The role of theory in quantitative and qualitative second language learning research: A corpus-based analysis

The role of theory has been emphasized in both quantitative and qualitative research handbooks in applied linguistics, but no systematic study has been conducted to consolidate, expand, or modify these experience-based observations. By approaching this meta-theoretical issue from a corpus-based perspective, we offer new insights into the particular ways in which claims to scientific rigor are made in the two methodologies. A 1.3 million-token corpus of the introductions and literature reviews was created from 577 full-length articles (quantitative: 316; qualitative: 261) in four leading journals in L2 learning between 2013 and 2019. We performed linear mixed-effects modeling on the frequencies of theor- in the quantitative and qualitative subcorpora and analyzed the 1,812 collocates of theor- using the logDice statistics and Sketch Engine. Results showed that (1) the qualitative studies used theories more frequently, and (2) although theories were used by both bodies of research for structuring and grounding, the other roles assigned to theories were divergent: quantitative studies constructed theories as both agents and objects of specific positivistic reasoning processes, while qualitative studies either represented theories as dynamic agents with strong subjectivity or adopted a pragmatic, dialogic attitude when representing theories as objects.