Doing Narrative Research in Applied Linguistics

CIFLTE Public Talk

On February 23rd, TC was treated to a talk by Dr. Gary Barkhuizen, a renowned scholar in the field of applied linguistics and Teachers College alumnus. The talk, sponsored by the Center for International Foreign Language Teacher Education (CIFLTE), was entitled “Doing Narrative

Research in Applied Linguistics” and focused on the use of story in narrative inquiry research. The event was attended by nearly 150 participants who joined remotely from around the globe.

Warm Up

Dr. Barkhuizen began his presentation with the ten questions he gets most often about conducting narrative inquiry; they ranged from the practical (“Can I use first-person ‘I’ in my research reports?”) to the theoretical (“Is telling participants’ stories enough? What more should I do?”). What followed was an in-depth discussion of the nature of the story and the value of narrative inquiry research. 

01 Stories and Re-stories

Dr. Barkhuizen dedicated a significant portion of his talk to discussing the concept of “story” and its role in the narrative inquiry approach. For him, there are certain features that must be present in a narrative for it to be considered a story: generally, there should be a rhetorically engaging discussion of past experiences or imagined futures that features “characters” and follows a plot. The telling should also include reflective or evaluative commentary of the told experiences. Dr. Barkhuizen explained that the stories participants tell about themselves and their life experiences provide insight into the way they make meaning of their experiences. He then went on to discuss that narrative inquiry contains multiple levels of meaning-making: first, where participants share their experiences in the form of story, and then again when the researcher “re-stories” the participants’ experiences, or constructs their own stories from those told by participants. 

02 Dimensions of Narrative Inquiries

Following the discussion of the notion of story, Dr. Barkhuizen spent time reviewing the five “core dimensions of narrative inquiry” (the full discussion of which can be found in his and coauthor Sal Consoli’s 2021 editorial, Pushing the edge in narrative inquiry). Dr. Barkhuizen shared that each core dimension contemplates a distinct feature of narrative inquiry and seeks to distinguish it from other neighboring qualitative approaches that also make use of participant narratives. Dr. Barkhuizen, using these core dimensions, discussed that narrative inquiry differs from a more general form of narrative study in that the content of the participant narrative— rather than the linguistic or organizational structure of narrative—is the key area of interest. Likewise, narrative inquiry relies on stories-from-interaction (rather than stories-as-interaction); greater researcher engagement; data in story form; and engages in narrative analysis, where the outcome of analysis is, itself, a story. Dr. Barkhuizen then provided a number of sample studies which have employed narrative inquiry in new and interesting ways. (These studies are also discussed and expanded upon in the 2021 editorial.)

03 Questions & Answers

Dr. Barkhuizen ended his talk by answering questions from participants. Many of the questions focused on the integration of the narrative inquiry approach into their respective research projects and pondered how the approach could accompany other paradigms. Dr. Barkhuizen made a point to emphatically state that, while it is possible to incorporate narrative elements into mixed methods research, narrative inquiry can stand on its own as the sole methodological approach, and it does not need to be viewed as subsidiary to other qualitative or quantitative methods.

In sum, the talk provided both a methodological and theoretical foundation to narrative inquiry for those who were new to narrative research, as well as a peek into the exciting and novel ways in which narrative approaches are being used in research now.  

Reporter: Abby Massaro

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