Descripciones mejoradas de Syndetics:

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.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Introduction
• 1 Basic Terms. What do People Quantify?
• 2 Why do People Quantify Language? The Teaching/Therapy Reason
• 3 Why do People Quantify Language? The Research Reason
• 4 Overview of Four General Kinds of Approach to Data Gathering for Quantification
• 5 Data for Quantification: Fully Naturalistic
• 6 Data for Quantification: Quasi-naturalistic Interaction
• 7 Data for Quantification: Opinion
• 8 Data for Quantification: Manipulation
• 9 Maximising Naturalness in the Data-gathering Phase of Language Quantification
• 10 The 'Referencing' Dimension of Quantification
• 11 Overview of Scale Types: Simple Sources of Interval Scales
• 12 Scoring on Interval Scales: Counts of Various Sorts
• 13 Scoring on Interval Scales: Totals from Uniform Sets of Dichotomous Items
• 14 Scoring on Interval Scales: Scores Involving Rating and Weighting
• 15 Scoring on Interval Scales: Combined Scores of Various Sorts
• 16 Individual Rank Ordering
• 17 Ranking in Ordered Categories
• 18 Nominal Categorisation
• 19 Overview of Quality Issues and Reliability. Measurer as Source of Unreliability
• 20 Cases, Circumstances and the Measuring Instrument Itself as Sources of Unreliability
• 21 Overview of Validity: Measurer, Cases etc. as Sources of Invalidity
• 22 Specification of the Nature of a Variable and its Operationalisation as a Source of Invalidity
• 23 Indicators as a Source of Invalidity
• Conclusion

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

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).