Investigating English in Europe by Andrew Linn

Author:Andrew Linn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2016-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

5.1.2Methodology in practice

5.1.2.1Experimental techniques

The field of psychology has a long tradition of researching human behaviour through highly controlled experiments in laboratory conditions. The guiding principle of such studies – adapted from the natural sciences – is to isolate a particular variable in order that it may be studied free from external influences in a way that facilitates precise quantitative measurement. (It should be remembered that psychology is a relatively young discipline, and throughout much of its history it has been struggling to establish scientific legitimacy; one way in which psychologists have sought acceptance from the wider scientific community is through the use of that community’s positivist, reductionist methods.) This ‘scientific’ approach has been taken up widely within social psychology, and the previously mentioned MGT represents a key illustration of this tendency. A long-standing criticism of this approach (Tajifel 1972) is that it attempts to detach behaviour from context, forcing participants to make choices that may not be an accurate reflection of real-life, situated behaviour.

An influential example of a study in the experimental tradition, which nevertheless attempts to overcome some of the limitations of the genre, is Dalton-Puffer, Kaltenboeck and Smit’s 1997 study of the attitudes of Austrian learners to various English accents. In their study, they employed a modification of the MGT known as the verbal guise test (VGT). Here, rather than a single speaker assuming several guises, different speakers are used. The researchers overcome the issue of decontextualized speech appearing in a situational vacuum by providing participants with a task relevant to the setting of the study. In this case, the speakers read a short text on the subject of bilingualism and participants were told that they, as university language students, were evaluating speakers with a view to the subsequent publication of an audio-book on the topic of child language development. Maintaining an awareness of the limitations of the experimental approach, the researchers in this study were able to reassert some degree of contextual support for their experiment by predefining the situational context, thus eliciting more meaningful and engaged responses from the participants.

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