December 2005 Volume 9, Number 3 Contents | TESL-EJ Top Second Language Research, Methodology and Design Author: Alison Mackey & Susan M. Gass (2005) Publisher: Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Pages ISBN Price Pp xv + 405 0-8058-4249-7 $41.95 Second Language...
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December 2005 Volume 9, Number 3 Contents | TESL-EJ Top Second Language Research, Methodology and Design Author: Alison Mackey & Susan M. Gass (2005) Publisher: Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Pages ISBN Price Pp xv + 405 0-8058-4249-7 $41.95 Second Language Research is not a pioneer in the field of giving guidelines to conduct research on second language learning and teaching. But, this kind of book is rare enough to deserve a special mention, especially because of the pedagogical effort made by the authors to explain to the budding researcher, in understandable language, what research is and how it should be done (and not done). James Dean Brown did this for me years ago, and for this I am eternally grateful to him. "[I]n its most basic and simplest form, research is a way of finding out answers to questions" (p. 1) declare the authors at the beginning of the first chapter. This may sound like a truism, but the very simplicity of the definition describes exactly what a language teache
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