ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses different approaches to text analysis in the context of education research, including content analysis, theme analysis, conversational analysis, discourse analysis and corpus linguistics analysis of register. The aim is to showcase the wide range of operationalisations of the term text analysis and to inform about the implications that each may have for the research projects. Educational and social science research uses text as its main source of data. Irrespective of the approach selected, two stages need to be considered when looking at texts: analysis and interpretation. Discourse analysis is a different approach to textual data analysis that has been used extensively to look at changes in ideas and viewpoints over time. The chapter uses notion of text as register to capture the essence of the work that is undertaken by corpus linguists that, in general terms, do not use the term discourse in their discourse analysis.
