Hi Gold,

I am sure you're all busy writing your first draft. I would like to remind you some important points about writing the Method section. Here they are:

In describing subjects, instruments, procedures and analysis, questions such as the following should be considered:
1. Who participated in the study, when and where (subjects)?
2. What were materials/instruments used (materials/instruments)?
3. What were the participants asked to do (procedures)?
4. How were the analyses performed (analysis)?

You can look at this sample method section taken from http://www.uefap.com/writing/function/method.htm:

Use Of A Writing Web-Site By Pre-Masters Students On An English for Academic Purposes Course.

A. J. Gillett, University of Hertfordshire

Method

¹Two groups of international students on a one-year Pre-Masters English for Academic Purposes course, each comprising 50 students were taught academic writing by different methods and compared. ²In each group there were 50 students from five different academic departments - computer science, business, engineering, life sciences and law. ³The subjects were selected from the second semester - Semester B - of the University of Hertfordshire International Bridging Programme in the 2004-2005 academic year. ⁴This programme accepts only students from a narrow English Language Proficiency band (IELTS 5.00 - 5.5). ⁵Thus, comparable language level among the test subjects was insured.

⁶The subjects were selected from the 250 students on the International Bridging Programme on the basis of performance at a satisfactory level in the Semester A examination. ⁷Students who had performed below the minimum level on the semester A examination were excluded. ⁸This criterion was employed to ensure competent understanding of the tasks and adequate motivation.

⁹One group - Group A - studied English writing in the traditional way in a class with a teacher. ¹⁰This class met for 2 hours each week in a classroom for 12 weeks and was supplemented with written homework assignments given by the teacher each week. ¹¹The second group - Group B - met together in a class with a teacher for one hour per week for 12 weeks and were assigned a homework task of spending one hour per week doing exercises from the UEfAP web-site (Gillett, 2005).

¹²The test instrument employed in this study was a revised version of the University of Hertfordshire English Language Writing Test (Roberts, 1997), which permits the assessment of academic written language performance. ¹³It consists of an academic reading text and comprehension questions, followed by a discursive essay on the subject of the reading text.

¹⁴Both groups A and B were given the same written examination at the end of the semester. ¹⁵The students took the examination under standard university examination conditions as part of their end of semester examination. ¹⁶The tests were marked using the following categories: task achievement; communicative quality; organisation; ideas, content and relevance; and grammar and vocabulary, by two experienced writing examiners and moderated in the standard way to ensure reliability. ¹⁷In this way it was possible to see the relationship between the students' main academic subjects, and the improvement in their writing ability depending on the teaching method.

¹⁸A 3 x 5 analysis of variance was used to test for academic department, method of teaching and language achievement differences.