ABSTRACT
In many ways, as outlined in the early chapters of this book, the preferred model of research design in teaching and teacher education contexts has been qualitative and it has often based itself on analyses of practice using tools such as survey methods and audio and visual recording. Conclusions have been drawn on the basis of a few, or often one, specifi c example of practice in context. While such studies and their conclusions obviously have tremendous value, by their very nature they may be prone to skewing and to over-generalising in relation to the practice of other professionals working in similar but not the same contexts. The combined approach suggested in this study provides for an added dimension by permitting specifi c examples of practice to be studied and analysed on the basis of their quantitative signifi cance in corpusbased results. Nonetheless, as is the case with any interpretation in qualitative and particularly discourse-based research, it is never possible to guarantee that the interpretation of the researcher is either fully true to the intentions of the participants or is in agreement with the interpretations of other professionals. For these reasons, the online survey also included a number of other relevant questions aimed at gathering opinions and perceptions of general issues surrounding the TP context. Many of these were discussed in the opening chapters of this book and will be revisited here to take us back to the bigger picture. The following sections of this chapter will discuss the various responses to the online questionnaires organised around thematic units, based on the 26 teacher and 21 tutor responses (analyses of individual questions are based on a 100% response, even when all participants did not reply, so, for example, the percentage response rate of two teachers in a particular question may not equate with the percentage response rate of two teachers in another question where the total numbers of teachers responding in both cases is different).
