Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education by Nat Bartels

BARTELS 9learning (Numrich‚ 1996; Pennington‚ 1995). It can also be an excellent way ofcollecting longitudinal data (Hosenfeld‚ 2003). For teachers of applied linguistics‚collecting journal data can be much less time consuming than other data collectionmethods‚ especially if learner journals are already integrated into the course or practicumyou are investigating and the journals are submitted in electronic form.MetaphorsMetaphors have also been used to investigate teachers’ knowledge and cognition. Thisincludes metaphors which occur naturally in interview or other data (source) as well asdata from tasks that specifically ask participants to produce metaphors. The theory is thatthe metaphors people create or chose to use reflect their conceptions of the phenomenathey are using the metaphors to represent. The analysis can include identifying themes orattitudes contained in the metaphors.Narrative and Biographic MethodsAs mentioned earlier‚ much of teachers’ knowledge is bound up in stories of theirexperiences both as students and as teachers. An effective way of accessing this kind ofknowledge is using narrative and biographic data collection methods. There are threegeneral directions this can take. First‚ data can be either general stories (“How do youremember learning French?”) or on specific aspects of teaching (“What happens when