Research Methods in AL

Contemporary Qualitative Research in Applied Linguistics: Perspectives, Debates, and Futures 🏛 Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company 📚 Series: Research Methods in Applied Linguistics (RMAL) ✍️ Editor: Hessameddin Ghanbar — Islamic Azad University, Fereshtegaan International Branch, Tehran, Iran 🗓 Fortcoming: Early 2028 Foreword Sal Consoli — University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom Chapter 1 Introduction: Contemporary Qualitative Research in Applied Linguistics: Reorientations, Debates, and Methodological Futures Hessameddin Ghanbar — Islamic Azad University, Fereshtegaan International Branch, Tehran, Iran PART I: RECONSIDERING METHODOLOGICAL COMMITMENTS AND INTERPRETIVE QUALITY Chapter 2 Methodological Adaptation without Epistemological Drift: Rethinking Qualitative Innovation in Applied Linguistics Hessameddin Ghanbar — Islamic Azad University, Fereshtegaan International Branch, Tehran, Iran Chapter 3 Reconsidering Replication in Qualitative Applied Linguistics Kevin McManus — University of Pittsburgh, USA Chapter 4 From Codes to Claims: Thematic Analysis, Qualitative Content Analysis, and Interpretive Quality in Applied Linguistics Brian Hibbs — Dalton State College, USA Chapter 5 Making Lived Experience Analytically Visible: Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis in Applied Linguistics Rohan K. Willis — University of Auckland, New Zealand Chapter 6 When the Researcher Becomes Evidence: Memory, Interpretation, and Accountability in Autoethnographic Inquiry Bedrettin Yazan — The University of Texas at San Antonio, USA PART II: EXTENDING SITUATED, RELATIONAL, AND DYNAMIC QUALITATIVE INQUIRY Chapter 7 Nexus Analysis: An Integrative Methodology for Critical, Relational Inquiry in Multilingual Education D. Philip Montgomery — Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan Aiym Zhumabayeva — Zimran, Kazakhstan Chapter 8 Going Through Language and Place: Conceptualising Go-Alongs as Mobile Qualitative Inquiry in Applied Linguistics Yingqiu Chen — College of Foreign Languages, Fujian Normal University, China Louisa Buckingham — University of Auckland, New Zealand Chapter 9 Retrodictive Qualitative Modelling in Applied Linguistics: Tracing Dynamic Systems from Outcomes to Developmental Pathways Özkan Kırmızı — Karabük University, Türkiye Chapter 10 Quality Time: Designing for Kairos in Interventionist Qualitative Research in Applied Linguistics Jacob Rieker and Meredith Doran — The Pennsylvania State University, USA Chapter 11 When Pedagogy Becomes Data: Reflective Practice as Teaching and Qualitative Research Lena Barrantes-Elizondo — Universidad Nacional, Costa Rica Joshua Gordon — University of Northern Iowa, USA PART III: INCLUSION, EPISTEMIC JUSTICE, AND EMERGING METHODOLOGICAL RESPONSIBILITIES Chapter 12 From Ngopi to Sangkep Banjar: A Decolonial Framework for Relational Inquiry and Community-Governed Knowledge Co-Creation I Kadek Purnawan — Nanzan University, Japan Chapter 13 Designing Disability-Inclusive Qualitative Research in Applied Linguistics: From Conceptualization to Circulation Caitlin Cornell — Michigan State University, USA Chapter 14 Accessibility as Epistemic Justice: Feminist Disability Ethnography, Institutional Power and Inclusive Qualitative Research in Applied Linguistics Rebecca Fish — University of Lancashire, United Kingdom Chapter 15 What Counts as Evidence? Conversation Analysis, Participant Accounts, and Disability-Inclusive Qualitative Research James Alvis Carpenter — Tsurumi University, Japan Chapter 16 Beyond Procedural Ethics: Relational and Reflexive Decision-Making Throughout the Research Process Carlo Cinaglia and Emil Asanov — Florida State University, USA Chapter 17 The Methodological Footprint of Generative AI: Interpretation and Ethical Responsibility in Qualitative Research Pei-Jung Li — University of Georgia, USA Jessica Nina Lester — Indiana University Bloomington, USA Afterword Peter I. De Costa — Michigan State University, USA

