This book is aimed at beginning researchers who want to work in the area of L2 vocabulary acquisition. A number of introductory books of this kind have appeared over the last few years, notably Schmitt (2010) and Nation and Webb (2011), but this book is very different from these volumes. It is not an introductory textbook, and it does not summarise large amounts of vocabulary research. Instead, it presents you with a set of computer programs that will allow you to do interesting research of your own.

In our experience, beginning research students are often left to their own devices when it comes to designing their projects. Some universities provide compulsory research training courses, but these courses are often not very relevant to the kind of work students in applied linguistics may want to do. Sometimes they provide a general introduction to research approaches (quantitative versus qualitative research, survey methods, ethical issues, and so on) and they very often contain large quantities of inedible statistics. What they do not do is to provide you with practical tools that you can use immediately. As a result, a lot of students end up trying to develop meaningful research ideas, and the tools they need to test these ideas at the same time. This is generally not a realistic plan for a research project.

This book is intended to provide readers with a set of research tools that can be used more or less out of the box. The tools consist of a set of computer programs that we have developed for students doing final-year undergraduate projects, or Masters' level research projects. Tools of this sort – which are typically not provided as part of a research training course – are useful because they allow you to sidestep the difficult problems of designing your own research tools, and let you concentrate instead on the deeper questions that the tools are designed to address.

All the programs in this book are written to run on the internet, and not on stand-alone computers.