The place of ethics in second language education

For those involved in human research, ethics plays an important part of the research process at the level of seeking approval for research projects from institutional review boards or following the prescriptions of codes of practice of professional and disciplinary associations. Ethics, however, can extend beyond protocols and regulations playing a role in the day-to-day decision making process of doing research and being a teacher. Ethics has a far broader role for an academic discipline as it can be used to address questions regarding the scope, nature and purpose of a discipline. This paper will examine ethics in second language education from the perspective of both research and practice. Ethics has often played a peripheral role in second language education even though it plays a fundamental role within other disciplines in terms of research and practice, e.g. psychology. It will be argued that the causes of this peripheral position have to do with its relationship to applied linguistics and linguistics. I will then go on to discuss the value and importance of ethics particularly in light of the complexity of foreign language teaching and learning in Europe.