Despite criticisms questioning its raison d'être (e.g., Giddings & Grant, ), mixed methods research has been welcomed in social research as a methodology in its own right (Greene, ). Recently, it has also been acknowledged and advocated in applied linguistics (Dörnyei, ; Hashemi, ). In an attempt to investigate the status of this relatively new trend in applied linguistics, the current study examines the nature of the integration of qualitative and quantitative methods in terms of research designs, sampling designs, and quality of interpretations. Content analysis of 205 research articles published in seven comprehensive international peer reviewed applied linguistics journals between 1995 and 2008 reveals that concurrent designs are more prevalent than sequential designs and that studies make limited use of mixed designs that are detailed in the mixed methods literature. Moreover, although a considerable number of articles used both qualitative and quantitative methods, only a small number achieved high degrees of integration at various stages of the study as a quality standard for mixed research. The study concludes with several implications for making more effective use of mixed methods research in applied linguistics and calls for a more systematic treatment of this trend as a versatile research methodology.
One fruitful line of research has been to explore the local linguistic as well as global rhetorical patterns of particular genres in order to identify their recognizable structural identity, or what Bhatia (1999: 22) calls ‘generic integrity’. In terms of methodology, to date most genre-based studies have employed one or the other of Swales’ (1981/1990) move-analytic models of text analysis to investigate whether or not the generic prototypical patterns that he has introduced exist universally. This paper, however, considers the application of the Systemic Functional (SF) theory of language to genre analysis. The paper looks, in particular, at distinctive rhetorical features of English newspaper editorials as an important public ‘Cinderella’ genre and proposes a generic prototypical pattern of text development for editorials or what Halliday and Hasan (1989) refer to as the Generic Structure Potential (GSP) of a genre. The results of this study should benefit both genre theory and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and will be, it seems, of interest not only to applied linguists, but to those involved in education, journalism, and the media.
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