Research methods in Applied Linguistics: Quantitative data collection

Definition and description of the quantitative research, including types of sampling, types of experimental designs or how to write questionnaire items, among others.40 page

Research Methods in Linguistics - recenzja

"The book entitled Research Methods in Linguistics, edited by Lia Litosseliti, addresses the issue of research methodology that needs to be worked out before any empirical research is initiated. In the introductory chapter by Lia Litosseliti (p. 1) we can read that “linguistics is a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary field of study characterized by a diversity of theoretical, epistemological, and methodological approaches applied in different subfields (e.g., semantics, phonology, language acquisition), branches (e.g., experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics) and related fields (e.g., education, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, mathematics, sociology). […] As a heterogenous field, it has been in a continuous process of reformulation and bridge-building.” This diversity is reflected in the way the book is organized and structured as “it encourages readers to take a wider view of key approaches along the quantitative-qualitative continuum” (Litosseliti, 2018, p. 2). Apart from providing a thorough and comprehensive overview of research methods available in the field of linguistics (e.g., such as quantitative methods, interviews, case study research), the volume also critically examines the affordances and limitations of quantitative versus qualitative paradigms. In addition, it presents the value of the holistic and mixed methods research, and the need to push the boundaries of methodologies to incorporate crossdisciplinary perspectives (Litosseliti, 2018, p. 2), which makes this volume an essential contribution to the field of research methodology and a valuable resource for researchers, especially novice ones." (fragm.

Getting Started With COCA

In this assignment, students will learn basic methods in corpus linguistics, an emerging field at the intersection of humanities and quantitative social science. They will learn how to search large English language corpora (e.g., the 900 million word Cambridge International Corpus) to look for otherwise hidden patterns of language use. They will be able to track the emergence of new words, shifts in meaning in existing words, and note the obsolescence of some words. They will interpret their findings in light of how language usage reflects societal attitudes and social change

Statistical Literacy Among Applied Linguists and Second Language Acquisition Researchers

The importance of statistical knowledge in applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA) research has been emphasized in recent publications. However, the last investigation of the statistical literacy of applied linguists occurred more than 25 years ago (Lazaraton, Riggenbach, & Ediger, 1987). The current study undertook a partial replication of this older work by investigating (a) applied linguists’ general experiences with statistics, (b) underlying factors that constitute applied linguists’ knowledge about and attitudes toward statistics, and (c) variables that predict attitudes toward statistics and statistical self-efficacy. Three hundred thirty-one scholars of applied linguistics and SLA completed a questionnaire. Eighty percent had taken a statistics class; however, only 14% of doctoral students and 30% of professors felt that their statistical training was adequate. A factor analysis of participants’ knowledge of statistical terms revealed three factors: common inferential statistics knowledge, advanced statistics knowledge, and basic descriptive statistics knowledge. An analysis of participants’ attitudes toward statistics revealed two factors: statistics are important and lack of statistical confidence. Regression analyses found that a quantitative research orientation was the strongest predictor of positive attitudes toward statistics; nevertheless, participants also expressed support for qualitative research. Recommendations for improving quantitative methods in our field are made based on our findings

RHETORICAL STRUCTURE OF PROMOTIONAL GENRES: THE CASE OF RESEARCH ARTICLE AND CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS

This paper focuses on the rhetorical structure of research article and conference abstracts in Linguistics. The study employs quantitative and qualitative analysis and is based on a self-compiled corpus of abstracts from two prestigious linguistic journals (Linguistics and The Journal of Linguistics) and conference abstracts from the 49 th Annual Meeting of the international society of linguists Societas Linguistica Europaea. The results show that the key moves (‘Background’, ‘Purpose’, ‘Methods’, ‘Results’) are distributed fairly similarly across the two types of abstracts; however, the ways they are employed are not always similar. Two additional moves were identified in our data set (‘Niche Opening’ and ‘Announcing Position’), which signal different promotional strategies employed by researchers

Usage-based linguistics and conversational interaction. A case study of German motion verbs

Speakers’ linguistic experience is for the most part experience with language as used in conversational interaction. Though highly relevant for usage-based linguistics, the study of such data is as yet often left to other frameworks such as conversation analysis and interactional linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 2001). On the basis of a case study of salient usage patterns of the two German motion verbs kommen and gehen in spontaneous conversation, the present paper argues for a methodological integration of quantitative corpus-linguistic methods with qualitative conversation analytic approaches to further the usage-based study of conversational interaction

A Global Lexical Dataset (GLED) with cognate annotation and phonological alignments

This repository comprises a dataset developed from a subset of ASJP, in which all lemmas are presented in a broad phonological transcription, automatically annotated for cognacy, and phonologically aligned. Per-family NEXUS files with binary annotation of presence/absence of cognate sets are also available. The dataset is intended to facilitate prototyping studies and methods in quantitative historical linguistics