Quantifying Language: A Researcher's and Teacher's Guide to Gathering Language Data and Reducing It to Figures (Multilingual Matters)

Linguistics is changing from a discipline in which 'those who count don't count' to one in which expertise in empirical research methods is essential. There is a proliferation of what might be called 'hyphenated' linguistics - areas such as psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, attitude research, applied linguistics, etc. which require this know-how. For the would-be language researcher this work fills a gap in the limited repertoire of existing guides to research methods and statistics for the linguist. In particular it provides for the first time an overview of ways of gathering and turning into figures data from a wide variety of subdisciplines of linguistics, with numerous examples and onward reading references. This quantification is the grass-roots activity of the empirical language researcher - one which, if not performed satisfactorily, renders even the most sophisticated overall design and statistical analysis useless. For the language teacher or therapist, the book places the 'language testing' that they may be aware of within the wider context of language measurement in general, and draws attention to some ways of measuring language that have been more associated with research, but are coming to be used also for pedagogical assessment. Further, since many teachers now also undertake classroom research of some sort, the attempt to survey measurement concerns of researchers and teachers in the same volume is timely.

Phil Scholfield has long experience of giving practical courses on empirical research methods and statistics tailored to the needs of linguists, and of advising undergraduates and MA and PhD students on data gathering and analysis aspects of their projects. He is currently involved in setting up a pioneering new MA program in Linguistic Research at the University of Wales Bangor. He was a member of the editorial board of the newly published Longman Language Activator and is a contributor to the recent Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics (Pergamon).