A naturalistic stimulated recall study of specific silence events

Abstract

Stimulated recall is a form of introspective inquiry that has been employed extensively in educational research, primarily as a means of investigating individuals’ concurrent thinking during specific past events (e.g. Butefish, 1990; Calderhead, 1981; Fox-Turnbull, 2009; O’Brien, 1993; Peterson & Clark, 1978). This is achieved by encouraging subjects to comment in a subsequent interview on what was happening at the time an event occurred, using prompts or stimuli connected to the incident as support. As Gass and Mackey (2000) have illustrated in their extensive overview of the approach, this method of data collection has recently been gaining increasing prominence within the field of second language education. While much of this previous research has focused on teachers’ decision-making (e.g. Johnson, 1992; Nunan, 1991; Woods, 1989), stimulated recall has also been employed effectively in studies focusing on a variety of language learning topics, including for example, vocabulary acquisition (e.g. Paribakht & Wesche, 1999), written composition (e.g. Bosher, 1998), and interlanguage pragmatics (e.g. Robinson, 1992). More relevant to my own investigation into Japanese language learner silence are those studies which concentrate on oral interaction, and I shall now consider a number of these investigations in more denth.