Questioning Standards of Evaluation in Educational Research: Do Educational Researchers Ventriloquize Learners’ Voices in L2 Education?

Abstract

Learners are not stakeholders in their own education. Adhering to the quantitative gold standard in English as a Second Language (ESL) deprives the learner from having a voice in their learning process. This paper addresses voicelessness and ventriloquism in ESL, ventriloquism referring to the act of voicing the thoughts of another person, in this case the system overriding the learners’ experiences. This article addresses this problem, aligning itself with the Platinum standard while challenging the quantitative gold standard in ESL research. This paper offers resonance and semantic reliability as evaluative measures in educational research taken from literary criticism. The notion of resonance has been addressed in the literature on qualitative research since the dawn of the narrative turn; I address how resonance can be used in educational research.