ABSTRACT
Diary-writing is a pervasive narrative form which has, of course, always played an important role in many people's private reflections, and has had many famous exponents. In education and in English language teaching, the diary has become increasingly significant both as a reflective genre in it, and as one of a battery of interpretive micro-ethnographic research techniques. Diaries are best written over an extended period, and snapshot extracts cannot capture changes over time which can often be very marked, so any one segment belongs organically in a broader temporal and contextual picture. Scrutiny of the text may lead to a self-contained analysis of behaviour, interaction, learning processes, and so on as a diary study in its own right, or alternatively may be, in Nunans terms, ground-clearing preliminary, generating topics worth pursuing with other research tools both qualitative and numerical. Diaries kept by trainee teachers have several obvious parallels with what we have termed pedagogic learners diaries.
