Discourse Analysis and Foreign Language Teacher Education
DATA PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS
In accordance with the social realist framework adopted here, the data are presented in two distinct, but interwoven layers. First, I present information relating to the agency of each student-teacher under study. The primary data for this layer are the semester-long reaction journals that each student maintained as a graded assignment in the seminar. Scholars in diverse fields have argued that aspects of an individual’s agency can be represented in the linguistic features of the texts that they write (Freeman, 1996a; McAdams, 1996; Numrich, 1996; Salaberri & Appel, in press; Wortham, 2001). I assume that the language of these student-teachers’ reaction journals is representative of their developing agency as teacher-researchers of a foreign language with respect to their exposure to expertise in DA (Ivanic, 1998; Johnson & Golombek, 2002).
Fran’s reaction journal consisted of 11 pages of hand-written text and 26 pages of single-spaced, typed text, whereas Sam’s journal was comprised of 25 pages of hand-written text. The reaction journals were digitized and stored in Ethnograph v5.0 (Seidel, 1998), a software package for qualitative data analysis. This program enables researchers to store, read, code, and variably search large amounts of text in order to discover particular thematic or linguistic patterns, to count the number of tokens of a particular code, or to discover relationships between various codes and various texts or subjects. Researchers create and define their own search codes and tag sections of prose text for a virtually unlimited number of phenomena. In addition, researchers may create face sheets for each subject in which they store biographical information. In this way, data sets may be cross-searched for relationships between established codes and biographical information, e.g. with what frequency did female learners under 25 years of age use the quotative particle ‘like’? In each case, the journal entries were coded for the five levels of response, the students’ use of particular lexical items and linguistic devices, and re-occurring themes and patterns of language use. Additional data are taken from biographical surveys, my participant observations in the seminar, and email correspondence with the student-teachers.
In the second layer of data, I situate each teacher’s agency in the larger macro-sociological aspects of FL teacher education (TE) in the department in question, in FL departments in the U.S. in general, and in the field of FL TE. The primary data sources on this second level of structure include participant observation, policy documents, published research, and demographic statistics.
