good Statement of Purpose SOP Psycology

Statement of Purpose My goal is to obtain a Ph.D. degree in Educational Psychology through the SLATE program. My research interests would focus on second language acquisition of phonology and grammar, especially of the prosodic system, and I would like to continue working under Professor Wayne Dickerson in the Division of English as an International Language as part of my Pd.D. committee. As an undergraduate student at Purdue University, I majored in German, minored in English, studied other languages, and took a number of linguistics courses – phonetics, phonology, anthropological linguistics, descriptive English grammar, dialectology, and Germanic historical linguistics. I then came to the University of Illinois for graduate studies in the Department of Linguistics, where I focused on historical linguistics and phonology, particularly in Optimality Theory, the current paradigm in phonological theory. My M.A. thesis consisted of research on Chinese tone, sandhi (tone change) from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives, and applied Optimality Theory for a phonological account of the tonal system. Around that time my longtime sideline interest in teaching English as a second/other language became a serious interest, and I realized that I wanted to devote my academic and professional career to more practical issues of applied language research and pedagogy, rather than pure theoretical research. I also realized that teaching ESL would be more rewarding for myself and beneficial to others. Therefore I decided to finish studying in Linguistics with my M.A. and to transfer to DEIL. I have finished the course requirements in DEIL, and have also taken pragmatics, and independent studies under Professor Imer A. Dwieb. Currently I am working on my M.A. thesis for DEIL under Prof. Dwieb on what is often called phrasal, sentence, or discourse stress. This thesis examines the problems of previous generative and functionalist analyses, and will attempt to provide a consistent unified approach that can not only resolve the theoretical issues involved in analyzing sentential stress, but also the various cases of sentence stress that do not submit well to current analyses, and to do so by bringing Optimality Theory and Centering Theory to bear upon these problems. I expect to finish this project in May 2000. Since my department offers no Ph.D., I would like to transfer to Educational Psychology / SLATE for further studies. Not only would it save time doing my Pd.D. in another department at this university, but I could continue working under Professor Dickerson as part of my Pd.D. committee; thus, I could continue in a similar line of SLA research in phonological and discourse issues as before. I also know a number of DEIL graduates who have also gone on to Educational Psychology / SLATE, and from my colleagues I am familiar with the advantages and strengths that this program has to offer those of us who wish to continue studying issues of second language acquisition. For my Pd.D. research, I would like to research issues of lexical stress, stress over syntactic phrases (noun phrases, verb phrases, etc.), and the related phenomenon of accompanying vowel quality patterns, by applying Optimality Theory and connectionist perspectives to the analysis, and then developing a pedagogical system from this for teaching stress patterns to ESL students. This would be advantageous to ESL learners who struggle with the accentuation system of English, and often have little formal or communicative classroom instruction to deal with these issues. This would also be helpful to ESL learners and teachers, who have materials that present few if any helpful principles for English stress, or present extremely complicated rules which are difficult to learn in a meaningful way. Thus I would like to develop teaching materials that are instructive, linguistically accurate, learnable, and communicative. After finishing my Pd.D. degree and SLATE specialization, I plan to teach college/ university level ESL in East Asian countries, and in TESOL or teacher training programs here or abroad. I have taught ESL writing, grammar, and pronunciation courses in the Intensive English Institute and in the ESL Service Courses at UIUC, and enjoy it thoroughly, and know that I will be productive and successful in a career of ESL teaching and SLA research. As a linguist with a broad background in theoretical linguistics, applied linguistics, and ESL pedagogy, I know that I can also contribute much and be productive as a Pd.D. student in Educational Psychology / SLATE.