philosophical background is beyond the scope of the present book. The rela-
tivist position, defended by people like Block, Lantolf, Firth and Wagner, is
that there are multiple realities and that phenomena are always contextualized
and contingent on other phenomena. The rationalist position, defended by
people like Crookes, Eubank, Gregg and Long, state that there is one reality
that we can observe objectively without the researcher influencing the data.
The debate continues. Michael Long takes a clear position when asked
about the main trends:“Appearance of relativist work by a small but vocal
minority, with some inevitable damage done to the credibility of SLA and
AL as a result. Hopefully, this will be a passing phase, as it has been in other
disciplines.”His views are not shared by all informants. Many of them see a
growth of research with a relativist perspective and a substantial development
of the SCT community.
Jan Hulstijn refers to the gap between the quantitative and qualitative
approach to research:
The gap between, on the one side, researchers investigating linguistic-
cognitive issues, often using quantitative research methods including
inferential statistics and, on the other side, researchers working on the
basis of sociocultural or sociocognitive views, often using qualitative
research methods, including case study and ethnography. The gap was
perhaps more apparent in the 1990s than presently.But Merrill Swain still wonders:“What are the standards for qualitative
research? There are standards, but often they are not adhered to.”This gap
is discussed in the nine-author article (Hulstijnet al.2014) in SSLA.
As Nunan (1992) indicates, the debate is ultimately philosophical:
One reason for the persistence of the distinction between quantitative
and qualitative research is that the two approaches represent different
ways of thinking about and understanding the world around us.
Underlying the development of different research traditions and meth-
ods is a debate on the nature of knowledge and the status of assertions
about the world, and the debate itself is ultimately a philosophical
one...Underpinning quantitative research is the positivistic notion that
the basic function of research is to uncover facts and truths which are
independent of the researcher. Qualitative researchers question the
notion of an objective reality.
(10)6.1.4 The growth of Socio-Cultural Theory
Many informants see the emergence and growth of SCT as one of the most
important trends. While SCT was marginal for many years, it has gained
substantial popularity in the last decade.
62 Main trends I