Learner Resource 8: Developing your research question
Once you have decided on the type of data you are going to collect, the methodology, and the general area of language you are going to investigate,
and assured yourself the plan is basically workable, with no serious ethical or practical issues, you need to develop a research question. A RQ is the
focus for your project, and all your analysis should be geared towards answering your question. It is therefore crucial to phrase the question correctly!
A research question for this kind of project is likely to start with ‘How’ or ‘What’. It is very difficult to answer ‘Why’ questions about language; ‘Where’ is
best left to Geography and ‘When’ to History.
A question that can be answered with ‘yes’ or ‘no’ does not give you much opportunity for extended discussion!
Examples of helpful research questions investigated by A-level students include:
How do family members adapt their language when speaking to an adult with brain damage?
How do teachers use language to establish control in the first five minutes of a lesson?
What are the differences between language used by a teacher with a Year 7 class and a Year 11 class?
How does a driving instructor use language during lessons with young learner drivers?
What changes have taken place in the language of children’s books in the last 100 years?
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Activity:
Look at the following possible investigations and have a go at drafting RQs for them:
Data
Methodology
General area of language
Recordings of students socialising
made in a college cafeteria
Naturalistic observation
Gender?
Primary school exercise books
Content analysis / corpus analysis
Child language acquisition
Problem pages from a variety of
magazines
Content analysis / corpus analysis
?
Questionnaire responses from a
variety of adults about use of slang
and taboo language
Questionnaire
Attitudes to language change?
Clips from a range of stand-up
comedians
?
?
Potential RQ(s)
from a boy and a girl aged 5-7
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