Awareness of research paradigms has been recognised as a prized asset to educational researchers. Yet, the extent to which philosophical stances tend to be reflected in papers remains enigmatic in ELT research. This study was, therefore, conducted to explore whether methodologies adopted by ELT researchers are underpinned by pertinent philosophical assumptions. In particular, it enquired into authors’ explicit reference to philosophical underpinnings of their research. In so doing, based on a set of rigorous criteria, a search of relevant articles was undertaken, culminating in 53 articles published in 24 journals, spanning five years (2015–2019). The results testified to researchers’ reluctance to engage with philosophical assumptions, inasmuch as only a small proportion of articles (7.5%) discussed the underpinning philosophical assumptions. The results, however, showed that ethical considerations appear to be a well-established phenomenon, of which the majority of researchers (60.4%) took heed. Moreover, the adopted word cloud technique introduced the highly frequent words used in the methods sections. The results are imbued with some implications for ELT researchers and academics.

研究范式的意识已被认为是教育研究人员的宝贵资产。然而，在ELT研究中，哲学立场倾向于在论文中反映的程度仍然是个谜。因此，进行这项研究是为了探索ELT研究人员采用的方法是否以相关的哲学假设为基础。特别是，它询问了作者对他们研究哲学基础的明确参考。在此过程中，基于一系列严格的标准，对相关文章进行了搜索，最终在24个期刊上发表了53篇文章，涵盖了五年（2015-2019年）。该结果证明了研究人员不愿从事哲学假设，因为只有一小部分文章（7.5％）讨论了哲学假设的基础。然而，结果表明，道德考量似乎是一种公认​​的现象，大多数研究人员（60.4％）对此予以关注。此外，采用的词云技术介绍了方法部分中使用的高频率词。该结果对ELT研究人员和学者具有重要意义。