著者

田中 博晃 山西 博之

出版者

外国語教育メディア学会

雑誌

Language Education & Technology (ISSN:04587332)

巻号頁・発行日

no.41, pp.77-88, 2004-06

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The main purpose of this paper was to consider the problem concerning the dfficulties that most researchers of the qualitative studies are confronted with. From an overview of recently conducted studies in the academic field of English language education in Japan, it appeared that most researches using qualitative verbal data were categorized into hypothesis examination or hypothesis generation studies. Nevertheless, few of the hypothesis generation studies were able to help the researchers overcome the difficulties of objectivity and generalizability in treating the data. This suggested that most of the researchers did not give a sufficient amount of consideration to the transfer of their knowledge to future studies. To overcome the difficulties, we proposed to add a new approach, the hypothesis succeeding approach, to the traditionally used hypothesis generation approach. The hypothesis succeeding approach is conducted by a combination of hypothesis generation and hypothesis testing. The former is for interpreting verbal data qualitatively and the latter is for complementing the generated hypothesis. We have shown the extent of the effectiveness of this approach in overcoming the difficulties.