ABSTRACT
One of the most rewarding aspects of teaching at the university level, for both teacher and student, is the opportunity to engage students in research. In addition to the educational benefits, it’s just plain fun, carrying the thrill of finding something novel in an assignment that could turn out differently every year. Though some of the issues in student-led data collection are the same no matter who’s involved, others are unique to the presence of a large number of enthusiastic but inexperienced assistants. Pedagogically, student-led data collection has a lot of potential. As part of a unit on dialect geography, students administered to friends and family a dialect survey targeting phonological and morphosyntactic variables in British English. Form-based data submission not only results in much cleaner data, but removes the hassle of having to download and save dozens of individual spreadsheets: the online form compiles responses in real time, and researcher can download them once the data collection period ends.
