Autoethnography as an approach to inquiry has gained a widespread following in part because it addresses the ethical issue of representing, speaking for, or appropriating the voice of others. In this article, I place the emergence of autoethnography within its historical context and discuss the contributions and limitations of autoethnography as an approach to inquiry. I examine ethical aspects of autoethnography, showing how the method is rooted in ethical intent, yet autoethnographers nevertheless face ethical challenges. I suggest that collaborative autoethnography, a multivocal approach in which two or more researchers work together to share personal stories and interpret the pooled autoethnographic data, builds upon and extends the reach of autoethnography and addresses some of its methodological and ethical issues. In particular, collaborative autoethnography supports a shift from individual to collective agency, thereby offering a path toward personally engaging, nonexploitative, accessible research that makes a difference.
Transcription is an integral process in the qualitative analysis of language data and is widely employed in basic and applied research across a number of disciplines and in professional practice fields. Yet, methodological and theoretical issues associated with the transcription process have received scant attention in the research literature. In this article, the authors present a cross-disciplinary conceptual review of the place of transcription in qualitative inquiry, in which the nature of transcription and the epistemological assumptions on which it rests are considered. The authors conclude that transcription is theory laden; the choices that researchers make about transcription enact the theories they hold and constrain the interpretations they can draw from their data. Because it has implications for the interpretation of research data and for decision making in practice fields, transcription as a process warrants further investigation.
Contemporary educators who view learning as interactive, discursive, and situated have argued that well‐designed online conferencing environments may be particularly suited to provide the socio‐cognitive support for learning seen as fundamental to constructivist pedagogies. In order to assess the relationships between online course design, participants' interactions, and learning, a first step is to examine closely and describe the nature of online class participants' interactions within synchronous and asynchronous conferences. In this article, I address the role of interactive writing as an integral element in the conceptual development that takes place in such online courses. I argue that the interactive textual environment of asynchronous online conferences is particularly facilitative of both social and cognitive construction of meaning because the nature of online interactive writing itself bootstraps the construction of meaning.
A meta-analytic review of 33 studies investigating the pragmatic language skills of 3- to 12-year-old students with language disorders, language-learning disabilities, or learning disabilities as compared with the pragmatic language skills of nondisabled peers was conducted. The students with language and/or learning disabilities demonstrated consistent and pervasive pragmatic deficits in conversation compared to non-disordered peers (mean effect size = -0.52; SE = 0.06) across settings, conversational partners, age groups, and types of pragmatic skills measured. The pragmatic differences between the students with language or learning disabilities and control groups could not be accounted for by differences in study methodology or design. Furthermore, these pragmatic deficits appeared to be more attributable to underlying language deficits than to insufficient social knowledge. These findings are consistent with the perspective that students with learning disabilities can also be described as language disordered, and that children with language disorders experience a continuum of language failure that may be manifested in different ways as they progress through school.
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