Choosing the Right Frameworks in Research: Foundations, Justifications, Adaptations, and Innovations

This chapter explores the theoretical decision-making process underlying a doctoral study that investigated the cultural conceptualizations of commonly used terms among Māori and non-Māori secondary school students in New Zealand. The study aimed to understand how divergent linguistic and emotional meanings contribute to intercultural miscommunication and educational inequity in a bicultural context. Three theoretical frameworks were critically evaluated to guide this inquiry: Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), Sociocultural Theory (Vygotsky, 1978), and Intercultural Communication Theory (Hall & Whyte, 1963). While each theory offers valuable insights into pedagogy, learning, and intercultural engagement, none fully addresses the cognitive-linguistic encoding of cultural meaning or its relationship to systemic educational structures. To bridge these gaps, the study initially adopted Cultural Linguistics (Sharifian, 2017) for its emphasis on cultural conceptualizations, schemas, and distributed cognition. However, the limitations of Cultural Linguistics in addressing macro-level phenomena led to the development of a new, integrated model: the Dual Level Cultural Linguistics (DLCL) framework. DLCL (Mohebbi, 2024) combines micro-level analysis of linguistic-cognitive and emotional processes with macro-level critique of educational policy, curriculum, and power relations. The chapter demonstrates how DLCL guided the mixed-methods design and generated precise insights into cultural discontinuities, thereby contributing to broader debates on theory-building and decolonizing educational research.