Complicating methods for understanding educators’ language ideologies: transformative approaches for mixing methods

Abstract

This study enlists a transformative approach to mixed methods research in order to problematize what different methods can offer for expanding understandings of educator language attitudes and ideologies. Analyses consider Likert-scale survey responses and linguistic autobiography data from a sociolinguistics course in an online Educating Multilingual Learners master’s degree program at a Southwestern U.S. university. A regression analysis of survey data suggests that older participants are predicted to orient more positively to linguistic diversity and participants with more teaching experience are predicted to orient less positively. Meanwhile, a discursive analysis of autobiographical essays from the oldest participants (over 45) and those with the most teaching experience (over 10 years) illuminate reflexively constructed stances, which we draw on to complicate (not necessarily triangulate) statistically significant findings. Discussion considers the methods by which we examine educators’ language ideologies with implications for both research and teacher education.