Block I - Key Concepts of Research (4 seminars)
Seminar 1: Philosophy and research
Key components: inductive and deductive reasoning, philosophical frameworks for research in AL (epistemology, ontology, realism, positivism, social constructivism, pragmatism, phenomenology, modernism, postmodernism)
Seminar 2: Types of research
Key aspects: quantitative and qualitative research, basic and applied research, dealing with validity, reliability and practicality; hypotheses, research questions and „so what questions“
Seminar 3: Qualitative research methods
Key aspects: narrative inquiry, ethnographic research, case study research, phenomenological research, grounded research; evaluating research (coding, credibility, dependability, transferability)
Seminar 4: Critical reading: 3 sample studies related to the topic of this block (presented by the students)

Block II Quantitative Research - descriptive statistics and corpus methodology (4 seminars)
Key components: characteristics of data, ways of measuring, sampling, describing data, measures of central tendency, measures of frequency, measures of distribution, standard scores, visualising data (common and fancy graphs), common tools (Excel, web apps)
Seminar 1: The Dataset - finding and acquiring the data, processing texts and creating corpora or other datasets. Sampling the data.
Seminar 2: The Analysis - methods and techniques of measurement in linguistic data
Seminar 3: The Output - visualisation and visual exploration, tools and techniques
Seminar 4: Critical reading: 3 sample studies related to the topic of this block (presented by the students)

Block III Quantitative Research - inferential statistics (4 seminars)
Key components: experimental research, causal-comparative research, correlational research, inferential statistics, variables,
significance, effect size, correlation, regression, t-tests, ANOVA,
Seminar 1: Experimental research - numerical, categorical and ordinal variables, basic statistical principles of experimental design, basic assumptions for parametric analysis
Seminar 2: Running statistical tests - The logic of p-values and how to read them, understanding if variables are related using correlations and regression, understanding the difference between causation and correlation
Seminar 3: Comparing means - repeated measure t-test, independent samples t-test, ANOVA, ANCOVA
Seminar 4: Critical reading: 3 sample studies related to the topic of this block (presented by the students)