This study addresses the methodological issues identified in the previous section in two main ways, the first relating to a specific method of data-elicitation, and the second relating to the study’s overall approach to the status and analyses of the discourse data elicited in verbal commentaries. As regards the first, it uses a videoclip-based comment procedure (Speer 2005) to ensure that, as far as possible, the researcher and teachers establish mutual understanding on what aspects of the teachers’ practice are being focused on. Second, it draws on theoretical and methodological tools developed in discursive psychology and conversation analysis in analysing the discourse of teachers’ verbal commentaries as a topic in itself, not just a resource for accessing ‘mental’ phenomena or comparing it with ‘reality’ (as in classroom practice). Each of these two ways of dealing with methodological issues is addressed in turn below.
Apart from the issues of mutual understanding, the use of video recording already has an important justification in the study. Many studies in teacher cognition rely solely on teachers’ verbal reports on their classroom practices, without providing any evidence regarding the practices themselves. This is being seen as increasingly problematic in teacher cognition research, with Borg (2006) arguing that ‘the study of what teachers do should be integral to the study of (...) teacher cognition’ (p. 273, italic added). Even when verbal commentary data such as semi-structured interviews are used alongside observation of practice, the two data-sources are often kept separate, with often one data-source being used to ‘undercut’ (Silverman 2001) the other, for example by pointing out supposed ‘inconsistencies’ between what teachers do and what they say. This study addresses both these problems, by, in the first place, not relying solely on teachers’ verbal commentaries, and by integrating the two types of evidence by adopting a social practices approach to all the interactional settings in the study - classrooms and other data elicitation contexts.
To address the problem of establishing mutual understanding, Speer (2005) suggests that a methodological remedy for this situation is to ask teachers to comment on videoclips of their own practices, in what she calls the ‘videoclip interview technique’. She claims that this method can ‘enable researchers to collect data on beliefs tied to specific examples of teachers’ practices and data is generated that permits more accurate attributions of beliefs’ (2005: 377). By getting teachers to comment on very specific examples of their practices, rather than decontextualized abstractions or generalizations, this technique can get round the ‘conceptual rumination’ problem described above. By watching videoclips of classroom action together, researcher and teachers can achieve more shared epsitemic primacy (Stivers, Steensig and Mondada 2011) and will be able to focus in on more concrete examples of practice.
The second methdological issue, that of the way in which ‘discourse dilemmas’ are dealt with, is more fundamental to the study than the choice of any one data elicitation strategy. In addressing these issues, the study draws on the theoretical and
methodological frameworks of discursive psychology and conversation analysis. However, it is important to point out at the outset that the study does not position itself as either a discursive psychological or conversation analytic piece of research. That is,
building their worlds of practice, nor a micro-analysis of the ways in which the classrooms or the other interactional settings were jointly accomplished. Rather, in drawing on selected analytic tools from both perspectives, the study takes steps to address the ‘discourse dilemmas’ and contingent problems discussed in the previous section. In broad terms, the methodological approach is to achieve a balance between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. In avoiding the contingent, and indeed some of the necessary, problems of using verbal commentaries, there is a danger of going too far, with the ‘hows’ of joint construction of knowledge taking precedence over the substantive issues the research is supposed to be about. The approach taken is consistent with Holstein and Gubrium’s (2004) concept of the ‘active interview’ in which there is a balance between a focus on the meaning-making process and the actual experiences of the interviewees. As they put it, ‘The analytic objective is not merely to describe the situated production of talk, but to show how what is being said relates to the experiences and lives being studied in the circumstances at hand.’ (Holstein and Gubrium 2004: 156). Put another way, the study’s methodological approach is to be reflexively aware of, and to take steps to resolve, what Mazeland and ten Have (1996) describe as three ‘essential tensions’ in research interviews:
• Description of the lifeworld of the speaker • Local relevance (answers to questions)
• Materials for analysis relevant to research topic
(Mazeland and ten Have 1996)
Thus, there is a clear interest in the ‘lifeworlds’ of the teachers, that is what they do in their classrooms, and the ways in which language figures as an aspect of these practices in their own terms. However, ‘local relevance’ is also a focus of the study, in that their descriptions of their practices emerge in the context of interaction, as responses to a question, or a request to comment on a videoclip. Here, it is important to recognise the importance of the discursive organization of research interviews as interaction. The interviews in this study were designed to have a ‘mixed format’ - a combination of what Mazeland and ten Have (1996) and ten Have (2004) describe as ‘turn-by-turn’ (TBT) and ‘discourse unit’ (DU) interviews. TBT interviews mainly consist of short turns, such as questions, answers and acknowledgement tokens (ten Have 2004: 62), while DU interviews position the interviewee as the expert on his/her own experiences with
the questions put by the interviewer marking out an ‘answering space’ which indicates the general character of the response expected (ten Have 2004: 64). Thus, at some phases in the interview, the interviewee was the ‘primary speaker’ with the interviewer limiting himself to minimal responses. At other stages, there were exchanges of shorter turns in TBT format, often as part of the ‘work’ of preparing the ground for a DU phase of the interview. There is also a focus on maintaining a dialogue between the evidence as produced in the classroom and interview data, and the theoretical ideas about the roles of language in CLIL, and about teachers’ knowledge, which frame the study. Having set out the broad methodological approach, we can now turn to a more specific description of the tools from discursive psychology and conversation analysis which were employed in the analysis of discourse data in the study.