Writing as Theorising for Language Education

One thing some people know about me is that I journal a lot (some even might say obsessively) about my teaching.¹ I started doing this as a young teacher trying to survive my first classes, armed only with a notebook and the belief that revisiting my lessons and trying to make sense of them in narrative form would make me a better teacher.² In my notes —-some extensive, some just scribbles written between classes—- I have tried to record little triumphs, moments of tension, and things I might try next time. In some ways, this continuing record has been my attempt to learn from experience, and become more conscious of what was happening in my classroom and more deliberate in changing it.

Still, narrative writing alone, the kind of writing I did early on when I lacked the conviction and confidence to articulate my theoretical thinking, falls short of explaining the patterns beneath experience, of connecting the stories I tell with the concepts that might illuminate them. It helps me see what happened, but not always why. To reach that deeper understanding, you need something more: a way of connecting personal insight with the shared body of professional knowledge. That, in essence, is I call theorising for practice.

In this post, I will try to unpack the concept of theorising for practice, and connect it with the process of reflective teaching and reflexivity.

What is theorising for language teaching

Theorising for practice is a way of articulating, as a language teacher, the principles, assumptions, and patterns that underlie what you do in the classroom. It is the process of moving beyond intuition or habit to make explicit the reasoning that informs your choices: i.e., why you sequence activities a certain way, respond to learner language as you do, or design tasks with particular outcomes in mind. In other words, it is your best attempt to explain, in your own words, why things are the way they are in your professional context.

Components of theorising for practice

Theorising for practice is one of the core facets of teacher research literacy, as we have defined it in the Research Literacy of Teachers project (ReaLiTea). In the research literacy framework that we developed, we conceptualise this as having four components:

• Theoretical positioning, or the ability to synthesise conceptual, historical,³ experiential and empirical information and connect them to our thinking about our day-to-day teaching;
• Contextual sensitivity, which is the alertness to how general principles play out in the local context, and how constraints and affordances in our teaching situation affect our developing theorisation;
• Reflexive awareness, by which I mean the readiness to reflect on how our personal experiences and value systems experience shape our teaching and research practices; and
• Practicality, the ability to distill, from the emerging theorisation, some actionable insights to inform our teaching and learning.

Building small-t theories
in language education

Thinking about your practice through these four lenses (positioning, contextual sensitivity, reflexivity, and practicality) produces what one might call a theorisation, or a small-t theory,⁴ about one’s practice as a language teacher. This does not refer to a grand or universal theory about a field, or a school of thought (as in, e.g., ‘complexity theory’). Rather, it’s a situated, evolving framework that helps us make sense of our own pedagogical world.⁵ Such small-t theories do not claim to explain everything. What they do is offer a working model, an account that is provisional, revisable, and responsive to evidence. In this way, theorising for practice becomes an act of bridging that connects the immediacy of classroom experience with the broader conversations, empirical findings, and historical ideas that inform language education as a discipline.

[Theory] involves the concept of a statement with which a speaker articulates his or her best understanding of what is going on. […] The important issue is not the complexity, or even originality of what is formulated. The importance lies on the individual (or group) attempt to take responsibility for putting into words the current state of awareness and understanding with which one is operating.

Julian Edge, The reflexive teacher educator in TESOL, p. 80

Reflective teaching and writing as meaning-making in language education

Writing (journal writing, writing for publication, blogging and more) plays a crucial role in this process of theorising for practice. It provides the space where observation, interpretation, and conceptualisation come together. This is not just where we record our experience but also where we rework it into understanding. When we write about our teaching, we slow down enough to notice details that would otherwise pass unnoticed: the precise moment when a task lost momentum, a learner’s unexpected response, the subtle tension between our intentions and what actually happened. These fragments of classroom life, once captured on the page, become data for reflection.

Structuring reflective writing about language teaching

Sometimes, the most productive forms of writing emerge spontaneously. None of what follows is intended to play down this fact. But often, writing requires structure and discipline. In the literature, we can find a number of frames for structuring our reflections and documenting them in writing.

One influential model has been put forward by Graham Gibbs, in a book entitled Learning by doing (2013 [2008]). What Gibbs’ reflective practice cycle suggests is approaching incidents in class by recording:

• what happened
• how you felt and what you thought
• what was positive and negative about the experience
• what sense you make out of the event
• what other course so action are possible
• what you will do in the future

Even if such a rigorous approach to reflection does not appeal to you, writing can still be a medium for reflection. Through writing, we ask questions of our own narratives: Why did this happen? What does it tell me about my assumptions? How does this relate to what I knew so far? Such questions mark the transition from recounting experience to theorising it. Draft after draft, our voice shifts from the personal to the analytical, weaving together experience, values, and conceptual frames.

From reflection to reflexivity in language education

While reflection helps us analyse what happens in the classroom, reflexivity invites us to examine how we, as teachers, position ourselves within those events, that is to say, how our histories, identities, and assumptions shape what we notice, value, or overlook. Reflexive writing, in this sense, turns the lens slightly inward: from the teaching moment itself to the person interpreting it. It recognises that the teacher wring is not a neutral observer but a participant whose beliefs, emotions, and professional contexts are always part of the data.

