Keith Richards

Trends in Qualitative Research in Language Teaching since 2000.

This paper reviews developments in qualitative research in language teaching since the year 2000, focusing on its contributions to the field and identifying issues that emerge. Its aims are to identify those areas in language teaching where qualitative research has the greatest potential and indicate what needs to be done to further improve the quality of its contribution. The paper begins by highlighting current trends and debates in the general area of qualitative research and offering a working definition of the term. At its core is an overview of developments in the new millennium based on the analysis of papers published in 15 journals related to the field of language teaching and a more detailed description, drawn from a range of sources, of exemplary contributions during that period. Issues of quality are also considered, using illustrative cases to point to aspects of published research that deserve closer attention in future work, and key publications on qualitative research practice are reviewed.

FOOD SECURITY RISK LEVEL ASSESSMENT: A FUZZY LOGIC-BASED APPROACH

A fuzzy logic (FL)-based food security risk level assessment system is designed and is presented in this article. Three inputs—yield, production, and economic growth—are used to predict the level of risk associated with food supply. A number of previous studies have related food supply with risk assessment for particular types of food, but none of the work was specifically concerned with how the wider food chain might be affected. The system we describe here uses the Mamdani method. The resulting system can assess risk level against three grades: severe, acceptable, and good. The method is tested with UK (United Kingdom) cereal data for the period from 1988 to 2008. The approach is discussed on the basis that it could be used as a starting point in developing tools that may either assess current food security risk or predict periods or regions of impending pressure on food supply.

How Leadership Works

This chapter, the final analytical chapter in the book, explores the dynamics of leadership and the different forms it can take in research project meetings. It addresses the ways in which leadership activities and processes such as decision-making, negotiating and reaching consensus are discursively constructed by team members, and how different forms of leadership are instantiated through research interactions.

Knowledge Exchange in Initial Meetings

This chapter is the first of two chapters with an epistemological focus. These examine the extent to which a standard model of stages in interdisciplinary research can be applied to the data set used in the book, beginning in this chapter with interaction in initial meetings. It begins with an introduction to work on epistemics in talk then develops an analysis of two initial interdisciplinary meetings on different subjects and with different aims. For the purposes of comparison, it also includes a brief consideration of an initial meeting in an interdiscipline: systems biology.

The Disciplinary Landscape

This chapter focuses on the disciplines because these are the foundations of all interdisciplinary work. It provides a historical context for understanding some of the forces that influence the development of interdisciplinarity, working towards a conclusion that makes the case for the importance of interactional relationships in interdisciplinary communities. The chapter includes three cases that illustrate the complex relationship between disciplines and interdisciplines, and the different ways in which new interdisciplines emerge.

The Collaborative Construction of Knowledge

This chapter completes work begun in Chap. 5 on stages in interdisciplinary research. This time attention is directed to the way in which knowledge is constructed collaboratively. The analysis draws on data from a number of interdisciplinary meetings, some from within systems biology involving different projects and others from a specific research project bringing together the social sciences, biology, mathematics and economics. The second part of the chapter identifies a discourse marker that plays an important part in the building of understanding and draws attention to a significant interactional pattern in which it features. In its conclusion the chapter returns to the issue of terminology in interdisciplinary engagement and challenges a widely accepted claim.

The Interactional Dynamic: Stories from the Back Region

The stories lying at the heart of the workplace culture of the Pen teachers represent a confluence of experience and belief and offer insights into their engagement with the mysteries of their profession. In this chapter I hope to show, through an exploration of these teachers’ tales, how the mystery of their work sets them apart from other groups, and how their modes of sharing represent both a commitment to the seriousness of their profession and a defence against the helplessness it can engender.

Us and Them: Constructing the Other

People sometimes choose to define themselves in terms of who they are not, along the lines of Samuel Beckett’s assertion, T am not British. On the contrary.’ This is an extreme reflection of the necessary truth that the existence of groups is dependent at least to some degree on the extent to which they can be distinguished from other groups and collections of individuals. So far I have concentrated on interactional features that characterise my chosen professional groups and dealt only incidentally with their relationship with outsiders. However, this relationship has been much studied from a psychological perspective because of the extent to which psychologically salient groups form a shared representation of their own identity in terms of how they differ from outsiders or other groups (e.g. Tindale et al., 2001).

The Joke’s on Them: Varieties of Humour in Collaborative Talk

Embedded in, arising from and flowing through many of the routines and rituals of professional life, the stream of humour is one of its most distinctive features, providing not only a source of enrichment and nourishment but also serving as a defining characteristic of the territory as represented by its inhabitants. While the last chapter revealed how collaborative professional groups minimise the impact of centrifugal forces generated through argument, this one will examine how the centripetal dynamic of humour is exploited in different ways by such groups to a variety of affiliative ends.

Staying Onside: The Negotiation of Argument

Despite its usually negative connotations, argument in talk is a pervasive feature of our interactional being and one that serves a diversity of ends. ‘Social life’, as Antaki notes (1994: 160), ‘is argumentative’. This chapter will examine the social aspect of argumentative engagement; specifically, it will explore the ways in which a collaborative group appropriates argument and makes of it an affiliative resource. Argumentative involvement could be seen as representing a challenge to the collaborative identity that has been described in the foregoing chapters because it presupposes differing positions, but this chapter will show how interactants develop a centripetal dynamic by drawing on shared understandings and resources in order to engineer collaborative positioning which reorients individual differences within a broader common purpose. I will suggest that this process depends on an orientation where notions of winning or losing an argument have no valency and that, instead, arguments are constructed for the purposes of bringing onside those involved.