From Topic Selection to Theoretical Framing: Insights for Curriculum Design in English Literature Education

Abstract

To investigate how undergraduate English Literature research proposals connect problems, questions, objectives, theory, and prior scholarship and to explore implications for research-writing instruction. This exploratory qualitative study examined five anonymized undergraduate research documents from an Indonesian university, restricted to their available Chapters I and II. A five-dimension analytical matrix supported within-case interpretation and cross-case comparison. All five documents identified research topics, questions, and objectives, but their conceptual connections varied. One document contained partly overlapping objectives; others called for clearer explanations of how analytical tasks, theories, and proposed textual evidence would support interpretation. Research-gap statements also needed stronger comparative justification. Across the cases, three interpretive concerns emerged: purpose explicitness, analytical explicitness, and contribution explicitness. The findings suggest possible problem-delimitation exercises, alignment mapping, theory-justification tasks, and comparative literature-review matrices. These strategies were neither implemented nor evaluated in this study. The study offers a bounded, document-based account of conceptual coherence in discipline-specific proposal writing, rather than an evaluation of completed theses or student achievement. The observations are restricted to the selected documents and cannot establish how widespread the patterns are or whether the proposed curriculum strategies improve learning outcomes.