First small steps in my undergraduate dissertation (GRAL)

At the beginning of the term, we chose the topic and our GRAL tutor, and after that we got tangled in assignments and regular coursework. As a result, I haven't been able to do anything on my GRAL until this week, when after having finished this term's lessons we started our third school placement.

So far, I have read the GRAL guide again; I have read a bit of the website our teachers have created to give us support to do our dissertation; I have begun to create my document template for the dissertation (our GRAL tutor provided us with one, but since I am used to creating my own, I rather do it from scratch), downloaded the university logo and read about the university's typo (I wonder if we will be allowed to use it, as it is not mentioned in the GRAL guide); I have also installed the application which will allow me to search in our university's databases from my computer at home, something that I hadn't done in my new computer yet; and have searched on my topic in the ERIC database.

The most interesting things I found in the GRAL guide, besides the specifications for the written report and the poster of my future dissertation, were these two:

• One or more questions should be the starting point for the dissertation.
• The School of Education where I study my undergraduate degree in pre-primary teacher education aims to create reflective teachers.

Bearing in mind that my dissertation topic is storytelling (vast and vague, so far), I have been thinking about the questions that could be the starting point for it. For now, this is what I have come up with:

1. How does storytelling help language acquisition?
2. What other roles does storytelling play in children's development?
3. What are the main trends regarding the use of storytelling in English teaching/learning?
4. What ingredients must storytelling have in order to maximise opportunities for language acquisition in general, and foreign language acquisition in particular?

I am aware that while questions 1, 3 and 4 help narrowing down the topic, question number two broadens it. Therefore, it is an issue I should not develop in depth, but I think it is useful to set the role of storytelling in education, and then narrow the topic down to storytelling related to language acquisition.

I am also aware that there should be a number 0 question: what is storytelling?, which is tricky itself, because storytelling is a common word whose meaning we take for granted, and those are usually the words most difficult to define. That was the first question my school placement tutor at university threw when we met to discuss how to link this last school placement with the dissertation, and I realised I had no answer for it.

Obviously, I have not narrowed down the topic enough yet, but I hope that once I start reading the articles I have downloaded so far, I will see things more clear.

Writing the questions has arisen a terminology problem: foreign language learning?, second language acquisition?, foreign language teaching? Which should I use in my dissertation? I guess it is time to ask my teachers guidance on whether they are equivalent terms or they are related to specific points of view.

The website our teachers created around the dissertation took me to action research regarding the options we have on the methodology for our research. Now, this is a very interesting topic, which I came across in my first year of the degree. In the unit on the theory and history of education we had a really good teacher who got us involved in cooperative learning, so each of us had to learn on a particular author and teach the rest of our classmates on it. I had never heard about any of the authors then, and when it was my turn to choose, I took John Elliott by chance. It was one of those enlightening coincidences, as I found the action research he advocated very inspiring. It is on number 37 of my long list of concepts and authors which make up my personal map on education (it might be a good idea to try to complete it and give it a more appealing form by the end of this academic year, by the way). Coming back to the GRAL guide, in my opinion this is what our School of Education means when they say they want to create reflective teachers. So, there I have another ingredient for my dissertation, which I will have to bear in mind while I do the literature review on my dissertation topic.