Advanced Applied

Linguistics
Instructor: Prof. Dr. Siusana Kweldju
Ethics and Applied Linguistics

Dear Students,

(a) Please read AAAL ethics guidelines carefully.

(b) Read the folowing summary:

Ethics, according to Brown (2004), is ‘an area where all research methods and
techniques come together and tend to agree’ (p. 498). To some extent, ethical
research also depends on the research methods adopted, whether they are
quantitative or qualitative. The positivist paradigm tends to treat ethics as
suggested in IRBs [Institutional Review Boards]. By contrast, a critical
postmodernist paradigm would emphasize the values and ideologies of the
researchers, issues of power, and social justice.

Macroethical and microethical perspectives can be used to incorporate the two

approaches. Kubanyiova (2008) makes the distinction between macroethics and
microethics. While the former refers to the ‘procedural ethics of IRB protocols
and ethical principles articulated in professional codes of conduct’ (p. 505), the
latter refers to ‘everyday ethical dilemmas that arise from the specific roles and
responsibilities that researchers and research participants adopt in specific
research contexts’ (p. 504).

Macroethics

The term macroethics embraces two aspects of research ethics:

(a) procedural ethics (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004), which is the process of
seeking approval from a relevant ethics committee (e.g., IRBs) to undertake
the proposed research project, and
(b) ethical principles articulated in professional codes of conduct; for example,
the American Educational Research Association (AERA, 1992), and the
American Psychological Association (APA, 2002). Clearance from one's
institutional ethics committee is an essential step in conducting research,
particularly in North America, but it also has been increasingly adopted in
 British and other European institutions, especially where research is funded
through external fund ing bodies.

The general macroethical criteria are typically derived from three core
principles that serve as moral standards for research involving humans:
(a) respect for persons, which binds researchers to pro tect the well-being of
the research participants and avoid harm and/or potential risks; The
respect for persons, has generally been a matter of routine practice in
applied linguistics research. This is clear from the TESOL Quarterly
Research Guidelines, for instance, which require researchers to produce
evidence of informed consent, to protect the participants' privacy and
maintain anonymity and, ideally, that participants benefit in some way
from taking part in the study.
(b) beneficence, that is, ensuring that the research project yields substantial
benefits while minimizing harm; ms confirms, particularly in the sense of
usefulness to communities that participate in our research and to which its
results are supposed to serve; and
(c) justice, a fair distribution of research benefits (Christians, 2000). So far
the principle of justice has been consistently overlooked in SLA research,
which is manifested in the persistent neglect of certain types of L2
populations with research produced, as a result, with the aim of serving
only a privileged minority of L2 speakers (Ortega, 2005).
.
Microethics

Microethics deals with big ethical issues in bioethics such as euthanasia or

cloning and ethics involved in everyday doctor-patient interactions in clinical
practice. Two theories in the microethical framework in applied linguistic
research are:
(a) ethics of care and
(b) virtue ethics

Ethics of care is primarily a relational activity demanding the researcher's

sensitivity to and emotional identification and solidarity with the people under
study (Helgeland, 2005). Rather than being given labels, such as "vulnerable
persons" who require the kind of protection set out in the macroethical
principles, the research participants are seen as "specific individuals, located in
specific situations that require actions based in care, responsibility, and
responsiveness to context.

Virtue ethics emphasizes the development of the moral character of the

researcher, his/her ability and willingness to discern situations with potential
ethical ramifications as they arise in the research practice, and his/her ability to
make decisions that are informed by both macroethics of principles and
microethics of care. The researcher's reflexivity is considered to be an important
tool in pursuing ethical decisions, which facilitates the understanding of both
the nature of research ethics and how ethical practice can be achieved
(Guillemin &Gillam, 2004).

Specific guidance for situations in which

macroethical and microethical practice seem to clash

Specific guidance is developed by the Canadian Code of Ethics for

Psychologists developed by the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA,
2000).

Ethical Framework for Applied Linguistic Research

Today SLA research has used classroom-based, qualitative research such as

case study, longitudinal ethnographies, narratives, and diary studies have
become more prominent than ever. This new development has brought about a
shift in the researchers' roles, relationships, and responsibilities. SLA research
has recently been situated in the sociocultural context. This situation also leads
to a new ethical dilemma and misunderstanding:
(a) ethical correctness is used to be considered as a constraint, and
(b) satisfying macroethical principles will automatically ensure ethical
research conduct

One dilemma is there can be a thin demarcation line between beneficence and
coercion, whereas the latter indicates that what may be seen as beneficial at the
macro-level may have harmful effects when the micro-context is taken into
consideration. For example, most teachers' motivations to join the author’s
(Kubanyiora, 2005) research project were not for change as it should be , but
they had their own personal agenda. They were already happy with their
teaching, so that the auther did not have the rights to talk about change. If a
change does not take place in teacher education, the research does not have any
value.

Another example is when the author wants to play the role of a critical friend
for a research proposal, and wants to volunteer for the improvement of the
proposal, the proposal writer feels being professionally threatened, and lose his
enthusiasm to submit the proposal.

Most recently we have more dilemma with digital ethnography or internet

research ethics within applied linguistics, such as anonymity and informed
consent, perceptions of privacy and publicness, data protection and copyright,
sensitive data and vulnerable groups. One reason is that internet content can be
automatically recorded and archived (‘persistence’), duplicated and shared
(‘replicability’), be visible to known and unknown audiences (‘scalability’) and,
most importantly, searched and found (‘searchability’). These affordances
create distinct communicative dynamics whereby audiences become invisible
and contexts collapse .