Living with inelegance in qualitative research on task-based learning

A hands-on experience of English language teachers as researchers

“…The themes they identified in the transcriptions and the meanings and reasons attached to these themes for interpretation were discussed in our group discussions successively. As emphasized in literature (Leung, Harris, and Rampton 2004), they found it a messy enterprise to work with qualitative data: I understood that data analysis in qualitative research could be messy and hectic. You swim in the ocean of data and try to hunt for proper information to choose.…”

Making Ethical Decisions in an Ethnographic Study

“…Having collected the data, I next had to wrestle with how to choose and represent my data. This dilemma, as Leung, Harris, and Rampton () contend, raises a serious epistemological question of what counts as data. According to them, representational choices and selections of “our collected research data unavoidably involve us in making direct or indirect statements of our interests and our view of reality” (p. 261).…”

'Passivity' or 'Potential'?: Teacher responses to learner identity in the low-level ESL classroom

“…Schachter and Gass (1996:ix) advocate having a flexible agenda when undertaking classroom-based research, because the initial goals of the project often need to be modified according to 'exigencies of time, place and individuals'. Leung, Harris and Rampton (2004) report on the difficulty qualitative researchers experience in presenting the sheer volume of often ambiguous data that does not conform to neat categories. Duff and Early (1996) group the difficulties posed by classroom-based language teaching research into institutional, ethical and methodological challenges.…”