My academic requirements for my PhD in Education-Applied Linguistics are now completed. I am now into exploring possibilities as to what to study for my dissertation to finally complete my degree. Your suggestion will be of great help. Thank you.
I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this is up to you to decide. Nobody can tell you what your topic of research should be.
In fact, a Ph.D. is usually considered a research degree (in my experience, at least), and thus to be able to get a Ph.D.-level job after graduation you would want to be able to show that you are able to function as an independent researcher and are able to think of and pursue worthwhile research questions. It will be very difficult to do that if you don't even think of your own topic for your dissertation. (The situation may be different, though, for someone who intends to look for an industry job rather than an academic job; in my experience, though, industry jobs that require a Ph.D. still want to see that the candidate was once able to do independent research, even if the future job will not require it.) I am sorry that your advisor or your program has not made this clear to you earlier, they really should have; and maybe the expectations in your academic community are different than what I am familiar with. But I have to be totally honest here, asking people online what you should research would not look good in any academic context I am familiar with, whether it be job committees reviewing your application, professors deciding whether or not to advise you, etc. I would be quite hesitant to devote my time to advising/mentoring a student who doesn't show enough interest in the field to think of his/her own research topic. I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but I think it's important you think about this before deciding whether to commit to the long and difficult process of doing dissertation research.
Feel free to send me a message if you would like to discuss this issue further.
You should think back to all of your courses. What are the ideas that you found to be most fascinating? This can give you the possible broad subject areas for your dissertation.
Then think about each and ask yourself "what are some questions I have about this topic?" These questions are about things that are not addressed (or not addressed well) in the academic literature.
When you have a few good questions, think about how you could design a research project to answer them.
This process will help you narrow down your possible dissertation topics.
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