AAAL 2026: Invited Colloquium

Making Method Visible: Methodography, Reflexivity, and the Epistemics of Research-in-Practice

Conveners:

Discussant: 

Sal Consoli, University of Edinburgh

Colloquium Abstract

This colloquium centers “second-order reflexivity” (Prior, 2025) as a critical and transformative imperative for applied linguistics, presenting methodography as a powerful empirical mode for enacting it. While methodology typically outlines what researchers should do, and first-order reflexivity emphasizes ethical self-awareness and positionality, second-order reflexivity interrogates the epistemological assumptions, disciplinary norms, and institutional conditions that shape what counts as knowledge, how it is produced, and by whom.

Unlike reflexivity-as-introspection, second-order reflexivity calls for epistemic, ethical, and institutional critique and transformation. We argue that methodography operationalizes this imperative by turning the analytic lens onto method itself—not as fixed protocol, but as situated, discursive, and affectively charged practice. Drawing on Greiffenhagen et al. (2011), Kasper and Ross (2017), and related work across applied linguistics (e.g., Consoli & Ganassin, 2023; Habibie & Sawyer, 2025; Prior, 2016; Talmy, 2025), we frame methodography as both a critical stance and an observational tool that makes visible the often-invisible labor of research-in-practice.

Methodography traces how methods are enacted, negotiated, and stabilized through analytic encounters, institutional routines, and collaborative decisions. It reveals how interpretive “trouble spots” emerge, how coherence is retroactively assembled, and how researchers navigate constraint, contingency, and affect. Importantly, it resists “vanity reflexivity”—performance without consequence—and reframes reflexivity as epistemic work: sustained, accountable engagement with how knowledge is made and legitimized.

The colloquium begins with a framing overview, followed by four paper presentations examining methodographic research across diverse methodological and institutional contexts. A formal response by Dr. Sal Consoli draws out key themes, and a concluding dialogue invites audience participation. Collectively, the session repositions methodography as a generative framework for unsettling research logics, enriching practice, and reimagining applied linguistics as a field grounded in responsibility, transparency, and critical reflexivity.

Reflexivity as Epistemic Scale: Interrogating Presence, Process, and Power in a Critical Ethnography

Steven Talmy, University of British Columbia

This presentation develops a scalar framework for reflexive engagement. Using data from a critical ethnography of ESL education at Tradewinds High, the presentation demonstrates affordances of conceiving of reflexivity as an epistemic structure, distributed across multiple layers of methodological inquiry. This enables a sustained, multidimensional view of reflexivity as a scalar movement across three recursive registers: 1. First-order reflexivity: grounded in researcher presence, the lived experience of doing fieldwork (Prior, 2025). 2. Methodography: focused on the situated processes of knowledge production, how methods were enacted and data co-constructed (Greiffenhagen et al., 2011) 3. Second-order reflexivity: aimed at interrogating power arrangements, engaging structural critique, the epistemic and institutional conditions that shape what can be known, by whom, and under what terms (Fitzpatrick & May, 2022; Prior, 2025). First-order reflexivity at Tradewinds entailed navigating my ambiguous role in the field. It reveals how I was locally scaled into the institution in ways that shaped access and interpretation. Methodography involved examining methods-in-use, how access was negotiated, roles sustained, and knowledge shaped. At Tradewinds, this meant navigating teacher concerns about surveillance, adjusting interview practices to ensure confidentiality, and recognizing how my institutional location shaped what I could say in classrooms. Second-order reflexivity confronted the epistemic boundaries of ESL itself, of grappling with the limits of critique, of institutional silences around race and language ideology. I treat these moments as encounters with a thought collective (Fleck, 1977), an historically layered epistemic formation that shapes what counts as knowledge. Together, these reflexive registers demonstrate how knowledge in ethnographic research is produced through scalar entanglements: embodied participation, situated method, institutional constraint. Reflexivity, reframed as epistemic scale, becomes a means of substantively, systematically tracing how both researcher and field are implicated in the politics of knowing.

Instruction Delivery in Online Psycholinguistic Experiments

Jia Kang, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
Gabriele Kasper, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Psycholinguistic experiments contribute significantly to disciplinary knowledge in SLA (Roberts, 2012). An extensive methodological literature describes experimental technologies, design options, and data treatments, and considers their suitability to address a wide range of research questions on L2 processing and knowledge (Phakiti, 2014; Schmid, 2016). At the same time, the activity structures of laboratory experiments differ markedly from participants’ everyday experience and therefore require specific instruction and training (Deschambault, 2018). The participants’ practical grasp of the experimental protocol is critical for the production of data that counts as valid and reliable in the research tradition, yet little is known about how pre-experimental instruction is delivered in situ.  

