English Language Teaching in its Social Context

RECORDING AND TRANSCRIBING TALI< 325collect you will need to take account of the effect your own presence, and the way youcarried out the observations, may have had on your data.It is also important to consider, more generally, the relationship you have, or that youenter into, with those who participate in your research and allow you to observe thcirlanguage behaviour. I have used the term researcher stance to refer to this more generalrelationship - the way a researcher behaves towards the people and events she or hc isobserving. Cameron, Frazer, Harvey, Rampton and Richardson (1 992) distinguish betweenthree kinds of relationship, or researcher stance:‘ethical research’, in which a researcher bears in mind the interests of researchparticipants - e.g. minimising any inconvenience caused, protecting privacy - but stillcarries out research on participants: in this case, it is the researcher who sets theagenda, not other research participants;‘advocacy’, in which researchers carry out research on and for participants - e.g.regarding themselves as accountable to participants and being willing to use theirexpert knowledge on participants’ behalf (when required by participants to do so);‘empowering research’, in which researchers carry out research on, for and with otherparticipants - e.g. being completely open about the aims and methods of the research,recognising the importance of participants’ own agendas, empowering participantsby giving them direct access to expert knowledge.The kind of researcher stance you feel able to adopt will affect the overall conduct of yourresearch - what you research, the specific methods you adopt, how you interpretyour results, the forms in which you disseminate research findings. Points to considerinclude:What kind oftalk is it reasonable to record? Only ‘public’ talk or also casual, or ‘private’conversation?Do you always need permission to record talk? Researchers would usually gain permissionto make recordings (perhaps from parents in the case of young children), whereas talkmay be recorded by teachers as a part of ‘normal’ teaching activity that docs notrequire permission. But what if the teacher is also a researcher, or if s/he wishes tomake use of ‘routine’ recordings for research purposes?How open shouldyou be about the purposes $your recordings? Bound up with this questionis the notion of the observer’s paradox: it is likely that the more you tell people aboutyour research the more their behaviour will be affected. Some researcherscompromise: they are rather vague about the precise purposes of their research,though they may say more after completing their recording. ‘Empowering’ rescarchwould require greater openness and consultation.You may also feel that, if you areobserving as a colleague or a teacher, it is important to rctain an atmosphere of trustbetween yourself and thosc you work with.To what extent should you discuss your recordings with research participants? This has to dopartly with the researcher stance you adopt. Discussing recordings with others alsolets you check your interpretations against theirs, and may give you a differentunderstanding of your data.How shouldyou identfy thoseyou have recorded? In writing reports, researchers often givepseudonyms to institutions in which they have carried out research, or people whoscwords they quote. If you have worked more collaboratively with participants, however,they may wish to be identified by name. If you do wish to maintain confidentiality it