ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the assumptions that underlie the use of language data in the study of teachers’ knowledge and proposes an alternative approach to analysing such data. Arguing that, to date, teachers’ words have been assumed to ‘represent’ their thinking, the chapter outlines the representational view which has been adopted in such research in which language data is taken as isomorphic to participants’ thoughts, beliefs, knowledge, and feelings. However, research can benefit from work in linguistics on the nature, form, and social dimensions of language and its relation to thought. From this perspective, a presentational approach is proposed which focuses on the interrelationship between what is said in the data about the teacher’s inner world, the language used (or not used) to say or ‘present’ it, and the context-both virtual and actual-of its ‘presentation’. The chapter lays out the two views and argues through that their integration researchers can examine, and find evidence of, particular processes of thinking and change.
