Colleen Brice Gives Workshop on Qualitative Data Coding to UT Students

Prof. Melinda Reichelt reports that on Friday, March 20, a workshop hosted at UT entitled “Coding Qualitative Data in Applied Linguistics” took place. Eight MA-ESL students participated in the event (Doria, Hill, Liao, Myers,Vimuttipong, Wherley, Wolfel, and Zhou). The workshop was facilitated by UT English Professor Melinda Reichelt and Colleen Brice, Associate Professor of English, Grand Valley State University. Dr. Brice is a well-known specialist on coding qualitative data and is the author of the following chapter, which most of the workshop participants had read last semester in Linguistics 5210: Issues in ESL Writing: Brice, C. (2005). Coding data in qualitative research on L2 writing: Issues and implications (in Matsuda, P.K. and Silva, T., Eds.; Second language writing research: Perspectives on knowledge construction (pp. 159-75); Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum).

At the two-and-a-half-hour workshop, Dr. Reichelt presented an overview of procedures for coding qualitative data, and then the participants broke into two small groups. Group one, led by Dr. Brice, worked with data from Kelly Wherley’s master’s thesis research on language use and gender in Facebook. Group two, facilitated by Dr. Reichelt, worked with interview data from Lijie Zhou’s master’s thesis research on heritage language maintenance in Chinese-speaking immigrant families in Toledo. Each group read through its data set recursively in order to identify salient themes in the data on which to base the development of a coding scheme. The photo depicts Dr. Brice and Kelly Wherley discussing Wherley’s Facebook data.