.64 does not differ much, so we may consider to keep the value for analysis. Apart from that one must also look at skewness and kurtosis. If the former is lesser than 2 while the latter is from -1 to +1, distribution of data may be assumed to be normal (Hair, Anderson, Tatham & Black, 1998 in Fah & Yoon, 2008) as well.