This paper is positioned within narrative ways of understanding pre-service teacher training at university. Narrative inquiry here refers to a method of investigation into how second year university undergraduates attending an ELT methodology course represent their decision to take the pedagogic module and evaluate their experiences with the course.As ‘a way of understanding experience’, narrative inquiry is also ‘collaboration between researcher and participants (…) in social interaction’ (Garvis, 2015: 3).In the view of many specialists (see for example, Benson, 2014: 154), applied linguistics is a scientific domain in which narrative inquiry, ‘or the use of stories in academic research, (…) includes a significant body of work on the discourse and sociolinguistics of narrative’. In respect of narrative research data, research interviews are among the most common instruments for the collection of such data. Narrative frames are also a means of investigating the experiences of language teachers and learners and the work of Barkhuizen and Wette (2008) and Barkhuizen (2014) informed the use of this data collection instrument in the study presented here. A narrative frame is a ‘skeleton to scaffold writing’ (Barkhuizen and Wette, 2008) consisting of a template of sentence starters and connectives followed by blank spaces meant to be filled in by respondents in relation to their own experiences. The narrative frames used in this study included 20 sentence starters focusing on respondents’ decisions on taking and experience with the ELT course. In the analysis, the participants’ responses to the relevant sentence starters were extracted from the full stories and qualitatively categorized according to several main themes among which, ‘instrumental’, ‘interactional’ and ‘affect’ were the most salient. The findings of this study may be relevant for a better understanding of the dynamics of pre-service language teachers’ starting point towards professional development.
