127
Research Methods in Language Issues ……………………………………
Part I
Preliminaries of Research
127
Research Methods in Language Issues ……………………………………
Chapter 1
What is Research?
What is research?
Curiosity is every part and parcel of mankind. Human beings are born curious. Right from the time little children learn to speak, they begin to ask questions and seek answers to their questions. It is this curiosity to which we owe most, if not all, of our present body of knowledge.
In their attempts to find answers to their questions, human beings experience and learn new things. These attempts have been one of the basic sources of human knowledge throughout history. However, the kind and shape of these efforts have changed drastically over time. Early mankind obtained information in some very simple traditional ways. Today, technology and modern equipment have made it possible for mankind to carry out rather complicated and systematic investigation of various phenomena. In simple terms, research refers to this systematic approach we use to answer our questions.
Sources of information
In the course of history, our ancestors accumulated knowledge in ways that were not always as scientific and systematic as today’s research conducted in well-equipped laboratories under strictly controlled conditions. The traditional sources of obtaining information include sensory experience, authorities, and logic.
A. Sensory experience
One of the earliest and most immediate sources of information is the personal experience we get through our senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, taste, and touch. Each of these senses is a valuable source of information. How do we know someone is at the door when the door is shut and we are inside? We hear the knocking. You are chatting with a friend on the phone. All of a sudden, you say: “I have to go now. The food is burning.” How do you know? You can smell. Even little Johnny, who is only six years old, knows that a certain food is more delicious than another. How? He can taste.
Despite its obvious value as a source of information, sensory experience has a number of shortcomings. The first problem is that information obtained through the senses is not always accurate; our senses sometimes mislead us. As an example look at the following lines. Are they parallel? See?! Your eyes misled you.
Moreover, the information we get through sensory experience is relative. Two eyewitnesses, reporting a car accident to the police, in all their honesty, may give two different or even conflicting accounts of what happened. This means that their eyes have seen the same thing differently. Or, put the forefinger of your right hand in a glass of hot water and the forefinger of your left hand in a glass of cold water. Obviously, your right-hand finger will feel hot and the other cold. Now take both fingers out and put both of them in a glass of luke-warm water. Although they are in same glass, the finger that was in the hot water feels cold and vice versa. In short, although sensory experience is a valuable source of information, the accuracy and reliability of the information obtained this way is not always guaranteed.
In addition, experiencing things to get information is not always a safe venture. Obviously enough, no normal parent can afford to let their four-year-old child to know what happens if they overthrow a kettle of hot water on their body by experiencing it. This kind of knowledge does not do the child much good since by the time s/he understands this, the poor kid also comes to realise that there isn’t much left of his/her life.
Finally, it goes without saying that not every piece of information can be obtained simply by the use of the senses. In fact, much of our present body of knowledge has been accumulated via some carefully controlled and systematic studies under rather special circumstances.
B. Authorities
Another way of getting access to information is to refer to authorities. Obtaining information through experience takes time. People can share experiences with others to save time. Instead of waiting for a chance to experience something, one can easily consult someone who has already experienced it. Experts and authorities in various fields are the people who have spent a considerable portion of their time studying certain phenomena. So they can be quite a reliable source of information. That’s why, for example, when we catch a cold, we consult a doctor. Everyone will agree that the doctor has specialized knowledge and experience, and that his advice is more accurate and reliable than someone without such knowledge and expertise.
Even expert opinion, however, cannot be regarded as mere fact. After all, experts are human, and humans are apt to make mistakes. In addition, the information provided by the experts might, for one reason or another, be biased. And sometimes, the information might undergo a complete transformation before it reaches its final destination.
For these and some other reasons, the information provided by the experts and authorities should be treated cautiously.
C. Logic
Humans are endowed with a God-given blessing called ‘logic’. By this, they can reason, think, and learn new things. Logic is of two types: deductive and inductive. Deductive logic moves from general statements of facts to more specific conclusions. For example, if you are to meet a person, named Mark, whom you have never met before, you already know that ‘Mark breathes’. This is because you reason that:
A : Human beings breathe.
B : Mark is a human being. So,
C : Mark breathes.
Or, you naturally avoid drinking from a bottle on which the word ‘poison’ is written because your logic tells you:
A : poison is dangerous.
B : Liquid X is a poison. So,
C : Liquid X is dangerous.
In both of these examples, sentence ‘A’ is called a major premise, ‘B’ a minor premise, and ‘C’ a generalization.
In case of the latter example cited above, your deductive logic saves your life, but it isn’t always as helpful. Sometimes, using false major and minor premises may lead you to wrong conclusions.
Only men have logic.
Women are not men.
Women do not have logic.
This is due to the use of a wrong premise. ‘Men’ in the first sentence means ‘human beings’ not the ‘male humans’. Even correct major and minor premises may also lead to false conclusions due to the fact that there are exceptions in nature. You know that ‘birds can fly’. Then you learn that ‘penguin is a bird’. So, you conclude ‘penguins can fly’.
