English Language Teaching in its Social Context

RECORDING AND TRANSCRIBING TALI< 341Quantitative and qualitative approaches to the analysis of spokenlanguageA quantitative approach allows you to represent your data in terms of numbers.You canmake a numerical comparison between talk produced by different people or duringdifferent events.When representing data that has been analysed using quantitative methods it is usualto display this in a table. Alternative forms of representation such as histograms or barcharts may be used to point up comparisons between people or events.Data may be analysed using prespecified categories of talk. Alternatively, as inJayalakshmi’s research, categories may emerge from close scrutiny of data, e.g. fromplaying, and replaying, an audio or video recording, or working slowly through atranscript. Such categories are not ‘naturally’ present in the data, but will depend uponyour own research interests.Representing talk in terms of numbers has the disadvantage that it is necessarily areductive exercise: talk is reduced to a set of categories; it is abstracted from its originalcontext; it is unambiguously pigeon-holed, masking the rather fluid, uncertain andnegotiated meanings that are evident when talk is examined in context.Talk may be recorded and analysed in a more open-ended way. Researchers adoptinga qualitative approach to recording can note down and explore any interesting aspectsof their data. What count as interesting aspects will depend upon the questions theresearcher is concerned to investigate, but sometimes points emerge that are quiteunexpected.Aspects of the data may only begin to make sense when mulled over and comparedwith other information, or perhaps discussed with speakers. Sometimes interpretationsmay change, or you may want to allow for a number of different interpretations.When presenting and discussing data that has been recorded and analysed using aqualitative approach, researchers frequently quote selectively from field-notes ortranscripts to support points they wish to make. Transcripts may be supported by adetailed commentary, as in Chapters 18 and 19.Such ways of analysing and presenting data allow the researcher to preserveimportant contextual information that affects the meanings of utterances, and also topreserve the ambiguity and fluidity of these meanings. The approach is selective in thattwo researchers may (legitimately) notice different things about a stretch of talk orprovide different interpretations of utterances. There is also a danger of unintended bias,in that researchers may notice features of talk that support a point they wish to makeand ignore counter evidence.to identify stylistic differences between different (literary) authors or different types of text.Wegerif and Mercer illustrate how corpus-based methods may be used with smaller amountsof data, and in combination with a qualitative exploration of language.Wegerif and Mercer drew on this combination of methods as part of an ongoing studyof exploratory talk in the classroom. They found that primary school children performedbetter on a standardised test of reasoning after they had been ‘coached’ in the use ofexploratory talk. They also looked at transcript evidence of the quality of children’s talkduring problem solving activities carried out before and after the coaching intervention.Extracts from transcripts are used to show that, after the intervention children spent moretime discussing problems, considered alternative solutions and eventually reached