We Do Need to Develop the Perspectives: In Pursuit of Options for Triangulating Academic Discourse Studies

This paper assumes that developing strong models of academic discourse analysis would not by itself guarantee researchers’ access to the realities of academic communication and that any development in the theory of academic discourse analysis should also be informed and equipped with developments in wider applied linguistics research methodology. The current paper proposes that the departure point of this dialogue between academic discourse theory and research methodology should be the concept of “triangulation”. While in applied linguistics research context, the concept has been defined as a research strategy aiming at developing diverse dimensions to approach the phenomena under investigation, I have argued that triangulation should be redefined and further operationalized in light of the realities of academic discourses and the very demands and desires of academic discourse researchers. To do so, a set of options including genre-based triangulation, culture-based triangulation, discipline-based triangulation, language-based triangulation, mode-based triangulation, time-based triangulation, expertise-based triangulation, analyst-based triangulation, corpus-based triangulation, and audience-based triangulation has been proposed.