ABSTRACT
Approaches to researching speaking are very eclectic and cover many fields in linguistics and applied linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, intercultural communication, and second language pronunciation. This reflects the fact that the spoken form touches many aspects of life and of society, and spoken language data are seen as relevant to a variety of research domains and research questions. These can range from the qualitative end of the spectrum of methods, for example, analysing roleplays using conversation analytical techniques with a view to understanding business negotiation in intercultural contexts, to the highly quantitative, for instance, a statistical analysis in a laboratory setting of how listeners perceive accent. The reasons for choosing one approach over another are perhaps best understood by beginning from the relationship between research topics, data, and the conclusions that can be drawn from these. As noted elsewhere in this book, there is a particularly interesting relationship between spoken language and theories of language. Our view of language is strongly shaped by the means we have to collect, describe, and then analyse it, and this is particularly the case in researching speaking. This chapter examines both quantitative and qualitative approaches to research questions in the domain of speech and discusses the role of speech data in relation to the methods used in each.
