The steady expansion in qualitative research in the area of language education over the last two decades indicates the growing recognition of its importance to investigating issues of language teaching and learning. Along with this recognition, understanding and assessing the quality of qualitative studies in this area has gained increasing significance. Addressing this concern, in this research synthesis, we qualitatively explore how 236 qualitative language education studies published in seven leading journals explicitly foreground the issue of ‘research quality’. We conducted a qualitative content analysis of how authors of these studies addressed the main quality concepts proposed by well-known frameworks of qualitative research quality. Our findings, presented as ten major themes, show that qualitative researchers' overt treatment of research quality is realised based on three distinct orientations: no explicit quality criteria, positivist views of quality, and interpretive quality conceptions. We discuss aspects of these orientations and their implications for qualitative research in language education.

中文翻译：

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语言教育研究者如何关注定性研究的质量？

过去二十年来，语言教育领域定性研究的稳步扩展表明，人们越来越认识到其对于研究语言教学问题的重要性。随着这种认识的出现，理解和评估该领域的定性研究的质量变得越来越重要。为了解决这一问题，在本研究综述中，我们定性地探讨了七种领先期刊上发表的 236 项定性语言教育研究如何明确强调“研究质量”问题。我们对这些研究的作者如何处理著名的定性研究质量框架提出的主要质量概念进行了定性内容分析。我们的研究结果呈现为十大主题，表明定性研究人员对研究质量的公开对待是基于三个不同的方向实现的：没有明确的质量标准、实证主义的质量观和解释性的质量概念。我们讨论这些方向的各个方面及其对语言教育定性研究的影响。