Narrative research in language teaching and learning (LTL) is concerned with the stories teachers and learners tell about their lived and imagined experiences. Teachers typically tell about their professional development and their practices, and learners about their experiences of learning and using languages. What stories are, and indeed what narrative research is, however, remains far from agreed upon in LTL research. There is no single, all-encompassing definition of narrative (research), probably because the same situation exists in other disciplines from which empirical work in LTL draws its theoretical and methodological assumptions and approaches. Stanley & Temple (Reference Stanley and Temple2008: 276), for example, say that generally there is ‘little shared sense of core concerns, of approach, and even of what narrative is seen as’. In LTL, narrative, whether as text/artefact, method of analysis, or both, has become a popular catchall term for much activity in qualitative, interpretive research which focuses on the experiences of research participants. In other words, it has been appropriated by researchers who exhibit varying degrees of epistemological commitment to narrative, and this is evident in the design and reporting of their research.
What complicates matters is that there are researchers who are fully committed to a narrative epistemology, but who come to their work with different perspectives on what narrative and narrative research is or should be; for example, those who are interested in the big stories of teachers’ and learners’ lives and focus on the content of what they say in large banks of biographical data, such as life history interviews and written reflective journals, compared to those who are more concerned with the discursive construction of small stories extracted from recorded conversational data. Those new to narrative research in LTL, therefore, are caught in the midst not only of definitional uncertainty, but of various, often competing, perspectives. Perhaps it is true to say that since narrative research has emerged only relatively recently in LTL (research, that is, which is explicitly framed as narrative), it is still in the process of coalescing as a visible and legitimate research approach. I would argue that this creates a convenient opportunity for researchers to explore narrative work more freely without the constraints of prescriptive methodological parameters and to begin to locate themselves and their practice within the possibilities that narrative research has to offer.
In this timeline I have brought together empirical research that reports on narrative studies, so I exclude published work about narrative research (e.g. Cortazzi Reference Cortazzi, Atkinson, Coffey, Delamont, Lofland and Lofland2001; Bell Reference Bell2002; Pavlenko Reference Pavlenko2002, Reference Pavlenko2007; Barkhuizen Reference Barkhuizen2011). I also exclude examples from the huge body of qualitative research in LTL that is not framed as narrative. Exceptions in this regard are the early learner diary studies, which although not reported as narrative, are clearly autobiographical, foreshadowing later research which is framed more explicitly as narrative. Early narrative researchers from the 1980s and 1990s and into the 2000s tended to focus on the content of the narrative data they constructed, and this approach remains dominant (although there is currently an increasing trend for narrative analysis to acknowledge the conditions of narrative production). Life history interviews or written teacher journals, for example, are analysed thematically to discover salient meanings in the lives of the participants. At the urging of scholars such as Pavlenko (Reference Pavlenko2007), researchers were reminded of the importance of context in narrative research: not only the local contexts of their participants’ lives but also the broader sociopolitical discourses that made particular meaning-making options available to them. More recently, following narrative work in sociolinguistics (De Fina & Georgakopoulou Reference De Fina and Georgakopoulou2011), researchers in LTL have begun to pay analytical attention to the storytelling context: the discursive construction of narrative in interaction and the specific, ethnographic contexts in which narratives are (re)produced. The timeline includes studies from all these methodological traditions.
In terms of topics covered, I include studies which report on language teaching and learning in educational contexts. This means that analyses of immigrant memoirs (see Pavlenko Reference Pavlenko2001) or memoirs not specifically written for research purposes (Gao Reference Gao2010) are not included. Also set aside are immigrants’ accounts of their language learning if they do not make connections with educational contexts.
This timeline organises the research literature into the three categories below, noted in the final column of the timeline. The distinction between ‘autobiographical’ and ‘biographical’ is often blurred in research, being complicated by who is doing the research, who the participants are, and how narrative data and reports are constructed. Nevertheless, for the sake of categorisation in the timeline I make a broad distinction based on the roles of the researchers, who either study themselves (autobiographically) or others (biographically).
T Language teachers’ professional development and practices
T1 Autobiographical accounts
T2 Biographical accounts, with single or multiple participants
L Language learners’ learning and language use
L1 Autobiographical accounts
L2 Biographical accounts, with single or multiple participants
A Primary approach to analysis
A1 Thematic/content analysis
A2 Discourse and positioning analysis
A3 Mixed methods
A4 Reflections and writing as analysis
As narrative research in LTL gains traction and acceptance amongst communities of language teachers and researchers, I see scope for further development of methods that make use of innovative forms of narrative analysis and reporting (Canagarajah Reference Canagarajah1996; Nelson Reference Nelson2011), particularly multimodal narratives (using electronic, mobile and social media resources) and crafted narratives (such as playscripts, poetry and stories). Experimenting with new forms of analysis and reporting will mean that researchers will by necessity pay increased attention to relationships between narrative form, content and context.
Gary Barkhuizen is Associate Professor and Head of the School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of language teacher education, learner language, applied sociolinguistics and narrative inquiry. He has published in a wide range of journals and has guest edited issues of TESOL Quarterly, Language Teaching Research (which he co-edited 2012–2014) and the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. He is author, with Rod Ellis, of Analysing learner language (Oxford University Press, 2005); with Phil Benson, Peter Bodycott and Jill Brown, of Second language identity in narratives of study abroad (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and, with Phil Benson and Alice Chik, of Narrative inquiry in language teaching and learning research (Routledge, 2013). He edited Narrative research in applied linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
