This is a practical guide to planning, conducting and presenting a sociolinguistic research project. Written in an accessible and engaging style, the book begins with a brief review of what sociolinguists study and how they study it, before guiding students step-by-step through the research process. It presents a range of qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis methods, including surveys, interviews and corpora, supported by examples from both published researchers and student projects. Drawing on the experiences of their own students, the authors provide supportive guidance on common areas of difficulty, such as framing questions, selecting participants and interpreting data. The final part shows you how to organise and write up your findings. Chapters are further enriched with hands-on activities and discussion questions.
This is an essential companion for budding sociolinguistic researchers with a desire to understand the linguistic landscapes around them and communicate their findings to others.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Introduction
Part One: Thinking Sociolinguistically
1. What is Sociolinguistics Research?
2. Getting Started with a Sociolinguistic Research Project
Part Two: Data Collection Methods in Sociolinguistics
3. Survey Data
4. Interviews
5. Participant Observation
6. Linguistic Landscape and Computer-mediated Data Sources
Part Three: Data Analysis Methods in Sociolinguistics
7. Qualitative Data Analysis
8. Discourse Analysis
9. Statistical Analysis
10. Corpus Data Analysis
Part Four: Putting it all Together and Finding Your Voice
11. Organizing Your Research Paper
12. Sounding Like a Sociolinguist
Glossary
References
Index.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Paul McPherron has taught Sociolinguistics at Hunter College, which is part of the larger City University of New York system for many years.Trudy Smoke has taught Sociolinguistics at Hunter College, which is part of the larger City University of New York system for many years.
Zusammenfassung
This is a practical guide to planning, conducting and presenting a sociolinguistic research project. Written in an accessible and engaging style, the book begins with a brief review of what sociolinguists study and how they study it, before guiding students step-by-step through the research process. It presents a range of qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis methods, including surveys, interviews and corpora, supported by examples from both published researchers and student projects. Drawing on the experiences of their own students, the authors provide supportive guidance on common areas of difficulty, such as framing questions, selecting participants and interpreting data. The final part shows you how to organise and write up your findings. Chapters are further enriched with hands-on activities and discussion questions.
This is an essential companion for budding sociolinguistic researchers with a desire to understand the linguistic landscapes around them and communicate their findings to others.
Vorwort
This is a practical guide to planning, conducting and presenting a sociolinguistic research project. Written in an accessible and engaging style, the book begins with a brief review of what sociolinguists study and how they study it, before guiding students step-by-step through the research process.
Zusatztext
As a teacher, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that your students will inductively figure out how research works simply by reading a lot of published articles, but having the mechanics of a project explicitly pointed out is an important but often overlooked part of that learning process … This book provides enough scaffolding that students can start to experiment with small projects, and figure out not only how research works, but also how they work as researchers.
