Chinese EFL academics’ perceptions of research quality: a phenomenological study

Abstract

This paper explores how Chinese academics, working in the field of English as Foreign Language Education in universities in China, conceptualise research quality. The paper uses a phenomenological approach and four qualitative methods (survey, interview, focus groups and document analysis) to investigate what a sample of these scholars perceive as high-quality research. We found that the participants viewed quality through various lenses and identified several different criteria. We categorised their elaboration of the criteria under three headings: methodology, contextualisation and impact. The participants nominated many general criteria that were similar to western standards of research quality, especially in relation to methodology; however, some contextual criteria were specific to the Chinese context. The paper indicates that there is much in the university research community that could be altered to enable people who are directly involved in research to disseminate their criteria for research quality, and potentially to affect and develop the quality of educational research in the Chinese context, and/or elsewhere.

Keywords:

• Chinese academics
• educational research
• EFL
• phenomenology
• research quality

Acknowledgement

We express our gratitude to the participants in this study and to the journal reviewers for their constructive feedback.

Notes

1. In Chinese language, ‘scientific research’ often refers to ‘academic research’ in general, and not exclusively to research in the natural sciences. However, many criticisms of research quality appear to focus on practice in the natural sciences.

2. In China, academics working at universities are usually called ‘university-teachers’ or ‘higher education institution teachers’.

3. The questionnaire can be provided upon request.

4. China has 23 provinces, four municipalities, five autonomous regions and two special administrative regions. Accessed from: https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/549,881,672.html.

5. The moderator (Xie) took part in this step by putting in her five prepared criteria. This was the only FG step the moderator got involved in, because we wanted the group to pay some attention to our criteria that we considered as significant according to our analysis of the nominated-papers and the pilot interviews.

6. The idea of using the card-activities was not fully original. This approach was inspired by the work of Graeme Clarke (1983), who developed something similar to structure discussion about criteria for giftedness.

7. ‘Guests’ in this conversation referred to panel members who assessed grant applications.

8. Our coding of the ‘perceived’ and ‘actual’ impact are underlined and in parenthesis after the particular examples.