On 30 December 2025, my colleague and I organised a workshop titled “Creating Ideas for Linguistics-Based Research and Publication”, where we invited a couple of guest speakers to give the audience (academics from my faculty) a glimpse into what it takes to conduct linguistics-based research. Until then, I had been predominantly writing, really, education-, business- and communication-related papers. My PhD was conducted using a mixed methods employing interviews and Delphi surveys, on the pretense that it was applied linguistics in professional communication. I had not, at the time, ever attempted to write my own “pure” linguistics-based kind of research.
During the workshop, one of the speakers said that the reason she pursued discourse analysis was because she wanted to appear smart. Anyone who claims to do applied linguistics or pure linguistics, even, should know how to do discourse analysis, she said. And this was like a stab to the heart for me, if I’m honest… because until then, I was familiar with discourse analysis, but it never truly occurred to me that it was a field that I should be dipping my toes into. I was not exactly content with basic qualitative and quantitative research methods, but I was also very intimidated by the idea of doing discourse analysis…until I heard her say that.
(Of course, I guess it was also in the manner of how it was said, which is so typical of me as a language academic to write about here. But there’s just something so viscerally painful about the way she just shoved that truth into my kokoro that it stuck with me, and I have been feeling quite inadequate, inexperienced, and ineffectual, in my research output.
After that workshop, I went home and started to do my homework. I challenged myself to write a paper using discourse analysis (which I did, in three weeks), that is currently undergoing peer review at a reputable journal in the subject area of language and linguistics. I drafted some project proposals, and explored research ideas I had never considered before. I also enrolled into a six-week Critical Discourse Analysis online course, which will begin next week.
Since that workshop, there is this nagging feeling in my brain (and heart) that I need to study this, and get good at it. I feel that I am to write quality papers and go further into this field, academically, then this is the most natural way to do it, as someone who calls herself a language and applied linguistics academic.
It has been a little over a month since I started really exploring discourse analysis as a research method, and I am feeling extremely excited about it. I love the feeling of knowing that I do not know a field of study very well. I love the anticipation that I will once again be a student, even if it is online, to learn about something that I have some awareness of, some layman knowledge of—but little else.
“Anyone who claims to do applied linguistics or pure linguistics, even, should know how to do discourse analysis.” Initially, when I heard the speaker said that, it almost seemed to me that doing interviews and surveys is not enough for an applied linguistics field. I had this feeling that I was second tier to those who pursued discourse analysis, be it genre, corpus, critical, what have you. But as I explored the field and drafted more project ideas, something else began to emerge: the idea that I can actually combine discourse analysis with these other methods. It’s not an either/or situation. It is an extension. A way of bringing lexical richness into how data is analysed and understood in traditional qualitative and quantitative methods.
I cannot unsee this opportunity now. I cannot unsee the potential of having a survey developed through a round of discourse analysis. Or how Delphi studies can fit into applied linguistics. Or how content and thematic analyses can be made richer with discourse analysis. Or how the way items in a survey can then be analysed to determine its effect. It’s like a world just opened up to me, and I cannot be more excited for it.
So to that speaker, who delivered such a truthful blow to the heart, thank you. Thank you for opening up my worldview. A PhD is nothing but a piece of paper that shows that you have basic research skills, and I cannot think of it as anything else but that anymore. Because there is so, so, so much more I have yet to learn out there, and I am thirsty for it. I am eager for it. And I am excited for it.
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