Ethics Declarations

 

All authors must read, understand, and comply with the following ethical requirements. Relevant information must be provided in the manuscript's Ethics Declarations and, where applicable, in the Method section. Authors must address the requirements that apply to their specific research design (quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods).

 

General Requirements (All Research Designs)

 

1. Ethical Approval

Authors must obtain approval from an institutional review board (IRB) or ethics committee before data collection. The manuscript must state the name of the approving committee, approval number, and date. If approval was not required, authors must provide a clear justification in the Method section.

 

2. Informed Consent

Authors must obtain informed consent from all participants. The manuscript must describe how consent was obtained (written, verbal, or both), how voluntariness was ensured, and how consent materials were made accessible in a language participants understood. For minors, parental or guardian consent and participant assent are required. For longitudinal studies, authors must explain how consent was revisited.

 

3. Institutional Permissions

Where research was conducted in schools, universities, or other institutions, authors must confirm in the Method section that appropriate institutional permissions were obtained in addition to individual participant consent.

 

4. Power Dynamics

Language education research often involves power imbalances (e.g., teacher-researcher, supervisor-student). Authors must describe in the Method section how such imbalances were managed, including measures to avoid coercion and to ensure that participation or non-participation had no impact on students' grades, assessment, or academic standing.

 

5. Confidentiality and Anonymization

Authors must protect participant confidentiality using pseudonyms and by removing or altering identifying details. The manuscript must describe data storage and destruction procedures. Participants' voices must be represented respectfully and without deficit framing.

 

6. Vulnerable Populations

Research involving children, refugees, migrants, individuals with disabilities, or minoritized language communities requires additional safeguards. Authors must describe these safeguards in the Method section.

 

7. Data Availability

Authors must include a Data Availability Statement indicating whether data are openly available, available on request, or restricted due to ethical constraints. If restricted, a clear rationale must be provided.

 

8. Generative AI Disclosure

Authors must include a Generative AI Disclosure Statement specifying which AI tools were used, for what purposes, and how AI-generated content was verified. AI must not be used to generate data, findings, or interpretations. Participant data must not be uploaded into AI tools. AI tools must not be listed as authors.

 

9. Authorship and CRediT

All listed authors must have made substantial scholarly contributions, approved the final manuscript, and agreed to its submission. A CRediT authorship contribution statement must be included.

 

10. Plagiarism and Similarity Index

Language Teaching Research Quarterly takes issues of plagiarism and copyright infringement seriously. All submissions are checked with similarity-detection software for two purposes: (a) to identify the similarity index and (b) to detect potential AI-generated content.

 

Similarity Index: Submissions with a similarity index of 60% or above are desk rejected. Minor and major revised submissions are checked at different stages of review, editing, and publication. The acceptable similarity index rate is 15% or below.

 

AI Detection: Submissions are checked for potential AI usage. The acceptable rate for AI-generated content is 20% or below.

 

11. Authorship Order and Author Details

No change is made to contributing authors' order or names after original submission. Email address, ORCID, and affiliation of all authors must be included in the original submission. Any request for a change in authorship after submission will be declined unless exceptional circumstances are approved by the editorial team.

 

12. Funding and Competing Interests

Authors must disclose all sources of financial support and declare any actual or perceived conflicts of interest. If none exist, this must be explicitly stated.

 

13. Post-Publication Responsibilities

Authors must notify the journal promptly of any significant error discovered after publication and cooperate with reasonable post-publication inquiries.

 

Additional Requirements for Quantitative Research

 

14. Preregistration

Authors must disclose whether the study was preregistered and, if so, provide the registration platform and identifier. If the study was not preregistered, authors should provide a justification.

 

15. Questionable Research Practices (QRPs)

Authors must confirm that the research was conducted without questionable research practices, including:

Fabrication or falsification of data

Selective reporting of results

*p*-hacking or inappropriate statistical manipulation

HARKing (Hypothesizing After the Results are Known)

Inappropriate exclusion of data points without justification

Authors must describe in the Method section how they ensured transparency in data collection, analysis, and reporting.

 

16. Data Sharing and Reproducibility

Authors must describe procedures for data sharing and reproducibility. Where data cannot be shared, authors must provide a clear rationale. Authors should include sufficient statistical detail to allow replication.

 

Additional Requirements for Qualitative and Narrative Research

 

17. Ethics-in-Practice

Authors must demonstrate ethics-in-practice, not merely procedural compliance. This includes:

Ongoing negotiation of consent throughout the research process

Attention to relational ethics and power dynamics

Respect for participants' voices in interpretation and representation

Management of researcher-participant boundaries, particularly when relationships become close or blurred

 

18. Micro-Ethical and Macro-Ethical Reflexivity

Authors must address both:

Micro-ethical reflexivity: sensitivity to context, relationships, and emergent ethical dilemmas during the research process

Macro-ethical reflexivity: adherence to institutional standards, ethical guidelines, and disciplinary norms

 

19. Narrative Inquiry

For narrative inquiry specifically, authors must discuss:

How they balanced the risks of storytelling with beneficence

How participants were involved in decisions about how their stories are shared

How participants' identities and well-being were protected beyond procedural approval

How the co-construction of narratives was managed ethically

 

20. Positionality and Reflexivity

Authors of qualitative and mixed-methods studies must include a positionality statement addressing their relationship to the research context, potential power imbalances, and how these influenced data collection and interpretation.

 

21. Representation and Reporting

Authors must describe transcription and translation procedures, justify data selection criteria, and report findings without selective misrepresentation. Member checking should be described where conducted.

 

Additional Requirements for Mixed-Methods Research

 

22. Integration Ethics

Authors must justify the integration of quantitative and qualitative components and explain how ethical considerations were addressed across both strands. This includes:

Transparency in how methods were combined

Justification of the mixed-methods design

Avoidance of methodological inconsistencies that could pose risks to foundational ethical principles

 

23. Transparency in Reporting

Authors must describe how transparency was maintained in reporting the mixed-methods design, including data integration procedures, divergences between quantitative and qualitative findings, and how ethical considerations were managed across both components.

 

Required Ethical Statement for Manuscript Submission

All manuscripts must include a comprehensive Ethics Declarations section addressing the relevant items above. The statement must appear at the end of the manuscript before the references.