Inductive knowledge moves from individual and specific statement of facts to general conclusions. In the afore-mentioned examples, we started with some general statements such as ‘poison is dangerous’, and ‘birds can fly’. But where do these statements come from? How do we know that, say, birds fly? We know that birds fly because we have observed many individual members of the bird family fly. Then we have made a general conclusion.
Sparrows are birds, and they fly.
Pigeons are birds, and they fly.
Crows are birds, and they fly. So
Birds fly.
Again it must be noted that because of our limited knowledge of nature, such generalizations can hold true only as long as there is no evidence to the contrary. Once we learn that penguin and some other birds cannot fly, the general statement loses its validity as a fact, or at least, needs modification.
Owing to the limitations of each of the above-mentioned sources of information, nowadays scientists, while still exploiting those traditional sources) employ scientific and systematic methods of obtaining information. Using the scientific method, scientists have explored aspects of the universe that were, for so long, unknown to us. On the one hand, they know many things about stars and planets that are millions of light years away from us. On the other hand, they have learnt how to bombard atoms, split them, and learn things about them which only a few decades ago were simply inconceivable. It is the scientific method to which we owe most of our present technology, and it is this method which we will focus on from this chapter on.
Goals of research
Scientific research is usually done for one or more of the following four purposes:
1. Description
2. Prediction
3. Improvement
4. Explanation
Each of these goals will be briefly looked at below.
1. Description
A good description of the nature of any phenomenon is both necessary and useful for a better understanding of the way it interacts with other phenomena, the reasons for these interactions, and the way(s) these interactions can be handled. In other words, before we can do anything about a phenomenon in a systematic way, we first need to know what it is. Therefore, the purpose of many researchers is to describe an event or a phenomenon. Many questions such as the following can be answered by description.
1. What is the sequence of morpheme development in Iranian children?
2. In which order do Iranian children develop their knowledge of tenses?
3. What percent of the Iranian teachers use the Communicative Approach in their classes?
2. Prediction
Usually, description is not the end point of research. Description may be necessary to achieve one or more of the other three goals. Prediction is one such goal. Descriptions may be needed for making predictions about the future. For instance, the description of the Iranian university student population will tell us things like the percentage of male and female students, the ratio of employed students to unemployed ones, etc. Such information may not always be valuable per se, but it proves quite useful in helping the officials predict what problems they might face in the future and think of solutions before it is too late. Suppose the description of student population in Iran shows that the ratio of female to male university students is two to one. This means that before long, the country will have twice as many graduates as male ones. So, the government needs to create more jobs that are suitable for females. Or consider weather forecasts on TV and radio channels. Meteorologists study and describe the changes in the earth’s atmosphere in order to forecast the weather.
3. Improvement
One of the major reasons why research is done is to improve the present conditions. Consider car-manufacturing companies. They spend huge sums of money on research projects annually to improve the quality of their products. Similarly, in the area of language teaching and learning, extensive research is directed towards greater efficiency in this profession.
4. Explanation
Earlier, it was pointed out that research originates in human curiosity, the desire to know the reason(s) for everything that happens around them. Men experience many new things, and intrinsically come up with many ‘why’s. In an attempt to find explanations for these new mysteries, they conduct research.
Characteristics of research
Regardless of the purpose for which it is conducted, research should have certain characteristics. It should be :
1. Systematic
2. Generative
3. Reductive
4. Replicable
5. Logical
1. Research is systematic
This means that at each stage of research, researchers follow a number of pre-established steps and procedures. When researchers publicize the outcome of their research, they intend to share their findings with others. Systematicity means that they should follow certain already-established regulations, known to other researchers, so that comprehension and interpretation become easier.
2. Research is generative
The word generative means ‘productive’ or ‘creative’. Research generates something. What? Questions. This may sound strange. If research is carried out to answer questions, how can it generate questions? Well, in fact it answers the question under investigation, but generates many other questions. Suppose you are conducting a research on the relationship between age and language learning. You have selected a group of young and a group of old subjects. You intend to compare their learning of English. While doing your research, you notice that the ratio of male subjects to female subjects in the two groups differs. This way a new question comes to your mind, “Does gender influence language learning?” You may also notice that the linguistic background of subjects in the two groups varies. Another question avails itself, “Does linguistic background affect L2 learning?” The more you try to answer these questions, the more you realize how many more questions there are yet to answer.
3. Research is reductive
This characteristic can be viewed from two perspectives: conceptual and practical. From the conceptual perspective, research reduces many individual statements of fact into fewer but more general statements. As an example, consider medical research. One research may arrive at the conclusion that a new drug (A) is good for curing the disease (D). Another research may end up with the conclusion that another drug (B) is also conducive to curing the same disease. The outcome of still another research may suggest that a third drug (C) has similar effects on the same disease. Now, comparing and contrasting the three drugs, researcher come up with the conclusion that the drugs A, B, and C have the element X in common. Thus, the three individual statements are reduced to a single statement, that the element X cures the disease D.