Qualitative research on language education and teaching: trends and opportunities, with an illustrative analysis of two Australian examples

Abstract

This article is a critical overview of reviews of qualitative research on language education and teaching, highlighting trends and opportunities for future research. It is focused on reviews of research on English education and teaching in situations where English is a second, additional, foreign, international or global language. The review is undertaken as an act of what was described by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (2004) as ‘participant objectivation’. By this is meant a reflexive analysis of the biases and relations of power stemming from the researcher’s positions in social space, a social scientific field, and the intellectual field in general. The focus here is on social scientific positioning, specifically, the traditions, national particularities and international conventions and commonsense of a cluster of relevant research fields. From this perspective, four trends in the review literature are canvassed: (i) the growing volume of articles in journals that take English language education and teaching as their object; (ii) the rise in the proportion of those articles which is empirical; (iii) change and stasis in the proportion of that empirical literature which reports qualitative research; and (iv) the shifting place of language education and teaching as objects of inquiry in relevant fields of research. The article re-iterates the importance of addressing the divides that have opened up between practitioners and researchers, advocating a renewal of the engagement of the relevant research fields with persistent and emerging challenges of language education and teaching.