Just out: Research Synthesis Methodologies in Applied Linguistics (edited by Sin Wang Chong, 2026) Open access! From the Benjamins website This edited volume offers a critical examination of research synthesis in Applied Linguistics at a time when such work is increasingly influential and increasingly misunderstood. The volume brings together reflective accounts of conducting and editing different types of research syntheses. Instead of a procedural manual, the book foregrounds the ethical and methodological decisions that shape research syntheses in practice. Across the book, contributors discuss opportunities, constraints, and tensions between standardisation and innovation. The book is written for researchers, postgraduate students, journal editors, and methodologists who are interested in research synthesis as a reflexive, situated, and collaborative form of scholarship. Preface John M. Norris | pp. xv–xx Section 1. Introduction: The origin and evolution of research synthesis in Applied Linguistics Chapter 1. The inconvenient truth about research syntheses in Applied Linguistics Sin Wang Chong | pp. 2–19 Section 2. Research synthesis in Applied Linguistics journals Chapter 2. Research syntheses in the international journal, Language Testing: Publishing trends and a drive to improve research reporting standards Talia Isaacs, Ruslan Suvorov, Xun Yan and Sofya Styrina | pp. 22–40 Chapter 3. Research synthesis and meta-analysis in SSLA: Evidence, quality, and ways forward Luke Plonsky, Yuhang Hu and Shujing Zhao | pp. 41–56 Chapter 4. Planning, doing, and disseminating research syntheses: An introduction to the new journal, Research Synthesis in Applied Linguistics Sathena Chan and Sin Wang Chong | pp. 57–66 Section 3. Bibliometric/scientometric review Section overview: What is a bibliometric/scientometric review? Sai Zhang and Vahid Aryadoust | pp. 68–71 Chapter 5. Methodological considerations in conducting bibliometric/scientometric reviews Peter Crosthwaite, Sulistya Ningrum and Jihua Dong | pp. 72–89 Chapter 6. Towards methodological rigor and analytical depth in conducting bibliometric reviews: A case study in Applied Linguistics Sai Zhang and Vahid Aryadoust | pp. 90–109 Section 4. Meta-analysis Section overview: What is a meta-analysis? Zhouhan Jin and Reza Norouzian | pp. 112–114 Chapter 7. Lessons from a modern meta-analysis: Methodological insights Zhouhan Jin and Reza Norouzian | pp. 115–133 Chapter 8. Learning through conducting meta-analyses: Supervisor and student reflections Stuart Webb and Su Kyung Kim | pp. 134–154 Section 5. Qualitative research synthesis and practice review Section overview: What are qualitative research synthesis, qualitative synthesis of research, and practice review? Sho Kato | pp. 156–160 Chapter 9. Supervising master’s students conducting qualitatively-focused research syntheses in a Japanese context Eoin Jordan, Jason Kushnir and Sho Kato | pp. 161–179 Chapter 10. Conducting a research synthesis on translanguaging practices in Anglophone classrooms Ming Sum Kong and Sarah Hopkyns | pp. 180–199 Section 6. Scoping review Section overview: What is a scoping review? Mara Fuertes Gutiérrez and Inma Álvarez | pp. 202–207 Chapter 11. Reflecting on scoping review methodology with a language testing example Sha Liu | pp. 208–228 Chapter 12. Mapping research evidence with a scoping review: A critical appraisal Inma Álvarez and Mara Fuertes Gutiérrez | pp. 229–246 Section 7. Systematic review Section overview: What is a systematic review Hamish Chalmers | pp. 248–252 Chapter 13. Conducting systematic reviews in Applied Linguistics: A case study and critical reflection Emily Oxley | pp. 253–270 Chapter 14. Challenges and practical solutions in Applied Linguistics systematic review: A reflective perspective Takumi Aoyama | pp. 271–291 Chapter 15. Sing a song of synthesis: Harmony and discordances in preparing a systematic review on the effects of songs in second language education Hamish Chalmers and Catherine Hamilton | pp. 292–310 Chapter 16. The opportunities and challenges of conducting a methodological review on the applications of Q methodology in Applied Linguistics Nicola Morea and Hessameddin Ghanbar | pp. 311–327 Section 8. Emergent and interdisciplinary practices in research synthesis Chapter 17. Human reviewers in an AI era: A methodological reflection on research synthesis Dongxia Nie, Qi Liu, Dominique Yixue Jiang, Rui Yan, Yi Zhang, Xin Fang, Jingying Hu, Xuechun Huang and Jing Yun | pp. 330–347 Chapter 18. Responding to the challenges of evidence synthesis: Some lessons from healthcare Anastasios Bastounis, Burak Kundakci and Andrew Booth | pp. 348–366 Section 9. Research synthesis in Applied Linguistics: Looking ahead Chapter 19. A principled approach to methodological agility in research synthesis: Putting ethics at the centre Sin Wang Chong | pp. 367-387.

