Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education by Nat Bartels

4 RESEARCHING APPLIED LINGUISTICScan give you a richer‚ insider perspective on the learning taking place in an appliedlinguistics class‚ although the researcher may be so preoccupied in her view thatimportant perspectives on the class are ignored. This can be alleviated by including datafrom other participants in the class‚ taping classes and analyzing transcripts‚ or by havingan outside observer to compliment your perspective as participant observer. (See Byra &Karp‚ 2000‚ for descriptions of and guidelines for participant observation.)DOCUMENTATIONA similar source of data are documents and artifacts from teaching‚ for example lessonplans‚ teaching materials‚ and student work. Such data provides a picture of teachers’knowledge in use‚ schemata and routines‚ especially when combined with data fromobservation and/or report data. It can also provide more detailed data than observationalone‚ for example if you want to look at teacher marking and comments on students’written work. However‚ this method can produce quite a lot of data‚ so it is wise to planbeforehand exactly what kind of documents you want to examine in order to reduce thevolume of data to by analyzed.Of course‚ you can also collect documents and artifacts from applied linguistics classes‚too. Student work is a convenient source of data because you collect it anyway and thenall you need to do‚ after getting the proper permission from the students and any researchreview board at your institution‚ is to copy the student work before handing it back to thestudents.