Analyzing language: Quantitative and qualitative methods

Language

French

Prerequisites

Students have successfully completed an introductory course in linguistics. 

Main themes

This course provides an overview of approaches, methods and tools in the research of language sciences. It aims to provide students with a good understanding of the terminology used in methodology, and to enable them to select, combine and use the appropriate tools according to their research objectives. 

Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit, the student is able to :
1	Present a critical overview of the specific (epistemological and methodological) features of qualitative and quantitative approaches and of the main methods of data collection in  language sciences (e.g. experimental methods, surveys, analyses of textual data, interaction analyses);
2	Characterise a particular research project in terms of the approaches and methods used;
3	Master a range of fundamental concepts related to epistemological and methodological issues (e.g. scientificity, validity, reliability; positivism, constructivism; problematic, research question, hypotheses; exploratory, confirmatory; triangulation, etc.);
4	Master the basic concepts of corpus linguistics (e.g. relative and absolute frequency, concordance, co-occurrence, collocation, etc.) and be able to use software tools to conduct basic research on a corpus of texts;
5	Master the basic operations required to organise, process and visualise data in a spreadsheet;
6	Master the basic concepts of descriptive statistics (e.g. significance, mean, median, standard deviation, variance, etc.) and apply them to data sets.
This learning unit contributes to the development and command of the following skills and learning outcomes of the ELAL programmes: 1.4, 2.3, 2.4, 2.6, 4.5, 5.6.

Faculty or entity

> ELAL