An Investigation Into The Qualitative Inquiries In Applied Linguistics

In recent years, qualitative research has experienced great development both in the west countries and in China. More and more studies use qualitative research as the main research method. Qualitative research has been widely used in applied linguistics and it has achieved fruitful research results. As Lazaraton (2003a) claimed in a recent review of evaluative criteria, ’Qualitative research has come of age in applied linguistics’.With the great development of globalization of China, English or other foreign languages have becoming more important in various fields. While more people choose to learn one or more foreign languages for different reasons, more attention should be paid to the field of foreign language teaching. Yet there are many research focus on foreign language teaching, using different traditional types of qualitative research, very limited research pay attention to the latest trend of qualitative research used in those research, which is of great importance to foreign language teaching in China.This thesis aims to find the trend of qualitative inquiries in applied linguistics in the west during the recent years, which hopes to give a reference to qualitative research in the field of foreign language teaching in China. Taking the thesis as a reference, the researchers can get some knowledge of the development of qualitative research in applied linguistics of foreign language teaching in the west, even the trends in the related fields, which are significant to develop qualitative research in China, and also is meaningful to researchers’future study.This thesis adopts mixed research method. Quantitative research method is used only in data collection part. Quantitative research method and qualitative research method are used in the analysis part of the thesis.It focuses on the representative journal of Applied Linguistics from 2003 to 2012, which studies the latest materials in the field of applied linguistics in order to provide the readers with the latest trend in the west. On analyzing qualitative inquiries in the west and the differences of that in China, the result shows that the traditional types used in the west and in China are more or less the same, but the percentage of each type is different. Besides, the way to collect and analyze data or information is different. Moreover, the thesis discusses the sample strategy in qualitative research, issues on observation, triangulation and the ethics of research. It is necessary for Chinese researchers to learn the experience of qualitative research in the west and to promote the development of qualitative research in the field of foreign language teaching in China in order to develop the quality of foreign teaching in China.