Qualitative Research in Applied Linguistics

Over the past two decades, the number of graduate students and practising teachers undertaking research projects in Applied Linguistics has soared, and the majority of them are ‘qualitative’ in nature. Partly this reflects a general trend away from quantitative towards qualitative research in the social sciences, but it is also probably true to say that necessarily small-scale projects, aiming to explore a pedagogical issue of personal significance to the researcher, lend themselves more easily to a qualitative approach. However, as the editors of this volume make clear from the start, qualitative researchers have to meet standards just as exacting as those working in the ‘positivist’ quantitative tradition, and it is to help novice researchers understand and aspire to those standards that they have put together this valuable work. In a sense we are all qualitative researchers in our daily lives, Croker observes at the start of the opening chapter; when we enter a new social environment, for example, we watch other people, talk to them, notice patterns in their behaviour and speech, try to understand what they know and how they think, and then later perhaps describe our impressions to a friend. The essential difference in research is that these activities are done for a purpose and in a systematic way, and this requires training. The book organizes this training in two main sections, dealing with ‘qualitative research approaches’ and ‘qualitative data collection methods’, preceded by a couple of chapters on the meaning of qualitative research, and followed by a couple more on ‘practical issues’, though every chapter is eminently practical in its orientation. In the main sections, each chapter follows a set format: it starts with an ‘illustrative example’ of a student or teacher researcher using that approach or method, and the writers return to this example at several points to show how their ideas might be put into practice; there are then sections that explain ‘what is …?’ and ‘why use …?’; the next sections offer advice on data collection, data interpretation, and presenting findings, while a final section deals with common pitfalls. Every chapter ends with a summary, a list of keywords, post-reading questions, and possible tasks (of the kind which might be done by students taking a module in ‘research methods’). Inevitably this format leads to some repetition—issues such as ‘triangulation’ and ‘emic perspectives’ come up again and again—but the book is probably not intended to be read as a whole but in chapters, for instance by students or teachers planning a particular type of research study or using particular qualitative data collection techniques.