Feb 20 Polio Chapter 1

Question: Which peer review study appeals to you more, the quantitative or the qualitative one? Why? What kinds of research have you done so far?

Quantitative and qualitative studies are just like two sides of a coin; either has its own merits and drawbacks. I am more familiar with quantitative research methods because most of the research I have done is quantitative. Personally, I think quantitative studies are much easier for novice researchers to get on track—they have more fixed processes of conducting and reporting research. But these are what have been criticized so often in the field of second language acquisition (SLA), especially after the emergence of “social turn” in this academic area around 2011. I am happy to see such changes because SLA should not be reduced to statistical numbers and models; what we are investigating is the language communication processes of real agents in situated circumstances.

Paradoxically, the qualitative peer review study appeals to me more because I am a person who always like to try something new (or I am not adept at conducting a qualitative study, so it appears mysterious and charming to me?). The activity theory underlying Zhu and Mitchell (2012) is also more suitable for qualitative in-depth observations and descriptions about learners’ writing processes and their motives. However, as is mentioned in this chapter, the choice between quantitative and qualitative methods should be based on the questions to be answered or the phenomena to be explored. Moreover, I think it may be more interesting to switch these two approaches to obtain new perspectives of language learning, for instance, attempting to run quantitative analyses against the background of activity theory, and adopting qualitative techniques in psycholinguistics. These rarely occur in SLA, perhaps due to the difficulty with the implementation of theory on appropriate data analysis.