She describes how she picked up on a particular utterance in data from a study with one of her doctoral students. Conducting microgenetic analysis prompted by this seemingly trivial starting point led to a further application of frame analysis to understand the situated emergence of a language teacher’s cognition.
To conclude this volume, we are honoured to feature Ema Ushioda’s chapter which rounds everything off better than we possibly could …
Finally …
In closing this introductory chapter, we would like to thank the contributors for their amazing work with us in seeing this project through to this stage. From the very outset, various people expressed their hopes for this volume, with the feeling that it was high time such a work be undertaken. Yet, to be completely honest, when we put out the initial call for proposals, and then gave authors the guidelines for construction of their chapters, little did we know how much we were asking. It was only when it came time for us to also write our individual chapters that it finally sank in. Naturally, it is quite a skill in itself to see a research project through to completion, and write about it as an empirical article or chapter. We then pushed our contributors to expound on their take on complexity theory, and the actual practice of researching from a complexity perspective. We asked them not simply what, but also how they do what they do. At the time of putting together the call for proposals, we often used the metaphor of a magician revealing their tricks. The trouble is, researchers are not magicians, and the research we do is not a trick or an illusion. And, so, we now realize that writing up a previous study with this reveal-all approach is extremely hard. The balance of narrative, data and methods all need to come together in order to help the reader retrace the steps of the researcher through what was no-doubt a very windy and uphill path. That being said, we hope that this book helps pave the way as one smoother path for complexity research into the psychology and practice of language teaching and learning.
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