Proceedings of the - British Association for Applied Linguistics

20
Introduction
Discourse Analysis: An Open-Ended Approach to Validity and Impact
Steven Peters
Discourse Analysis: An Open-Ended
Approach to Validity and Impact
Steven Peters
Graduate School of Education, The University of Bristol
steve22peters@gmail.com
The presentation focused on how the experience of conducting original
empirical research provided a TESOL practitioner-researcher and early
career researcher with insights into the tensions and rewards of using
discourse analysis in researching language teacher learning. Although the
original research looked at how teachers shape the meanings of aspects of
language teacher development (Mann, 2005), it was the nature of insights
into validity and impact especially in relation to the use of discourse
analysis that was presented.
Impact
An understanding of impact as something which means a number of
different things to a number of different people was presented. Gardner
(2011) views it as ‘impact in the thinking and practice’ of various
interested groups, while Francis (2010) views it as being split between
impact on policy and impact on practice. It was recognised that others still
view the term itself as unfortunate, suggesting associations with metaphors
of more physical and harmful notions, such as Saunders (2011). This paper
drew on this diversity to allow for a focus to be drawn on impact as
something that can be viewed as related to the creation of a greater impetus
for change in the practice setting. Insights into such impetus for change and
its ongoing nature were held to be evident in the results of a discourse
analysis approach exploring the interweaving of interview data as
analyzable sequences of interaction (Silverman, 2007) with participant
validation.
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