Excerpt 6 June 1988)
6.2 Audience, Publication Venue, and Focus: Preparing the Report
Writing up case studies is in many respects similar to the preparation of other kinds of research reports regardless of the inquiry tradition or methodology. This chapter discusses aspects that are both common to all research and specific to case studies. The first considerations in preparing a case study report are common ones: (1) identifying the intended audi- ence or readership, (2) selecting an appropriate venue for publication, and (3) determining the main focus and content of a prospective publication.
The organization, content, and presentation of reports follow from these.
Therefore, before even beginning to prepare a manuscript based on the study, it is crucial to consider all of these factors, which will determine the report’s length, format, genre, and so on.
6.2.1 Audience
With respect to the intended audience, the following questions should be addressed:
Are the intended readers the project funders to whom a final report must be submitted, and if so, what is the expected length, format, and genre?
Is the report a synthesis of findings primarily for the research participants in the study?
Is the audience a dissertation committee, the editorial board of a journal, a book editor, the general public, practitioners, or policy makers?
If it is a manuscript in preparation for a journal, which journal is most suitable for the type of study conducted and the intended focus of this manuscript, and what are the genres and page or word restrictions for that journal?
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The intended readership and the specific policies of various publishers (e.g., journals) determine, to a large degree, the acceptable length of the manuscript, the amount and type of theoretical contextualization required or possible, the scope and depth of coverage permitted, and the genres or rhetorical styles that are acceptable. Regardless of audience, however, or the length of the report that is prepared, the case should ideally be contex- tualized and described as fully as possible, evidence for claims should be provided, and the main purpose and findings of the study must be clear.
6.2.2 Publication Venue and Type
Because the best journals in a field normally have a rigorous review and revision process for manuscripts, and many now are widely accessible internationally through various Internet-based online databases, journals are a preferred publication venue. Book chapters, though they may also have gone through an internal or external review by the editors or publi- cation house, are mainly an option for those who have had a manuscript solicited by the volume editor in connection with a given theme.
To illustrate issues connected with publication venue and type, let us consider the case studies by Schmidt (1983) and Schmidt and Frota (1986).
The audience for the articles, both of which were book chapters, was grad- uate students and established L2 researchers. The focus was a Japanese man’s English L2 development over an extended period (Schmidt, 1983) and Schmidt’s own L2 development in Brazilian Portuguese over a five- month period and his metalinguistic reflections on the process (Schmidt
& Frota, 1986). Normally, unless authors wanted to write a complete book about each case, which is mainly done with dissertations or multiple-case studies, they would choose an appropriate journal to submit a manuscript to (e.g., journals that publish exploratory SLA research in this instance).
Schmidt published his pieces in volumes edited by colleagues in applied linguistics. What was very unusual (and fortuitous) about the resulting publications, and may have been a factor in the tremendous impact they have had on the field—besides the important theoretical insights that the case studies generated—was the depth of analysis possible because of the length of the book chapters: 37 and 89 pages, respectively. In contrast, the average length of other chapters in the same books was 13 and 19 pages,
respectively (about a third or a quarter of the length of his chapters). Had the same articles been submitted to a journal, or to more typical edited volumes, considerably shorter versions would normally have been required and some of the invaluable contextualization, data excerpts, and analysis would have been reduced as a result.
Most journals in applied linguistics (e.g., Applied Linguistics, Lan- guage Learning, Modern Language Journal, Studies in Second Language Acquisition) call for manuscripts between 20 and 30 double-spaced pre- publication pages (4,000 to 8,000 words, though some publish up to 10,000 words) (TESOL, 2007). Page allowances are an important consideration in determining how much of the context and analysis can satisfactorily be captured and illustrated in an article, especially since qualitative research articles typically require more space or words than quantitative ones do.
Therefore, case study authors must carefully plan how and where they will submit/publish their work. Duff and Li’s (2004) case study of a Manda- rin teacher and her instructional dilemmas appeared in System, a journal with a 4,000-word limit for articles (a limit we had failed to notice when submitting the article for review). As a result, most of the carefully chosen excerpts in the original manuscript, plus an entire section on L1-L2 code- switching, had to be deleted prior to publication. In retrospect, we should probably have submitted the manuscript to a journal with more generous page allowances but had not realized how strictly article length would be enforced at the time of submission.
6.2.3 Focus
The focus and scope of an article are connected to the intended audience, the author’s main purpose, and the venue and type of publication. Further- more, decisions about the focus of any one publication should take into account other planned publications based on the same study. Typically, dissertations can be turned into more than one publication, highlighting different aspects of the study in the same journal or in other places. Dupli-
The case studies in Hatch (1978), including Schumann's (1978) case study of Alberto, were approximately 10 to 20 printed pages each.
Of course, there are always exceptions: Spack’s (1987) case study was nearly 60 journal pages long.
Readers should consult a very helpful online publication, “How to Get Published in ESOL and Applied Linguistics Serials,” for descriptions of journals in our field and features of manuscript submissions and reviews (TESOL, 2007).
cation of publications is of course not normally permitted. For a short article, the cases could be described and then one or two main themes could be highlighted with at most a few short examples. In a longer article, greater contextualization and description of the case are possible, and more excerpts from data and more themes could potentially be included.
If the intended audience is not other scholars, as in Schmidt’s (1983) case, but rather is the research participants themselves, members of the public, or practitioners, the author would likely write in a more accessible, less technical, less theoretical, and less analytic style, with special care given to protecting the identities of participants, especially with sensitive data, since participants will be more easily identified within the origi- nal community. The article might also be much shorter and submitted to teachers’ journals, newsletters, or for private circulation among the focal participants, with some concrete practical pedagogical or policy implica- tions provided.