What is methodology?

The methodology is a description of how you have set up your investigation and how you have gone about the data collection. In the methodology you should describe how you collected your data. You need to give an account of the rationale that informed your data collection.

Types of data collection

Recording or photocopying of data (recording males and females in conversations, photocopying the cover stories of different newspapers or magazines)

Experiments (designing particular activities to test out a theory about how language works or is used, e.g. getting people to read a passage and then write about it at different time periods to see how their language memory seems to work.)

Questionnaires (useful for finding out about attitudes to language, what kinds of language people say you use, investigating meanings and interpretations)

Interviews (useful for collecting conversational data, e.g. to elicit dialectal speech)

Observation Study (collecting natural data by observing and recording what happens)

Case Study (the selection of a particular person or persons for study, e.g. to chart their language abilities, their accent or dialect)

When explaining and justifying your methodology you might like to discuss some of the following as applicable to your investigation:

• The principles used to select data: e.g. comparison/contrast
• How you  made your comparison/contrast clear
• How respondents were selected: characteristics/quantities
• How you  attempted to ensure data is natural
• How you  designed an experiment
• Why you  selected questions
• Why you  phrased questions as you  did

NB. You should avoid unscientific methodologies, e.g. I went to the shop and spent 10 minutes looking at the titles of magazines. You should also not spin out the methodology with unnecessary material!

Further Reading There is discussion of methodological issues referring to the types of data collection mentioned above in Chapters 12 to 16 of Wray A., Trott K. and Bloomer A. (1998) Projects in Linguistics. London: Arnold

Collecting data

Having decided your methodology you can now go about collecting your data. If you are collecting printed data then this may be quite straightforward: you just need to go to the source and make some photocopies. It is worth making more than one copy so that you can present a clean copy and have others that you can annotate and work on. If you are taping spoken data then there are a number of things to bear in mind:

• Have you got all the equipment you need: microphones, power leads, batteries, tapes and labels, recorder? 
• Do the know how to use the machine?
• Can you do a sound check to establish that the recording will work?
• Dictaphones make for less good sound quality
• Are there any environmental problems where you intend to record?
• Back-up copies of recordings should be made straight away in case of accidents
• A copy of the recording could be lodged with the teacher for safe keeping
• An edited version of the recording containing the extracts you are going to work on is necessary for final submission and is easier to work from.

Presenting the data

Once you have collected your data you must prepare it for use and for presentation as part of your final investigation.

Transcriptions (all recorded data must be transcribed)

• Transcription should be in a manner appropriate to what is being investigated: will an ordinary spelling transcription suffice? some phonetic transcription?

• Transcriptions should have line references every five lines
• A key to transcription symbols should be given at the start
• Spoken language does not have punctuation unless it was originally scripted in this way

Written data

• A clean and legible copy must be provided
• Questionnaires should presented as an appendix

Further Advice

Help on how to transcribe and examples of descriptions of data are available in Chapter 7 of McDonald C. (1992) English Language Project Work London: Macmillan
There are two helpful chapters on transcription in:
Wray A., Trott K and Bloomer A. (1 998) Projects in Linguistics      London: Arnold