Ethical Considerations in the Research of Applied Linguistics
Ethical considerations in the research of applied linguistics
JIAN HE
Monash University
1. Introduction
In applied linguistics researches, there are unlikely considerable issues related to ethics or morality due to the harmlessness of the nature of language study. And in most cases, the participants are even able to get more or less some benefits from the research. For example, the participants may have an opportunity to gain certain knowledge of a target language via practicing the tasks in the research if they are second language learners. However, once the human subjects being investigated, there will possibly raise potential risks and discomforts from the procedure of the research, for instance, the disclosure of privacy could be damaging to a person. A qualified researcher must place a premium on ethical considerations when doing the research planing , even if it appears to be of minimally risky to the subjects. In this paper, I tend to discuss on some prominent ethical issues concerned by the literatures of research methodology and to address some of them with a combination of the recommended solutions from the literatures and my own reflections after reading those texts. After all, as it is difficult to transact all of the ethical issues in all circumstances, to highlight some ethical dilemmas and make the tricky points noticeable to the researchers seems to be worth doing. And hopefully, every researcher of applied linguistics finds a balance point between the ethical considerations and their willingnesses of producing optimum researches. Anyway, whether ethically conducting the research or not also involves in the criteria for evaluating the quality of a research.
2. Researchers ' value
As the German sociologist Weber (1946) indicated, "all research is contaminated to some extent by the value of the researcher" (cited in Silverman, 2004: 257). How researchers carry out their researches therefore highly depends on the
JIAN HE
Monash University
1. Introduction
In applied linguistics researches, there are unlikely considerable issues related to ethics or morality due to the harmlessness of the nature of language study. And in most cases, the participants are even able to get more or less some benefits from the research. For example, the participants may have an opportunity to gain certain knowledge of a target language via practicing the tasks in the research if they are second language learners. However, once the human subjects being investigated, there will possibly raise potential risks and discomforts from the procedure of the research, for instance, the disclosure of privacy could be damaging to a person. A qualified researcher must place a premium on ethical considerations when doing the research planing , even if it appears to be of minimally risky to the subjects. In this paper, I tend to discuss on some prominent ethical issues concerned by the literatures of research methodology and to address some of them with a combination of the recommended solutions from the literatures and my own reflections after reading those texts. After all, as it is difficult to transact all of the ethical issues in all circumstances, to highlight some ethical dilemmas and make the tricky points noticeable to the researchers seems to be worth doing. And hopefully, every researcher of applied linguistics finds a balance point between the ethical considerations and their willingnesses of producing optimum researches. Anyway, whether ethically conducting the research or not also involves in the criteria for evaluating the quality of a research.
2. Researchers ' value
As the German sociologist Weber (1946) indicated, "all research is contaminated to some extent by the value of the researcher" (cited in Silverman, 2004: 257). How researchers carry out their researches therefore highly depends on the
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