This article illustrates how various qualitative traditions could be used in educational research by describing and comparing the traditions of ecological psychology, holistic ethnography, cognitive anthropology, ethnography of communication, and symbolic interactionism. The analysis shows that qualitative traditions present diverse approaches to research and that each tradition forms a coherent whole, comprising internally consistent assumptions about human nature and society, foci of study, and methodology. Implications of the analysis suggest that qualitative traditions may offer a richer and fuller understanding of education. Educational researchers could conduct either basic or applied research within these traditions, or they could adapt the traditions to address new problems. Moreover, it is suggested that educators who wish to perform qualitative research should seek to employ the totality of a tradition, not just generic assumptions or methods.

This article explores how the Learning Together form of cooperative learning influenced opportunities for acquiring academic English by L2 learners in a 6th-grade social studies classroom. Our findings present a complex picture. Cooperative learning gave L2 learners a wide range of opportunities to acquire academic English. They gave and received help with academic terms, difficult academic concepts, and para-academic knowledge. They were exposed to and produced lexical and conceptual explorations and homonymic word associations. They received help with conventions of written English. They used language for self-help and were invited by their peers to contribute more to the group. Many of these categories included both input and output opportunities, with L2 learners helping others as much as they were helped. However, except for help with decoding academic terms, the various kinds of opportunities occurred relatively infrequently. Moreover, there were some missed opportunities and some negative input. Several local contextual features (e.g., students' definitions of the task, features of the task, and participant structures) helped us understand the complex picture we found. Our findings suggest that (a) developers and disseminators need to take context into account, and (b) teachers who want to maximize the benefits of cooperative learning in support of second language acquisition (SLA) need to have a broad understanding of academic language, include SLA in their instructional goals, structure classroom tasks to support the desired opportunities for L2 learners, monitor what is happening in the groups, and fine tune their implementation if they are not getting what they want.

There is considerable confusion in the educational literature about the nature of qualitative research. In this article I argue that a major source of the confusion arises from discussing qualitative research as if it is one approach. The discussion in the educational literature concerning qualitative research can be clarified by recognizing that qualitative research comes in many different varieties, which can be more clearly identified and understood by using the notion of research traditions. To apply this concept to the discussion of qualitative research, I describe briefly and compare six traditions from the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, and sociology. These traditions are human ethology, ecological psychology, holistic ethnography, cognitive anthropology, ethnography of communication, and symbolic interactionism. I conclude that we may increase our understanding of qualitative research by focusing our discussions at the level of traditions.

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