A Comparative and Contrastive Account of Research Approaches in the Study of Language

Abstract

A research, in any field, starts with either a passing idea or a bee in one’s mind. Research in the field of language study, for instance, in all its branches, is a rich area where in hundreds of ideas and problems can be thought of and investigated. Needless to say, the study of language includes generally (linguistics: phonetic, phonology, morphology, syntax, comparative linguistics, etc.), (applied linguistics: pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, biolinguistics, clinical linguistics, experimental linguistics, computational linguistics, mathematical linguistics, forensic linguistics, corpus linguistics, contrastive analysis, discourse analysis, stylistics and error analysis, etc.), and (educational linguistics: language learning, teaching, and acquisition, etc.). Due to this, a certain problem or an idea in any of the above areas can be investigated from different points of view; that is, using either the correlational research approach, case-study, survey, experimental, ethnographic or the large-scale research approach. Actually, it is claimed in this paper that the above mentioned research approaches are different yet alike. This last point, however, is the major aim of this paper where in the six research approaches are compared and contrasted. At last, the researcher claims that no matter what a researcher in language study will follow since this approach fulfills the questions of his or her study logically, scientifically, and comes up with useful and fruitful bits of information and knowledge.

Keywords: Research approaches, Language study, Correlational research, Case-study, Experimental study, Survey study, Ethnographic study, Large-scale study, Comparative and contrastive studies.