Denise O’Leary Heath Rose

 To equip you with the knowledge and skills to enable you to critically evaluate published research To improve your ‘statistical literacy’

 To introduce you to the basic concepts, experimental design and statistical procedures needed to conduct research  “scholarly or scientific investigation or inquiry” or as a verb “to study (something) thoroughly” Research is a way of finding out answers to questions What is going on and why?

 To provide hands-on experience in using the statistical package SPSS to carry out data analysis in Linguistics/Applied Ling/ELT/SLP Statistics is one way of finding out answers to questions What do we have and what do we want to do with it?

 Critically evaluate and constructively support… ▪ What are the research questions? Are they clear? Is there too many? Can they be answered? Do they contribute to the field of study? ▪ How will they be answered? Is the methodology suitable? Time constraints and sampling limitations. Instrument design and precision. ▪ Post data collection: what does your partner have and what can they do with it? What type of data do they have and what statistical methods should they use to tell the story? ▪ Does the story make sense? If not, why not? Identifying problems along the way - limitations of current research ▪ What else could be done? Avenues for further research…

MT – ways of researching that does not involve number crunching or statistics! HT – answering questions using statistical analysis and specifically the package SPSS. Timetabling MT: Wednesday 4-5 Room 3106 Wednesday 5-6 Room 3126 Timetabling HT:Wednesday 4-6 Botany Lab MT:Group 1: Weds 26 th Sept to Weds the 31 st Oct (AL/ELT) – 6wks Group 2: Weds 7 th Nov to Weds 12 th Dec (Ling/SLP) – 6wks