ABSTRACT
Stimulated recall has been used extensively in applied linguistics research for more than two decades. It involves the retrospective elicitation of verbal commentaries (prompted by some recall support tool) about the participant’s interactive cognitive activity while taking some action or participating in an event, or about their interpretations of or reasons behind their behaviour and decisions. Given the multifaceted and multimodal approaches to applied linguistics research adopted these days, this chapter provides an analysis of empirical studies which used stimulated recall and have been published in high-impact applied linguistics journals over the last decade, with a view to examining the diversity of methodological purposes which stimulated recall serves, the variety of and variations in data collection procedures adopted, and the epistemological challenges which stimulated recall presents. It is expected that a new conceptualisation of stimulated recall will emerge from this analysis.
