Narrative Knowledging in TESOL

T his article introduces the special-topic issue on Narrative Research in TESOL. It begins by describing the concept of narrative knowledging and continues with a discussion of narrative (co)construction, analysis, and reporting, integrating into the discussion research issues related to TESOL narrative research interrogated by the authors in this issue. This broad discussion is organized in the form of a framework which delineates the generic, mutually informing stages and participants, and their interrelationships, in narrative research projects. I remember very clearly giving my first lecture on narrative inquiry some years ago. It was part of a graduate sociolinguistics course for language teachers at the University of Auckland, where I work, and the topic was sociolinguistic research methods. Usually for this particular class I covered a wide spectrum of data-collection and analytical methods drawn from our readings on variationist sociolinguistics, pointing out overall trends, warning about potential problems (e.g., the ubiquitous observer’s paradox), and suggesting ways to overcome these. But recently I had become excited about the idea of narrative and decided to share my enthusiasm with the teachers. Although the idea of narrative research was new to me, I was beginning to realize that my research practices had for a long time featured some sort of narrative overtones, though I did not yet know what these were. So I decided to explore further what narrative meant and how it applied to what I was doing and wanted to do as a researcher and teacher educator. My interest was triggered by a study I had been involved in for a number of years prior to my narrative inquiry lecture. In this study I investigated the linguistic and identity experiences of Afrikaans-speaking migrants