Article submission
I’ve just submitted an article to Gender and Education based on a content analysis I did last year as part of the MSc Educational Research. The article looks at the representation of gender relations in the online version of New Headway, and the ways in which theorisations of gender, identity and language learning may inform, and be informed by, the emergent postmethod movement in TESOL.
This is my first article submission, and the submission process has been something of a learning curve in itself – as chronicled in my blog…
Absolutely right, Achilleas! As part of the Quantitative Methods module on the MSc, we were asked to carry out a content analysis to present to the class. I wanted to do something on ELT materials, but had only a week to prepare and no easy access to multiple hard copies of things (I wasn’t teaching at the time). So on a search for online materials, New Headway came up, which seemed ideal in various ways: it was very up-to-date; it is widely known and used in the UK and Western/Central Europe (and doubtless many other contexts); it was the textbook most familiar to me. So in one sense it was a marriage of convenience, but one in which love blossomed nonetheless… 🙂
Having done the analysis and presented it (and it being very well-received), I thought the results were too interesting not to follow up. So I developed it for my Difference and Education assignment (one of my option modules on the MSc), orienting it to research into gender and language learning, considering the implications of the theoretical position I was taking by employing content analysis (e.g. acknowledging the prediscursive existence of binary sex as an analytical category), and interpreting the results. And thence the article.
I’d never normally have thought to do a quantitative content analysis, but having done it and found something potentially very interesting, it seemed a waste not to make more of it, y’know?
That seems like a very interesting topic, Lou! I suspect that the submission traces its origins in one of the MSc modules, is that correct? Would you like to share some more about it? I already read the entry in your personal blog (nice one! Thanks for sharing), but I was wondering on why you chose this book, your choices of methodology and so on…