Universidade Federal do Espirito Santo

Oral Communication
Professor Dr. Aurlia Leal Lima Lyrio
Francyne Gonalves, Vanessa Gomes Alves de Oliveira


Chapter 5- Approaches to researching speech Summary


There are many different approaches in research speaking. The spoken form
is linked to many aspects in life and many of its data is seen as relevant
to different research fields and questions. These research domains can range
from the qualitative to the quantitative. The qualitative, as an example,
analyzing role-plays by using conversation analytical techniques to
understand business negotiation in business negotiation in inter-cultural
events. The quantitative, a statistical analysis in an experimental setting of
how listeners perceive accent.
Something that affects what the researcher consider important, is the
epistemological stand-point. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that
studies knowledge.
Quantitative approaches are very prevalent in researching speaking. It
provides a well-tested and powerful framework for an investigation by
moving from pre-existing questions/ hypotheses to appropriate methods to
investigate these based experiments to elicit speech data and then analyze
this. As for qualitative approaches, it works from the inside of instances of
talk towards patterns and regularities and is able to uncover aspects that the
investigator many not have imagined existed. A very used method among the
qualitative approaches to researching speaking is conversation analysis (CA),
in which put high value to the analysis of real conversation to understand
how speakers create meaning and organize their discourse as social action.
Another approach is the theory-driven one, in which the discussion of
theories is the primary focus of the study. This study can be very influential
when it question aspects of speaking. In this approach, researchers have a
position and need to defend it. There are different examples of contrasting
approaches in researching speaking, such as Speer and Ito (2009),
Sandra Thompson and Elizabeth Couper- Kuhlen, Janne Morton, Blake, Wolf,
Clark and Krych.
Speer and Ito, in their paper Prosody in First Language Acquisition
Acquiring Intonation as a Tool to Organize Information in Conversation
(2009), present a comprehensive survey of approaches to researching first
language acquisition with a particular focus on prosody. It aims at convincing
the reader that what he is reading is under-researched. Sandra and Elizabeth,
in the The Clause as the locus of grammar and interaction (2005), the
authors present the clause as a fundamental linguistic feature in which
speakers orient interaction. It makes use of speakers behavior, how they
start a turn, or add an incremental phrase or utterance to an apparently
completed turn. It uses cross-linguistic comparisons, between Japanese and
English. Janne Morton, in Genre and disciplinary competence: A case study
of contextualization in an academic speech genre (2009), in which has a
qualitative approach. Morton takes as a given that the student architectural
presentation is a distinct genre. She compared presentations in two groups:
first and fourth year students and categorized them as successful or not
according to the perspective of their lecturer, without any additional
comments, criteria or analysis from the researcher. Morton suggests, the
capacity to draw on certain contextualization practices distinguished the
successful from the less successful presentations. Blake, in Potential of text-
based internet chats for improving oral fluency in a second language (2009),
follows a quantitative approach. The paper asks whether exposure to online
chat-room discourse would increase the oral ability of students in offline
settings. Wolf, in The effects of backchannels on fluency
in L2 oral task production (2008), uses a quantitative approach as well. His
paper asks what effects different kinds of listener response have in terms of
backchannels on oral production. Last, Clark and Krych, in Speaking while
monitoring addressees for understanding (2004), in which they use a
quantitative approach. They argue that theoretical frameworks that do not
take into account the effects on speakers of the availability of visual signals
provide a fundamentally incomplete picture of the mode.
There are some trends in applied linguistics that will have particular
significance for researching speaking. The first of these trends is the breaking
of some barriers between camps in the discipline, the acceptance of a less
adversarial, more eclectic, approach to language theory and respect for inter-
disciplinarily. The second is the effect of the World Englishes and English as a
lingua franca movements. It is a trend with which everyone who teaches or
researches speak-ing will need to engage at some level. Last one, the
consolidation of technological advances over a twenty-year period and the
incorporation of entirely new technologies have had, and will continue to
have, a major effect on our understanding of the spoken mode and how to
research it.