with this book we aim to contribute to the ability of researchers in light of the experiences and insights gained by others who adopted particular methods in their published research, potentially offering a powerful source of learning. Since research is closely related to, or identified with, the researcher, context, participants and methods, reading about others’ research stories could, we believe, illuminate for novice academics the knowledge that can be found in the unique implementations of the methods in particular contexts by particular researchers.
This book dodges being descriptive or prescriptive, in that it aims not to teach, but rather facilitate discovery about how regular people, who were curious and dedicated, explored through research processes, questions and concerns they had about language education. The book is relatively expository since it unpacks researchers’ experiences and their stances with reference to unique details, including how they utilized a particular research methodology with a particular phenomenon, and the challenges they encountered, and how they resolved them. These difficulties and experiences are often invisible in corresponding published research, often due to the limitation in space, and lack of direct bearing on the research results. These issues are absent in methodology books because each research endeavor is unique and idiosyncratic. For example, qualitative research is primarily characterized by its flexibility in process, which allows researchers to make unique methodological decisions while collecting and analyzing data, such as how to do interviews or how to observe a practice. This allows for innovation in the way these data generation methods are implemented. In the quantitative paradigm, on the other hand, the rules tend to be relatively more fixed and determined by statistics, though there are still decisions and challenges that need to be addressed by the researcher. Although there are major principles to follow in both paradigms, there are also stages in each, where existing rules for particular research methods may be unique to context, participants, and research topic. Such variations will accord with the particular context and methodological practices. In this book we argue that individual researchers’ experiences constitute valuable methodological knowledge for informing new research practices.
This book offers knowledge created by published researchers in the field, whose use of specific research methods is voiced on the basis of their lived experiences and written in narrative language. The very process of writing also gave these chapter authors space for revisiting their experiences and reflecting retrospectively on their engagement in research. Each researcher shares their experience in their own candid and approachable manner, so this volume makes the research processes more engaging, fascinating, and human.
We aimed to address a gap in research methods in language teaching and learning by inviting researchers to discuss explicitly their research method decisions. The lived research experiences, with reference to one or two of their own published studies, form a strong basis for verisimilitude, providing backstage transparency for the readers, highlighting challenges they faced. However, we are also cautiously aware that, however unique the interpretations of methods, the methods described in these chapters are repeated in many other studies and are recognized methods in the field.
The chapters in the book also reveal important insights into the researchers’ thought processes while using a particular qualitative or quantitative method and writing up research. Research methodology books prescribe particular given stages and procedures for researchers to follow, but tend not to focus on researchers’ intentions, choices, and realizations while considering the alternative methods.
The narrative language of the book aims to examine researchers’ intentionality, and to trace it as it is shaped by the methodological characteristics and constraints influenced by contextual elements. Rather than being directly stated, research methodology knowledge is presented in storied narrative, to enable not only richer presentation, but also deeper understanding and interpretation of the actual research processes, which might be lost in a discourse that merely offers certain implementation stages and steps to follow. Such narrative language also allows researchers to represent their multiple justifications of research processes, rather than representing research as a simple, linear process. Reflective description of research process, including methodological decisions and interpretations, is often included in the paper to enhance transparency and objectivity, and provide thick description with an extrospective stance. In addition, there is an emphasis on researchers’ orientation to their positionality in order to provide credibility and trustworthiness. The chapters in the book include stories that contribute to methodological openness and transparency, which is less likely to be represented in the published versions; these neglected stories, we argue, can bring the benefits of accessibility not only to the researchers’ internal decision-making mechanism but also to the potential opportunities to learn from outspoken justifications.
Researcher voice may be insufficiently articulated within the actual publication, whose primary focus is on communicating the findings and the new knowledge created. Readers will therefore have direct reference to the published study and will be able to gain new perspectives on the original research in the light of the researcher’s in-depth narration of the actual research process. This offers a powerful learning experience for the readers in that they can critically evaluate and reflect on the research process not only as reported in the published research, but also as experienced.
For decades, research pedagogy has been characteristically facilitated and informed by supervision based on hierarchical relationship between supervisor and student. However, some recently proposed models place more value on humanist, constructivist, and interactionist principles of learning. Burnett (1999), for example, discusses a “collaborative cohort model” as an alternative to a “master-apprentice” approach, which is theoretically informed by the Behaviorist school of thought. Hecq (2009) then introduced interactive narrative pedagogy as a direct response to, and substitute for, more authoritative relationships in supervision. Carter (2010) also proposes the process of mutual voicing of thoughts and ideas during supervision, in a dialogical and interactive manner, to support the co-construction of pedagogical knowledge, including regarding the meaning, possible forms, and novel conceptions of research. Other approaches also support horizontality (democratic, dialogical, and dynamic interaction) as opposed to verticality (supervision authority, and imposition and prescription of research knowledge) in research pedagogy.
In recent years, the hierarchical and authoritarian nature of the supervisory relationship has moved towards one characterized by collaboration, dialogue, and mutual understanding, and that allows for recognizing student voice, and facilitating student knowledge construction through joint knowledge building.
Lusted (1986, p. 3) strongly argues that pedagogy does not need to “instrumentalize the relations or disconnect their interactivity or to give value to one agency over another,” but rather to “recognize the productivity of the relations, and render the parties within them as active, changing and changeable agencies.” With this in mind, we see the chapter authors as offering supervision, in written form, on a particular methodology. They do this by adopting a narrative, self-reflective writing style that provides a transparent view of their engagement in doing and writing up research.
In the chapters, narrated learning conversations (Shotter, 1993) and critical reflective dialogue (Fillery-Travis & Robinson, 2018; De Haan, 2011) are created through self-critique, and justification of the use of the particular research method to produce high-quality research output.
Teaching Research Methods
The pedagogy of methodological learning (Lewthwaite & Nind, 2016) is disadvantaged by a lack of resources for research method teaching (Wagner et al., 2011), so that teaching research is typically characterized by peer support, trial-and-error, and the gradual acquisition of methodological know-how (Earley, 2014). Learning how to do research often involves a learning-by-doing approach, since formal courses involve generic methodological knowledge for students or novice researchers, which may not fit into specific contexts, research purposes or the methods followed.
The critical self-reflective voice of researchers at work in the chapters of our book can function much like a peer’s self-critical reflection on own research, to contribute to others’ vicarious understanding of the method (Mayes et al., 2002). Researchers’ experiences form a compelling