To purchase Professor Gary Barkhuizen's book, Narrative Research in Applied Linguistics, please follow the link: http://ow.ly/rwdaY Gary Barkhuizen, author of Narrative Research in Applied Linguistics, gives a short introduction to the topic. (Apologies for the poor quality of the sound on this recording. You may wish to turn on captioning, or view the transcript below.) What narrative research does is focus particularly on the lives of participants -- on their experiences -- as they understand their experiences; whether they're teaching or learning, or other type of social interaction. What makes narrative research perhaps a little different from other types of qualitative research is the particular attention that is paid to the fine, fine details of these experiences. Narrative research seldom if ever tries to generalise data to different contexts, but instead, tries to describe in detail the understanding -- the meanings -- that the participants in the research process make of their own lives. And that is done either to various forms of working data, such as language learning histories, or to written journals that teachers may write, reflecting on their practise, or it could be the small stories that participants tell in everyday conversations, or invented new contexts. And of course those types of data and the data analysis approach that go along with actually analysing those data are quite similar to qualitative research generally, but what is important with narrative research is that those data are looked at as stories, of these people's lives -- number one -- and also, the stories in very rich detail of those experiences.

• published: 05 Dec 2013
• views: 286