Linguistics: Research Methods

This book is designed to be the essential one-volume resource for advanced students and academics. This companion offers a comprehensive and accessible reference resource to research in contemporary discourse studies. In 21 chapters written by leading figures in the field, the volume provides readers with an authoritative overview of key terms, methods and current research topics and directions. It offers both a survey of current research and gives more practical guidance for advanced study in the area. The volume covers all the most important issues, concepts, movements and approaches in the field and features a glossary of key terms in the area of discourseanalysis. It is the complete resource for postgraduate students and researchers working within discourse studies, applied linguistics, TESOL and the social sciences.

Corpora are ubiquitous in linguistic research, yet to date, there has been no consensus on how to conceptualize corpus representativeness and collect corpus samples. This pioneering book bridges this gap by introducing a conceptual and methodological framework for corpus design and representativeness. Written by experts in the field, it shows how corpora can be designed and built in a way that is both optimally suited to specific research agendas, and adequately representative of the types of language use in question. It considers questions such as 'what types of texts should be included in the corpus?', and 'how many texts are required?' - highlighting that the degree of representativeness rests on the dual pillars of domain considerations and distribution considerations. The authors introduce, explain, and illustrate all aspects of this corpus representativeness framework in a step-by-step fashion, using examples and activities to help readers develop practical skills in corpus design and evaluation.

The present volume is devoted to the study of language use in translated texts as a function of various linguistic, contextual and cognitive factors. It contributes to the recent trend in empirical translation studies towards more methodological sophistication, including mixed methodology designs and multivariate statistical analyses, ultimately leading to a more accurate understanding of language use in translations.

Language learning research aims to describe and fully explain how and why language learning takes place, but can fall short of its stated purpose. Systematic, rigorous research is needed if the growing field of language learning is to progress methodically. This book demonstrates and fully explains such a methodology. Given that research in language acquisition yields practical pedagogical implications, it is crucial that it is rigorous and accurate. This book offers a quantitative research methodology that relies on statistical analysis in order to make inferences and conclusions about language learning. Experimental research aims to understand differences between or within groups of learners under manipulated environments. It requires strict control of conditions, enabling interpretations with a low factor of error. Aek Phakiti provides step-by-step guidelines and underlying principles, epistemology and methodology, in a book that is essential for advanced students of language acquisition and language and education.

Crowley's voice of experience brings us the best practical fieldwork guide to date. Sensible, frank, and comprehensive, this book prepares beginning field workers for the rigours ahead and will save years of costly trial and error. N. J. Enfield This book is a comprehensive, practical guide to field linguistics. It deals in particular with the problems arising from the documentation of endangered languages. Deploying a mixture of methodology and practical advice and drawing on his own immense experience, Terry Crowley shows how to record, analyse, and describe a language in the field. He covers the challenges and problems the researcher is likely to encounter, offers guidance on issues ranging from ethics to everyday diplomacy, and provides full discussions of corpus elicitation, how to keep track of data, salvage fieldwork, dealing with unexpected circumstances, and many other central topics. "We all learn by our mistakes," he writes, "and I have plenty of my own to share with you."

The definitive reference in the field, this volume synthesizes current knowledge on writing development and instruction at all grade levels. Prominent scholars examine numerous facets of writing from sociocultural, cognitive, linguistic, neuroscience, and new literacy/technological perspectives. The volume reviews the evidence base for widely used instructional approaches, including those targeting particular components of writing. Issues in teaching specific populations--including students with disabilities and English learners--are addressed. Innovative research methods and analytic tools are clearly explained, and key directions for future investigation identified. New to This Edition *Chapters on genre instruction, evaluation and revision, argumentative writing, computer-based instruction, and professional development. *Chapters on new literacies, out-of-school writing, translation, and self-regulation. *Many new topics and authors, including more international perspectives. *Multiple chapters connect research findings to the Common Core writing standards. See also Best Practices in Writing Instruction, Third Edition, edited by Steve Graham, Charles A. MacArthur, and Michael Hebert, an accessible course text and practitioner's guide.

This is an engaging interdisciplinary guide to the unique role of language within ethnography. The book provides a philosophical overview of the field alongside practical support for designing and developing your own ethnographic research. It demonstrates how to build and develop arguments and engages with practical issues such as ethics, transcription and impact. There are chapter long case studies based on real research that will explain key themes and help you create and analyse your own linguistic data. Drawing on the authors' experience they outline the practical, epistemological and theoretical decisions that researchers must take when planning and carrying out their studies. Other key features include: a clear introduction to discourse analytic traditions; tips on how to produce effective field notes; guidance on how to manage interview and conversational data; advice on writing for different traditions; annotated suggestions for further reading and full glossary. This book is a master class in understanding linguistic ethnography.

