Category: Asked & Answered
-
Tissue rejection in language education
This post discusses what might happen when language teaching methods that are known to be effective in one context are transplanted into a different educational setting.
-
“Should I do a factor analysis?”
The following set of questions was sent to me by email from a colleague in a university in the Gulf: I am conducting a research where I am trying to compare expectations of the teachers and expectations of the students about English studies under five different categories. The questions are designed differently, but mostly on…
-
Dependent and independent variables, using SPSS, and minding one’s manners
This post will teach you three things: how to tell dependent and independent variables apart; how to calculate correlations; and how not to piss me off.
-
How many components must a complex system have?
Dispelling the notion that a Complex System must have many components.
-
Where can I find calls for papers for TESOL?
So, you have written or are planning to write a paper on language education, TESOL or applied linguistics – but do you know where to publish it? The easiest way forward usually is to submit your work to one of the many journals in the field. Another option is to consider an edited volume or…
-
Can a child left in the wild develop a new language on her own?
Rich linguistic input is necessary for first language acquisition. But what happens when it’s not there?
-
What’s a spamference?
As the pressure to present and publish becomes more and more intense, many scientific conferences have appeared, some of which are less legitimate than others. This means that it is becoming more important for academics, especially more junior and more inexperienced ones, to be alert to predatory conferences or, ‘spamferences’. In this blog post, you…
-
How to interpret ordinal data
Let’s assume that you have prepared a questionnaire, where respondents had to select among responses ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. For convenience, you have probably followed the established practice of replacing these responses with numbers: “1” for “strongly disagree”, “2” for “agree” and so on. How do you go about analysing these data?
-
Is it ever OK to cite your own work?
When writing a new article, it can sometimes seem pretentious to cite your previous work. This post explains when it is appropriate to do so, and what are some things you should watch out for.