Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Language and Ideologies 15
using explicitly motivational methods of instruction increased student
motivation decisively. It is then assumed that this increase would, in turn,
improve attitudes toward language instruction, an improvement that
would presumably contribute to better outcomes for L2 study. Hence, this
contemporary work on language attitudes suggests that positive attitudes
can both contribute to and result from good and varied L2 instruction. In so
doing, it highlights the dynamic and reciprocal relationships between
learners’ and teachers’ individual attributes and experiences and language
learning success. Such studies illustrate the complex interplay between
learners’ attitudes, learning environments and processes, and positive
learning outcomes, an interplay also at issue in the more qualitative
approaches to research to be discussed shortly. First, however, let us turn to
another quantitative method of investigating language ideologies.
Corpus-based research on language ideologies
Another quantitative technique relevant to the study of language ideologies
is corpus linguistics, which takes frequency of language forms
rather than opinions of language users or learners as its source of data.
Corpus linguistics (Biber et al., 1998), the use of quantitative techniques to
identify patterns of use in large samples of texts, either oral or written,
provides a new and rather different quantitative method for research on
language ideologies. It is based on statistical analyses of very large samples
of different types of texts or corpora (a Latin plural) rather than on
respondents’ levels of positive or negative evaluation or strength of their
agreement/disagreement with survey or questionnaire statements related
to languages and language study. Corpus research begins by systematic
identifi cation of extremely large (with size defi ned by number of words of
running text, typically in hundreds of thousands or even millions) samples
of naturally occurring texts (e.g. written texts might comprise novels,
textbooks, newspapers, students’ essays or advertisements; oral texts
might consist of speeches, conversations, television or radio programs)
and assigning codes to the grammatical, lexical and discourse features
chosen. Corpus techniques can be used diachronically, to investigate language
change over time, or synchronically, to better describe similarities
and differences of text types from the same time period. The data of interest
for analysis then arise from the relative frequencies of particular linguistic
forms and patterns of co-occurrence and association (or lack
thereof ) between some forms and terms and others, patterns typically
identifi ed through correlation and factor analysis. Thus, unlike the deductive
research on attitudes, which uses individuals’ responses to predetermined
survey items as the source of data for analysis, corpus research
takes a more inductive stance; it uses patterns of linguistic co-occurrence
to generate quantitatively based factors that are then interpreted in