This seminar will be conducted by 3-hour online Zoom sessions for four days: Saturday, January 24, Sunday, January 25, Saturday, January 31, and Sunday, February 1 from 10:00 to 13:00 (JST). Students taking this seminar for credit must attend all four days. Students can add/drop this seminar course by 14:00 on Saturday, January 24.

The pre sign-up (or course registration for those who are taking this seminar for credit) is required for anybody attending the public session on Saturday, January 24 from 10:00 to 13:00. The sign-up process must be completed through the "Distinguished Lecturer Series Seminar Sign-Up Form" that is available on TUJ Grad Ed website. The sign-up deadline is Friday, January 23 at 12:00 p.m. The public session Zoom link will be provided to those people who completed the online sign-up (or course registration) process by 18:00 on Friday, January 23.

This seminar introduces participants to narrative inquiry as a powerful form of qualitative research in the field of language teaching and learning. Narrative inquiry is based on the idea that human experience is best understood through the stories people tell about their lives, practices, and identities. In applied linguistics, this approach has gained increasing recognition for its ability to capture the complex, lived realities of teachers and learners across diverse contexts.

The seminar will draw on authentic data from research on teacher identity, teacher education, multilingualism, and study-abroad to showcase how narratives open up understandings of language education from the perspectives of research participants. The seminar will explore and illustrate various qualitative and narrative methods, such as thematic analysis, writing as analysis, short story analysis, and narrative frames, to discover what they have in common, how they are different, and how we can choose what is most appropriate for our research. Graduate students and other researchers of all levels of experience will benefit from attending this seminar by gaining a clear sense of how narrative and qualitative research is designed, conducted, and analyzed – and also reported. Ultimately, this seminar will invite participants to see language teaching and learning as a lived, storied, and shared experience, one that can be studied in deeply meaningful, reflexive, and human ways.