Planning an elicitation session
Linguistic Field Methods · Spring 2005

You will be running your elicitation sessions as part of a pair. Each pair of students will run one session. After every pair has had one chance, each pair will run a second session.

One class day before a day when you are running the elicitation, your elicitation plan is due. This consists of the following:

• A statement of what your general area of interest is -- what phenomenon, or phenomena, are you interested in, and why?
• Concrete things to elicit, broken down into subgroups if you have more than one part to your plan. I.e., what English items or sentences do you plan to elicit? If you plan to use pictures or background story-contexts along with your elicitation, have those planned as well. For some ideas, see the various field-methods questionnaires linked from our reading list page.
• You are not required to stick to your plan once the elicitation session gets going -- more interesting things may turn up. But plan as though you are going to use everything you design, because maybe you will.
• Try to use about 35-40 minutes of class time. This will leave about 10 minutes for other students to follow things up, perhaps at the end of the session.

By the next "analysis" day, usually the following Friday, you as a pair must submit one data summary (broad transcription encouraged unless new phonetic details turn up) and one analysis summary similar to the weekly write-up papers you were doing in Phase I of the course.