Hi Sara,

Here are a few ideas for research focus and methodology:

Research Focus:

The areas that you could focus on include one or more of the following:

1) Grammatical and lexical complexity:

You could carry out two studies on this area: 1) a comparison of the grammatical and lexical complexity of the texts written in the students' L1 compared to the students' L2.

2) A study of the development of grammatical and lexical complexity in students' L2 writing over time. This would obviously  require collecting later data to compare with your mid-term data.

Jan Philipp Thomeczek's question in Research Gate on the complexity of language received a number of answers that could provide pointers to your own research. See https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_can_the_complexity_of_language_be_measured. You will see that some of the answers refer to specific means of measuring language complexity and or to specific books/articles which could be of value.

It might also be useful for you to contact Jan Philipp to see how he has progressed in his research. While, Jan Philipp's research focus -political texts- is very different from your own, some aspects of his methodology and/ or findings may be of relevance to you.

2) Developmental research into L2 learners' use of specific vocabulary, structures and patterns over time.

Ideas for the language areas that you could look at in terms of interlanguage development and/or for appropriate research methodologies can be gathered from studies in your own area, bilingual education, and a range of other areas including: error analysis (Corder, Ellis etc), usage based or emergentist approaches to L2 research such as pattern grammar (e.g. Hunston and Francis) and construction grammar (e.g. Tomasello) and different strands of learner corpus research-see e.g. A Bird's Eye View of Learner Corpus Research by Sylvian Granger, downloadable from Research Gate.

3) Discourse markers: a comparison of how they are used by your L1 and L2 students of German and English and/or a developmental study of the use of such markers over time by L2 learners of both languages.

Research Methodology

If you have the means and the time to do it, create a corpus or “set of subcorpora” of learner texts to enable you to carry out computer-assisted quantitative analyses of any aspect of the language that you consider to be important. I say “set of subcorpora”, because the corpus would obviously need to ensure at the very least separate analyses of the following: L1 texts from German students; L1 texts from “English” ( i.e British, American or whatever group you have) students. L2 texts from German students; L2 texts from English students.

Such quantitative analysis can perform two functions: it can enable you to substantiate the claims that you make on the basis of your qualitative analyses; it can reveal patterns which your quantitative analysis does not pick up on, leading to further research.

Wow, that's amazing, thank you so much for taking your time! I'll have a thorough look, certainly giving me some excellent starting points and food for thought. Very encouraging - you made my day! :)

I prefer the 6+1 Traits model from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory.  See the attached rubric.  

Thank you, that looks very useful as to guide qualitative aspects of the research. I'm far from having a solid research design yet, but i think I'll try to combine quantitative text analysis, pretty much as described by Chris, that I can compare between the groups (although I won't have giant case numbers) and also over time on the one hand, with guided observation (to also take oral communication into account).

Would any of you recommand a program to perform (parts of) the quantitative analysis?

Have a look at REF-N-WRITE scientific paper writing tool. This tool allows you to import text from previous papers relevant to the subject area in MS word. While you are writing your paper, you can just search for similar statements from other authors and inherit their vocabulary and language to improve your paper. It also comes with a library of academic phrases that you can readily use to polish your paper. Here is the link for the site.

http://www.ref-n-write.com

They have some nice tutorials here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf7qyyKtbyQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6hlXzqO3r4

https://wac.colostate.edu/jbw/v11n1/benson.pdf

https://www.tesl-ej.org/ej22/a1.html

Sara Thesen, Good Luck.