ABSTRACT
The statistical procedures discussed in Chapter 5 are designed for researchers to find relationships between variables. Such relationships are investigated by asking research questions, such as ‘are vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension related?’ (e.g., Guo & Roehrig, 2011), or ‘is proficiency related to use of collocations?’ (e.g., Laufer & Waldman, 2011). However, sometimes researchers are not interested in relationships, but in differences. For example, Doolan and Miller (2012) examined whether generation 1.5 writers make more errors in their English essay writing than L1 writers. In Doolan and Miller’s study, a group of generation 1.5 students (i.e., L2 speakers who have resided in the target-language country for an extended period), and a group of L1 English speakers wrote an essay based on the same prompt. Essays were rated, analyzed for errors, and then ratings and mean numbers of errors were compared between the two groups of writers. Kormos and Trebits (2012) investigated whether modality (i.e., written versus spoken) affected task performance by L2 learners. The researchers asked a group of EFL learners to describe a cartoon orally, and then a month later asked them to describe a similar cartoon in writing. Learners’ accuracy, fluency, syntactic complexity, and lexical variety were measured and analyzed for each description; the oral and the written descriptions could then be compared.
