CLL Session 3:

L2 Research Methodology

LAEL, Lancaster University

Florencia Franceschina

Exercise: Investigating the effects of instruction

A teacher has drilled her students in the structure called 'indirect questions':
Do you know where my book is?
Do you know what time it is?
Did he tell you what time it is?
As a direct result of the drills, all students in the class were able to produce the structure
correctly in class. After class, a student came up to the teacher and asked:
Do you know where is Mrs Irving?
In other words, only minutes after the class, in spontaneous speech, the student used
the structure practised in class incorrectly.

1. What do you think is the reason for this misuse?

2. Had the lesson been a waste of time?
3. How would you find out?
4. What can you conclude from this example?

G&S (2001: 13)

Problem:
Is this competence or performance?
One can only ever observe performance, and
infer competence from it.
Then
How can one be confident that particular
performance samples are a reflection of
competence of the type we are targeting?

Towards a solution
1. Select tasks in a careful and principled way
2. Whenever possible, elicit more than one type
of performance measure and then triangulate.

Another common problem

Elusive language:
Some types of language are usually very hard
to find (at least in enough quantities)
Solution: Be as inventive as possible!

Exercise:
Devise a task to elicit many examples of
questions in children in a way that is as natural
as possible.

Methodological decisions
What do you want to find out about learner
language?

What design and data are appropriate

for your RQ?

Longitudinal vs. cross-sectional designs

Experimental vs. naturalistic data
Investigating competence vs. performance
Triangulation

What types of learners will you be working with?

Child vs adult
Literate vs illiterate
Educated vs uneducated
Level of L2 proficiency
Etc.
The above will restrict your choice of tasks.

Are you clear about:

the theory of language that you will adopt?

(e.g., functionalist, formalist, etc.)
the theory of language learning that you will
adopt?
(e.g., UG-based, emergentist, etc.)
Your answers to these questions will determine the
type of data/analysis that will be appropriate for your
study.

Types of analyses
What type of linguistic analysis is required?

Sociolinguistic
Linguistic

Psycholinguistic
Neurolinguistic
Etc.

What level of linguistic analysis is required?

Phonetic
Phonological
Morphological
Syntactic
Semantic
Pragmatic
Stylistic

This will determine the basic units of analysis that are

appropriate.

Warning
A common mistake is to assume to accuracy (i.e., target-like
behaviour) is the only relevant criterion in interlanguage
analysis
However, other criteria can also be informative, such as

Decrease incomplete absence of an L2 feature

Increase in attempts at expressing that L2 feature
Temporary oversuppliance of an L2 feature
Increased accuracy

Types of data
Exercise: Classifying tasks and data

Tools for analysis

Transcription

conventions
(e.g. LIDES manual http://talkbank
.org/data/LIDES/
CLAN (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu)
Wordsmith, etc.
Statistics
Psychological testing
(e.g., working memory tests)

Some commonly used techniques

for analysis

SOC
TLU
MLU (mean length of utterance)
MLS (mean length of sentence)
MTUL (mean T-unit length)
Type/token ratio

Exercise: Trying out SOC and TLU

Resources
1. Corpora
CHILDES
http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/data/
ICLE
(International Corpus of Learner English; see Graeme Hughes
about access)
2. Other
Linguist-List web site
http://www.linguistlist.org
SLARG links page
http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/florencia/slarg/links.htm

Reading

Gass, S. and L. Selinker 2001: Second language

acquisition. An introductory course. (2nd edition)
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. (Chapter 2)