To address this question, our study builds on ethnomethodological and conversation-analytic investigations of methodography (Greiffenhagen et al., 2011; Kasper & Ross, 2018), instruction delivery (e.g., Lindwall et al., 2015; Olbertz-Siitonen & Piirainen-Marsh, 2023), and video-mediated interaction (e.g., Luff et al., 2003; Nielsen, 2019). Data are drawn from a larger corpus of video-mediated dyadic pre-experimental instructions for psycholinguistic experiments in Korean and English. The selected experiment, conducted by three experimenters and 47 participants, examines priming effects of case markers in Korean sentence planning. Multimodal conversation analysis (Mondada, 2019) reveals that instruction delivery and understanding displays are accomplished as ensembles of bodily conduct, digital resources, and linguistic action formats. Instruction delivery is calibrated to the ongoing activity phase, from generalized instruction based on on-screen written prompts in the initial task explanation to correction and elaboration in response to the participants’ performance in the practice phase. Even after participants successfully complete the practice run, experimenters provide model responses, contrastive examples, and further task explanations. In this way they treat the progressivity of the experiment as secondary to participants’ compliance with the experimental procedure and the goal to generate data consistent with the logic of the experiment. 

Decolonial affordances of methodography: Self-location in (Indigenous) language education research

Meike Wernicke, University of British Columbia

In the territory known as Canada, the growing emphasis on Indigenous language revitalization (ILR) (McIvor 2020) is creating opportunities for collaborations between Indigenous and settler language scholars for thinking across multiple knowledge systems (Battiste & Henderson, 2021). Relationality, a foundational principle of Indigenous research (Wilson, 2008), defines this work as historically and geo-politically positioned and "explicit about the perspective from which knowledge is generated" (Riddell et al, 2017) through the protocol of self-location, which "immediately brings the researcher self into [the] research" (Kovach et al., 2013). In this sense, relationality speaks to first- and second-order reflexivity (Prior, 2025) by insisting on transparency and also "challeng[ing] the epistemic, ontological, and methodological grounds of research."

In this paper, I take a methodographic lens to examine my role as co-researcher/instructor in the redesign and inquiry of a course on teaching French-as-a-second language in Western Canada, initiated by Indigenous education faculty in response to calls by teacher candidates for greater focus on their ancestral languages. Drawing on fieldnotes, I focus on the tensions evident in my “reasoning” through (Greiffenhagen et al., 2011) my self-location as a settler researcher/instructor in both French language education (as expert) and ILR (as accomplice/colonizer). Using a critical participatory action research perspective (Lenette, 2022) and my self-location as a starting point, I consider the impact of institutional/program structures and a researcher-centered approach on the necessary participatory nature of Indigenous-settler collaborations that require relationship-building, connection to land, and relational accountability that makes explicit our responsibilities and relational obligations in this work (Leonard, 2025). The methodographic lens taken here highlights researcher reflexivity as a necessary component of respectful and ethical inquiry, with the potential to extend this reflexivity to a better understanding of what it means to also teach language within different knowledge systems.]

The Ethics of Vulnerable Listening and Analysis: Doing Methodography in Emotionally Saturated Public Discourse

Matthew T. Prior, Arizona State University

This talk extends reflexive inquiry into emotionally saturated research by proposing an approach that reframes data analysis as epistemic, affective, and ethical engagement rather than neutral classification. Building on methodography’s attention to the construction of procedural coherence, I examine how analytic choices are shaped by interpretive risk, emotional force, and ethical responsibility when engaging with research that bears the weight of human emotion.The challenge in studying fraught discourse is not only methodological—it is ethical. How can we stay present and accountable to the affective force of what we analyze? I consider a reflexive stance grounded in vulnerable listening—committed to interpreting with others, not merely about them. It resists both analytic detachment and confessional over-identification, inviting researchers to remain with discomfort, ambiguity, and the cultural politics of tellability.

My analysis is based on a study of over 3,000 instances of mediated grief discourse (e.g., podcasts, online forums), using formulation analysis and discursive psychology to investigate how loss is made tellable and receivable. Embedding methodographic inquiry into the analytic process, I examine how speakers and listeners—including analysts—navigate pain, silence, and culturally saturated scripts. I ask: What is the speaker asking to be recognized? What does that demand of the listener—and what risks being misheard or misrepresented in analysis? I foreground these moments of reframing and negotiation as method-in-use, showing how methodological coherence and disruption are negotiated through affective and epistemic responsiveness.

This presentation argues that analyzing emotionally saturated discourse requires not only analytic acuity but also ethical clarity. Vulnerable listening is not merely a way of hearing differently; it is an orientation to analysis grounded in relational ethics and attuned to discursive agency and the stakes of interpretation. In doing so, it offers applied linguistics a model of reflexive inquiry committed to care, consequence, and socially responsive research.

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