English - Free topic B: Methods in linguistics – research and practical applications

In this course, students will be introduced to the fundamentals of quantitative and qualitative research and various research methods to study language phenomena, including questionnaire/survey and interview methods, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, introspection, ethnography, and eye tracking and process-oriented methods. We will cover basic notions, such as the importance of emic and etic perspectives, the linkage between research questions and hypotheses on the one hand and choice of methodology on the other. Students will further learn about basic statistics and visualization of linguistic data. In addition, a number of tools and specific analytical techniques will be introduced, which are not just useful in an academic setting but are also transferable and applicable beyond academia. This course will enable students to account for different types of linguistic data, apply quantitative and qualitative methods in the analysis of linguistic data, critically discuss the limitations and potential of various methods in linguistics, and apply different techniques to present quantitative and qualitative linguistic data. The course will be hands-on and students will gain experience in practical application of methods of data collection and analysis in the study of language. Thus, the course, will be beneficial to students who aim to write empirical language-oriented MA-theses.