ABSTRACT
In Chapter 7 we looked at a number of ways in which applied linguists gather quantitative data. In this chapter we look at some of the tests that applied linguists use to analyse these data once they have obtained them. In other words, we will be turning our attention in this chapter to statistics. There are many ways of analysing quantitative data and your choice of statistical technique will depend on the kind of data you have collected and on the kinds of things you want to find out from them. Statistical analysis falls into two broad categories – descriptive and inferential – and applied linguists use both. In the applied linguistics literature, you will often come across references to various statistical tests. In this chapter, we discuss and exemplify some of the most commonly used statistical tests, using practical examples from a variety of applied linguistic studies. Our aim in this chapter is not to provide detailed information about specific statistical tests, but to show some examples of the sorts of questions that can be addressed through statistical studies and the types of things that statistics can and cannot tell us about our data. Applied linguistics students who come from arts and humanities backgrounds find the thought of doing statistics somewhat daunting at first. However, when you actually start using statistics, you will find that they are not that difficult to understand, and with the software packages that are now available, the analyses themselves are surprisingly easy to do.