Why I Keep Insisting on Equal Group Sizes in ANOVA and MANOVA 🧪📊 Every time I run a workshop on comparing groups, someone asks me the same question: "Does it really matter if my groups are not equal in size?" 🤔 My answer is always the same. It matters, but not for the reason most people assume. It is not about elegance or symmetry. It is about what happens to your Type I error rate when an assumption is violated. ⚠️ Let me explain what I mean. 🗣️ 1️⃣ Equal n protects you when homogeneity is violated 🛡️ We all know ANOVA assumes homogeneity of variances, and MANOVA assumes homogeneity of variance-covariance matrices, which is what Box's M is testing. 📉 What is less widely appreciated is that this assumption is remarkably forgiving when your groups are balanced. The F statistic simply absorbs the violation. 📉 Once your groups are unbalanced, the violation starts to bite, and it bites in a predictable direction: 🦷 * If your larger group has the larger variance, the test becomes conservative. You lose power and you may miss a real effect. ⬇️ * If your smaller group has the larger variance, the test becomes liberal. Your nominal alpha of .05 may in reality be .10 or worse, and you end up reporting an effect that is not there. ⬆️ This is exactly why so many of us are relaxed about Box's M in a balanced design and much more careful in an unbalanced one. Under imbalance, I would move to Pillai's trace for the multivariate test, and to Welch's F or Brown-Forsythe for the univariate follow-ups. 🔄 2️⃣ Unequal cells break the orthogonality of your factorial design 🧱 This one is often missed in our field. In a balanced factorial design, main effects and interactions are independent, and the sums of squares partition cleanly. ✂️ Once cells are unequal, the effects become correlated, and Type I, Type II, and Type III sums of squares no longer agree. 🤝 Your substantive conclusion can therefore depend on a default setting in your software that you never consciously chose. 💻 In a balanced design, this problem simply does not arise. ✅ 3️⃣ You are wasting participants 🏃‍♂️💨 For a fixed total sample size, power is maximized when groups are equal. Effective sample size is driven by the harmonic mean, so a 20 versus 80 split behaves roughly like 32 per group rather than 50 per group. 📉 You collected 100 people and you are getting the power of 64. In our context, where data collection is rarely easy, this is a real cost. 💸 4️⃣ A note specific to MANOVA 📌 MANOVA is even less tolerant, because covariance homogeneity and multivariate normality interact, and multivariate outliers do far more damage in a small cell. 🚫 At minimum, every cell must contain more cases than you have dependent variables, and I would want a comfortable margin beyond that, not a technical minimum. 📏 So how much imbalance is acceptable? 🤷‍♂️ My working rule is to keep the ratio of the largest to the smallest group below 1.5 to 1. Beyond 4 to 1, I would not trust the standard test without serious checking. 🔍 And a plea about reporting 📝 When I review manuscripts, I still see authors report a non-significant Box's M and move straight on, with the cell sizes buried somewhere or absent altogether. 🕵️‍♂️ Please report your cell sizes, your variance ratio, and which multivariate criterion you used and why. It takes two sentences, and it is the difference between a reader being able to evaluate your analysis and simply having to trust it. 🤝 If you are designing your study now, this is one of the few methodological problems you can solve completely in advance, at zero cost, by planning for balanced groups. 🎯 Once the data are collected, all we can do is manage the damage. 🚑

Just out: Statistical Modeling for (Actual) Hypothesis Testing (Tove Larsson & Gregory R. Hancock) Free to download until August 11: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009660877 Keywords: Cumulative knowledge building, empirically informed hypotheses, null hypothesis significance testing, structural equation modeling Abstract: By building knowledge in a deliberate and systematic manner, we can gain a more complete understanding of a given research area relevant to corpus linguists. Specifically, empirically informed hypotheses (i.e., hypotheses that result from a synthesis of findings from all relevant prior studies) play a key role in this endeavor in that they enable us to test to what extent generalizations from previous research are consistent with our results, or if we need to make adjustments to our existing knowledge or theory. In this Element, we aim to provide a practical and accessible introduction to select statistical methods for evaluating such empirically informed hypotheses. In particular, we illustrate techniques from the broader null-hypothesis significance testing framework (e.g., equivalence testing), and structural equation modeling framework (e.g., measured variable path analysis), with the goal of encouraging knowledge building in a more principled and systematic manner in corpus linguistics.

Ethics and positionality are not peripheral sections of qualitative research—they shape every relationship, decision, interpretation, and representation we produce. This poster offers a concise reminder that ethical qualitative inquiry in applied linguistics requires ongoing consent, attention to power and language, contextual privacy, reflexivity, and interpretive care. The central question remains: What am I making visible—and what might I be obscuring?

📚 آکادمی PREET برگزار می‌کند: 🔴 کارگاه *Doing Qualitative Research in Applied Linguistics* 🔹 مدرس: دکتر محمدرضا هاشمی 🔹طول دوره: ۶ هفته (۶ جلسه دو ساعته) 🔹 زمان برگزاری: از ۳۱ تیر ۱۴۰۵، روزهای چهارشنبه ساعت ۱۶:۳۰ الی ۱۸:۳۰ 🔹 دوره در پلتفرم *ادوبی کانکت* برگزار می‌گردد و دارای پشتیبانی می‌باشد. 📚 PREET center presents: 🔴  Workshop on Doing Qualitative Research in Applied Linguistics 🔹 Instructor: Dr. Mohammad R. Hashemi 🔹 Duration: Six weeks (six sessions) 🔹 Schedule: Wednesdays 16:30-18:30 🔹 The workshops will be held on the Adobe Connect platform and will have the support. 📣  Registration has started. (Limited capacity) ▪️ For more information and registration: Telegram: @preetadmin WhatsApp & SMS: +989359289774 ▪️For each participant in the workshop, a digital certificate signed by Dr. Minoo Alemi, Dr. Zia Tajeddin, and Dr. Mohammad R. Hashemi will be issued.