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Speech Communication

Final Theses

Information about final theses

General information/requirements

The Chair of Speech Communication provides (first) reviewers (examiners, supervisors) for final theses completed in the Culture and Technology - Language and Communication, B.A. and Language and Communication - Applied Communication and Linguistics, M.A. degree programs, provided you meet the following requirements:

  • You are studying in one of these degree programs.
  • You have acquired the credit points required to register the final thesis (120 for the BA, 60 for the MA; refer to the respective study and examination regulations for details)

Requirements of the examination regulations

The TU Berlin General Study and Examination Regulations (AllgStuPO), particularly Section 46, as well as the relevant study and examination regulations for your degree program (BA, Section 12; MA, Section 11) are legally binding. The procedure for final theses is as follows:

  1. You choose a first reviewer (an academic chair).
  2. You narrow down your topic with your first reviewer.
  3. You may also discuss who could serve as your second reviewer.
  4. Register your thesis with exam team IB 3; the form is available from the Examination Office (important information about the bachelor’s thesis and master’s thesis as well as general information from the Examination Office).
  5. The first reviewer assigns a title to your thesis and suggests a second reviewer. Theses and thesis titles are assigned on the basis of the feasibility of completing the work within the writing period (8 weeks for BA, 6 months for MA) and of comparability between candidates.
  6. The examination board/dean of studies approves the title and the second reviewer.
  7. The Examination Office confirms the title of your thesis and informs you of the submission deadline; the writing period begins.

Types of final theses

  • Your final thesis should primarily focus on spoken language.
  • It must be an empirical work (and include your own data collection).
  • Sendlmeier’s method approach (Klassische Sendlmeier‘sche Methodische Dreiklang) can be useful for
    • Listener perception
    • Acoustic measurements
    • Analyzing statistical correlations

Requirements

  • Clearly cite direct quotations
  • Support claims with references
  • Full bibliography (APA format or similar)
  • Only pictures may be used as images; text or tables as screenshots are NOT permitted
  • Special formatting for code
  • Clearly present your results in a table
  • Observe the page limit (includes references, images, tables, excludes annexes, cf. study and examination regulations:
    • Master’s theses may not exceed 80 A4 pages
    • Bachelor’s theses may not exceed 25 A4 pages
  • Workload, cf. study and examination regulations:
    • MA: 30 credit points, approximately 900 hours
    • BA: 10 credit points, approximately 300 hours

Tips for finding a topic

This page contains possible topics and tasks you can explore when writing your final thesis at the Chair of Speech Communication.

Proposed topics

Our instructors have developed specific topics you can choose for your final thesis.

Tips

Prepare an exposé

Pros

  • Communicating with your supervisor
  • Polishing your ideas
  • Identifying inconsistencies and discrepancies
  • Using the exposé as the basis for your thesis
  • Realistically assessing timing and workload (by breaking it down into steps)

Cons

  • Spending time and effort on a topic you may not then pursue

Exposé content

  • Meaningful title
  • Brief summary (what do you aim to achieve?)
    • Hypotheses
    • Experiment
  • Rough structure, e.g.
    • Introduction
    • Theory/literature
    • Data collection
    • Data preparation
    • Perception experiment
    • Acoustic measurements
    • Results
    • Concluding remarks
  • Description of your planned results, e.g.
    • Data collection: Scope (number and duration), execution
    • Listener survey: Scope, type of questions
  • Schedule

Write your thesis in LaTeX

Pros

  • Now available in a free online editor: https://www.overleaf.com/
  • TU Berlin website offers an introduction to LaTeX
  • Free installation for all operating systems
  • Formatting and content are separate: Layout is automatically generated
  • “Standard” in scientific work
  • Collaboration with other authors possible
  • Based on plain text format: no issues with proprietary software

Cons

  • There is a learning curve, however
  • “What you see, is what you get” does not apply

Consider future publication

The following tips are useful if you are considering future publication:

  • Write your thesis in English to reach more readers. If your thesis is in English, you are required to also submit a summary in German.
  • If possible, use LaTeX, see above
  • It is best to use data which are free and publicly accessible to other researchers.
  • When collecting data, be sure to assign pseudonyms and have a license agreement signed.
    • Ideally, one of the following: My data are anonymized and are freely available for research.
    • Or: My data are pseudonymized and are available for research subject to withdrawal.
    • The Chair of Speech Communication has a licence agreement for subjects available if you want to share your data with our Chair.
  • Work “cleanly,” take care to closely follow all requirements

Pros

  • It may be possible for you or others to use the thesis again or further.

Cons

  • Requires more effort