Amazon.com description: Product Description: A companion for students undertaking a piece of independent research for the first time. It introduces the most commonly used tools and techniques of research and offers practical advice on how to choose a research topic, how to collect data, how to analyze it and how to write up the results. Sections on the main areas of linguistics discuss problems of research that are specific to the topic, and there are appendices on plagiarism, referencing, writing academic English, and the use of corpora, amongst others. The work seeks to bridge the gap between what research methods textbooks cover and what students need to know in order to conduct research successfully at undergraduate level.