Narrative frames for investigating the experiences of language teachers

Narrative inquiry in language teacher education aims to understand the experiences of teachers in the particular contexts in which they teach. This article reports on the use of narrative frames as a means of investigating the teaching experiences of university English teachers in China. This study used four specifically designed narrative frames to collect data from a large group of teachers who participated in a summer teacher education program. Eighty-three complete sets of the four frames were collected and then analyzed using a paradigmatic approach typical of qualitative content analysis to explore commonalities among the teachers’ experiences. One frame, relating to the Research Methodology course, is used to illustrate the effectiveness of this approach. The researchers suggest that the frames are useful for collecting a large amount of data from a large number of participants, and that they provide a means of entry into an unfamiliar research context. At the same time, they caution that using the frames in this way has the potential to de-personalize the experiences of teachers, an outcome atypical of narrative inquiry.