The present volume is a broad overview of methods and methodologies in linguistics, illustrated with examples from concrete research. It collects insights gained from a broad range of linguistic sub-disciplines, ranging from core disciplines to topics in cross-linguistic and language-internal diversity or to contributions towards language, space and society. Given its critical and innovative nature, the volume is a valuable source for students and researchers of a broad range of linguistic interests.

This handbook compares the main analytic frameworks and methods of contemporary linguistics. It offers a unique overview of linguistic theory, revealing the common concerns of competing approaches. By showing their current and potential applications it provides the means by which linguists and others can judge what are the most useful models for the task in hand. Distinguished scholars from all over the world explain the rationale and aims of over thirty explanatory approaches to the description, analysis, and understanding of language. Each chapter considers the main goals of the model; the relation it proposes from between lexicon, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology; the way it defines the interactions between cognition and grammar; what it counts as evidence; and how it explains linguistic change and structure. The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis offers an indispensable guide for everyone researching any aspect of language including those in linguistics, comparative philology, cognitive science, developmental philology, cognitive science, developmental psychology, computational science, and artificial intelligence. This second edition has been updated to include seven new chapters looking at linguistic units in language acquisition, conversation analysis, neurolinguistics, experimental phonetics, phonological analysis, experimental semantics, and distributional typology.

This book offers a state-of-the-art guide to linguistic fieldwork, reflecting its collaborative nature across the subfields of linguistics and disciplines such as astronomy, anthropology, biology, musicology, and ethnography. Experienced scholars and fieldworkers explain the methods andapproaches needed to understand a language in its full cultural context and to document it accessibly and enduringly. They consider the application of new technological approaches to recording and documentation, but never lose sight of the crucial relationship between subject and researcher. Thebook is timely: an increased awareness of dying languages and vanishing dialects has stimulated the impetus for recording them as well as the funds required to do so. The handbook is an indispensible source, guide, and reference for everyone involved in linguistic and cultural fieldwork.

This is the first book of its kind to provide a practical and student-friendly guide to corpus linguistics that explains the nature of electronic data and how it can be collected and analyzed. Designed to equip readers with the technical skills necessary to analyze and interpret language data, both written and (orthographically) transcribed Introduces a number of easy-to-use, yet powerful, free analysis resources consisting of standalone programs and web interfaces for use with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux Each section includes practical exercises, a list of sources and further reading, and illustrated step-by-step introductions to analysis tools Requires only a basic knowledge of computer concepts in order to develop the specific linguistic analysis skills required for understanding/analyzing corpus data

Specifically designed for linguists, this book provides an introduction to programming using Python for those with little to no experience of coding. Python is one of the most popular and widely-used programming languages as it's also available for free and runs on any operating system. All examples in the text involve language data and can be adapted or used directly for language research. The text focuses on key language-related issues: searching, text manipulation, text encoding and internet data, providing an excellent resource for language research. More experienced users of Python will also benefit from the advanced chapters on graphical user interfaces and functional programming.

This is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the methods researchers use to study child language, written by experienced scholars in the study of language development. Presents a comprehensive survey of laboratory and naturalistic techniques used in the study of different domains of language, age ranges, and populations, and explains the questions addressed by each technique Presents new research methods, such as the use of functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to study the activity of the brain Expands on more traditional research methods such as collection, transcription, and coding of speech samples that have been transformed by new hardware and software

The only volume to offer hands-on information about the wide range of research philosophies, methods and tools used across linguistics, phonetics, and speech science, as applied to disordered speech and language.- Covers core topics for students undertaking their own research, including experimental and qualitative methods, sociolinguistics, corpus construction and analysis, data recording, transcription and digital analysis of speech, and speech imaging.- Considers the research ethics associated with working with people who have speech, language or other communication difficulties.- Includes a detailed discussion of the dissemination of research results, and advice on the writing of theses and dissertations, and on the writing and publishing of journal articles, as well the peer review process.- Offers students and researchers from a variety of entry points - such as linguistics, education, psychology, and speech pathology - an introduction to the scope of research in clinical linguistics and phonetics, and a practical guide to this interdisciplinary field

Research Methods in Intercultural Communication introduces and contextualizes the most important methodological issues in the field for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students. Examples of these issues are which paradigms and how to research multilingually, interculturally and ethnically.      Provides the first dedicated and most comprehensive volume on research methods in intercultural communication research in the last 30 years Explains new and emerging methods, as well as more established ones. These include: Matched Guise Technique, Discourse Completion Task, Critical Incident  Technique, Critical Discourse Analysis, Ethnography, Virtual Ethnography,  Corpus Analysis, Multimodality, Conversation Analysis, Narrative Analysis, Questionnaire and Interview. Assists readers in determining the most suitable method for various research questions, conceptualizing the research process, interpreting results, and drawing conclusions Supports students from start to finish with key terms, suggestions for further reading, research summaries, and sound guidance from experienced scholars and researchers

