Researching Discourse

Book excerpt: This book offers a ‘how-to’ guide to conducting research in discourse analysis. Organised around different approaches to discourse analysis and working with different types of discourse data, the book will help students answer questions such as: Which approach should I take? What kind of data should I analyse and how do I set about collecting it? What consideration should I give to ethics? How do I make my analyses systematic and rigorous? How do I report my findings? Both qualitative and quantitative (corpus-based and experimental) methods are covered. Illustrated with far-ranging, detailed, and original case-studies, each chapter follows a consistent format that takes readers step by step through the research process, from design to implementation and presentation. Chapters can be read independently of one another. This is the ideal companion for any student undertaking research in discourse analysis within English language, linguistics, applied linguistics, and communication studies programmes.