Choosing the In-Depth Study Topic Under a Tight Timeline
Students must complete an in-depth study as part of school assessment. Each student chooses a topic connected to Armenian language and culture, researches it, and produces a written response in Armenian plus a short reflective statement. The school allots six weeks, with two lessons per week and one draft submission at the end of week four. Sona wants to study the language of Armenian diaspora newspapers in the 1920s; her family has a box of issues from Beirut. Her teacher, Mr. Krikorian, is concerned: the primary sources are in Western Armenian, Sona writes in Eastern Armenian, the orthography differs, and the nearest archive is overseas. Sona proposes to work from her family's 40 issues and to interview her grandfather. Another student, Aren, has chosen 'Armenian cuisine' and produced a plan that lists ten recipes with no research question. Mr. Krikorian has one meeting slot per student before the draft is due.
1. Evaluate Sona's proposal against the criteria an in-depth study must satisfy, and recommend whether Mr. Krikorian should approve it, modify it, or redirect it.
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Sona's proposal has real strengths and one serious risk.
Strengths: it has a genuine focus (the language of a specific press corpus, not 'newspapers' generally); it uses accessible primary sources (40 issues in the family's possession); it has a feasible oral-history component (her grandfather); and it connects language study to culture, which is the point of the task. A corpus of 40 issues is more than enough for a six-week study.
Risk: the orthographic and dialect gap. Sona writes Eastern Armenian; the 1920s Beirut press is likely Western Armenian with traditional orthography. If she plans to quote and analyse extensively, transcription and comprehension will consume her time budget and may crowd out analysis. The absence of an overseas archive is not fatal, but it means she cannot check gaps in her corpus.
Recommendation: modify, not redirect. Mr. Krikorian should approve the topic with a narrowed research question, for example: 'What lexical and orthographic features distinguish the Armenian of these 1920s Beirut issues from the Eastern Armenian Sona writes, and what do three representative examples show about register?' That converts the dialect gap from an obstacle into the object of study, which is exactly what the task rewards. He should also set a milestone: by week two, Sona must produce a one-page inventory of five features she can identify with confidence, so the risk is tested early rather than at the draft deadline.
2. Aren's plan lists ten recipes with no research question. Explain what is missing and how Mr. Krikorian should use his single meeting to fix it, given the six-week constraint.
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What is missing is a research question and therefore a focus. A list of ten recipes is a collection, not an investigation: it does not state what Aren will find out, what evidence would answer the question, or what Armenian-language work he will do. Under an in-depth study, the risk is that Aren spends five weeks cooking and one week writing, and the written response becomes description with no analysis.
Mr. Krikorian's single meeting should be structured around converting the list into a question in one move. He should ask Aren: 'What do these ten recipes let you claim that a reader could not learn from a cookbook?' Plausible questions include: how the vocabulary of a dish differs between two family sources; which loanwords appear in the recipe names and what they reveal about regional contact; or how the same dish is named differently across regions and what the naming shows. Any of these turns the recipes into evidence.
He should then set a week-two milestone: Aren must submit the question in one sentence, plus the names of the specific sources (named relatives, specific printed sources) he will use for at least six of the ten dishes. Recipes without an identifiable source should be cut. This uses the single meeting to impose a checkpoint rather than to solve the project for him, and it leaves the remaining four weeks for research and drafting.