Attitudes towards spoken, signed, and written language are of significant interest to researchers in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, communication studies, and social psychology. This is the first interdisciplinary guide to traditional and cutting-edge methods for the investigation of language attitudes. Written by experts in the field, it provides an introduction to attitude theory, helps readers choose an appropriate method, and guides through research planning and design, data collection, and analysis. The chapters include step-by-step instructions to illustrate and facilitate the use of the different methods as well as case studies from a wide range of linguistic contexts. The book also goes beyond individual methods, offering guidance on how to research attitudes in multilingual communities and in signing communities, based on historical data, with the help of priming, and by means of mixed-methods approaches.

This is the first volume exclusively devoted to research methods in language policy and planning (LPP). Each chapter is written by a leading language policy expert and provides a how-to guide to planning studies as well as gathering and analyzing data Covers a broad range of methods, making it easily accessible to and useful for transdisciplinary researchers working with language policy in any capacity Will serve as both a foundational methods text for graduate students and novice researchers, and a useful methodological reference for experienced LPP researchers Includes a series of guidelines for public engagement to assist scholars as they endeavor to incorporate their work into the public policy process

Research Methods in Second Language Acquisition: A Practical Guideis an informative guide to research design and methodology for graduate students and scholars. Each chapter of this volume offers background, step-by-step guidance, and relevant studies to create comprehensive coverage of each method. Includes chapters by expert scholars on an array of topics, including second language writing and reading, meta-analyses, research replication, qualitative data collection and analysis, and more Includes feature boxes in each chapter highlighting relevant research studies, discussion questions and suggested further readings Utilizes research methods and tools from varied fields of study including education, linguistics, psychology, and sociology

Research Methods in Sign Language Studies is a landmark work on sign language research, which spans the fields of linguistics, experimental and developmental psychology, brain research, and language assessment. Examines a broad range of topics, including ethical and political issues, key methodologies, and the collection of linguistic, cognitive, neuroscientific, and neuropsychological data Provides tips and recommendations to improve research quality at all levels and encourages readers to approach the field from the perspective of diversity rather than disability Incorporates research on sign languages from Europe, Asia, North and South America, and Africa Brings together top researchers on the subject from around the world, including many who are themselves deaf

This single-volume guide equips students of sociolinguistics with a full set of methodological tools including data collection and analysis techniques, explained in clear and accessible terms by leading experts. It features project suggestions, troubleshooting tips, and data assessment across diverse languages. Explores an array of anthropological and scientific methods that cover the full spectrum of contemporary sociolinguistics, from the study of style and discourse analysis to the study of phonetics Details the types of data available, and explains collection methods ranging from sociolinguistic interviews to linguistic landscapes Provides comprehensive coverage of data analysis, subdivided into segments on linguistic and socio-cultural techniques, and linked to numerous languages Includes useful summaries, seasoned advice and troubleshooting tips, ideas for research projects, and a full directory of supplementary reading

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Research Methods in Applied Linguistics provides accessible and concise explanations of key concepts and terms related to research methods in applied linguistics. Encompassing the three research paradigms of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods, this volume is an essential reference for any student or researcher working in this area. This volume provides: A-Z coverage of 570 key methodological terms from all areas of applied linguistics; detailed analysis of each entry that includes an explanation of the head word, visual illustrations, cross-references to other terms, and further references for readers; an index of core concepts for quick reference. Comprehensively covering research method terminology used across all strands of applied linguistics, this encyclopedia is a must-have reference for the applied linguistics community.

Essays on social science methods topics, quantitative and qualitative" - a claim examination supports. Approximately 1,000 comprehensive, in-depth, entries, including references.

Eleven distinguished linguists reflect on their career-spanning linguistic fieldwork. Over decades, each has repeatedly stood up to physical, intellectual, interpersonal, intercultural, and sometimes political challenges in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. These scholar-explorers have enlightened the world to the inner workings of languages in remote communities of Africa (West, East, and South), Amazonia, the Arctic, Australia, the Caucasus, Oceania, Siberia, and East Asia. They report some linguistic eureka moments, but also discuss cultural missteps, illness, and the other challenges of pursuing linguistic data in extreme circumstances. They write passionately about language death and their responsibilities to speech communities. The stories included here--the stuff of departmental and family legends--are published publicly for the first time.