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Less Frequently Used Research Methodologies in Applied Linguistics
Edited by A. Mehdi Riazi
[Research Methods in Applied Linguistics 6] 2024
► pp. 191–205

Chapter 12
Narrative inquiry

| Binghamton University
This chapter examines the key role that narratives have in human communication and engagement across cultures and as fertile analytical and methodological tools. Storytelling practices allow researchers to study speech participants’ visible and veiled interactional dynamics. Besides analyzing narratives for their content (“denotational text”), scholars have studied narratives also for their pragmatic effects in the here-and-now of speech participants’ interactions, or their “interactional text,” and across various spatiotemporal configurations. During their tellings, narrators can assume and reverse roles, for example. Moreover, narratives simultaneously shape and are shaped by their surrounding context. In this light, storytelling practices are actual speech events that are (co)created, and developed, and thus need to be studied as such because of their interactional nature.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical foundations
  • 3.Methodological orientations
    • 3.1Principles and affordances
    • 3.2Types of RQs addressed by narrative inquiry
    • 3.3Procedures of data collection and analysis
    • 3.4Ethical issues
  • 4.Critiques and responses
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 5 January 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rmal.6.12per
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