Writing reflexively means tracing these influences as part of the meaning-making process. It might involve asking questions such as: Why did I interpret the students’ silence as disengagement? What expectations of “good participation” am I drawing on? How have my own educational experiences or institutional pressures shaped this view? These are not easy questions, but they help reveal the interpretive frameworks that underlie our decisions.

Writing as an act of
subjective meaning making

A few years ago now, a colleague and I were observing an English class. During the lesson, I took the notes shown below left; later, I reconstructed these into a the narrative below right.

Classroom notes	Narrative reconstruction
T. addresses student A by name.  No response; teacher repeats question in L1, says name again & points to student. Student corrects pronunciation of his name, answers question. T. acknowledges answer, repeats name correctly, louder voice. […] T. nominates A again (loud). […] T nominates A. (again!), stress on his name	Teacher asks student whose name she has forgotten (?). The student corrects the teacher and answers the question correctly. The teacher is annoyed but acknowledges his answer, repeating his name angrily. Following that, the student was singled out and repeatedly nominated to speak. The teacher made a point of stressing his name, almost ironically.

When my colleague and I compared notes, I was surprised to find out that, not only had she not noticed the pattern that had been so obvious to me, but also after I prompted her, she interpreted the interaction very differently. In her perspective, the teacher felt embarrassed because she had misremembered the students’ name, and tried to redeem herself by giving the student the opportunity to talk more, while also making an effort to learn his name by repeating it often.

Reflexivity as a way to make sense of subjectivity

Such differing opinions tell us a lot about the subjectivity of observations and eye-witness accounts; but what is more interesting is to try and find out why I came up with my explanation, and why my colleague came up with hers, rather than the other way around. I can only speak for myself: the fact that my education took place in authoritarian schools, must have had some impact on what I picked up, what I chose to write about, and how I wrote about it. In my experience, teachers often bullied students, and one of the ways this was done was by repeatedly asking questions, until a student made a mistake. In my experience, students did not correct teachers, especially in a public way,⁶ and doing so would trigger a disciplinary response.

Adding this insight into the developing theory does not mean that my interpretation was worse than my colleague’s. What it means is that it was differently informed, because it was filtered through a particular history of schooling and a set of lived assumptions about classroom power and vulnerability. Recognising this reminds us that our theorising is always partial. It also underscores that every attempt to make sense of teaching reflects both the event itself and the vantage point from which it is viewed.

In this sense, reflexivity is not about correcting bias but about acknowledging it as part of our meaning-making. In fact, it is the part that gives our interpretations depth and authenticity. Rather than seeking to eliminate subjectivity, reflexive theorising accepts that knowledge in education is always constructed from within experience. Understanding why we see things as we do is itself a vital form of insight.

Reflexivity as a mutually shaping process in theorising about language education

What the above example shows is that how reflexivity shapes our writing, and (through that) our emerging theorisations about practice. This, however, is just one side of the story; when we theorise for practice , our small-t theories also recursively shape us.

We can think of reflexivity in writing about language education as a process with two aspects.⁷ One, which we might call prospective reflexivity, involves thinking about the question what difference does it make to my theorisation that it is I (rather than anyone else) who is writing? This is essentially ourselves externalising our experience into the developing theorisation.

The other, which we can call retrospective reflexivity for symmetry, involves asking ourselves what difference does it make to me as a teacher that I have come up with this theorisation (rather than any other way of understanding my practice)? This is a process of internalising theory, which directs our practice.

Overview of reflexivity aspects

Aspect of reflexivity	Guiding question	Mental process
Prospective reflexivity	What difference does it make to my theorisation that it is I (rather than anyone else) who is writing?	Externalising experience and projecting it onto theory
Retrospective reflexivity	What difference does it make to me as a teacher that I have come up with this theorisation (rather than any other way of understanding my practice)?	Internalising theory and using it to guide teaching

This kind of writing often oscillates between description and self-interrogation, between outward attention to classroom life and inward awareness of one’s own standpoint. It requires honesty but also theoretical curiosity as well as a willingness to see our teaching selves as situated within wider cultural, institutional, and disciplinary narratives. Over time, reflexive writing can reveal patterns in our reasoning, moments where our espoused beliefs diverge from our enacted practices, and instances where our professional identities are being negotiated anew.

Concluding remarks

If there is a takeaway from all this, it is that writing can do far more than document what happens in our classrooms. When approached reflexively, it becomes a space where experience and theory meet and where our stories, reflections, and inquiries begin to shape one another. Perhaps this is the invitation of theorising for practice: not to write more, but to write differently: with greater attentiveness to how our words both represent and transform our professional selves. If we take that invitation seriously, our journals, reports, and research accounts can become not just records of teaching, but acts of understanding: small bridges between who we are, what we do, and what we are still learning to see.

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Footnotes

1. And yes, I will publish an account of university years one day; and sorry, it will be uncensored; but that’s something for a different post. ↩︎
2. It also helps in situations when your employers try to gaslight you by re-narrating past events and instructions. Surviving toxic workplaces, too, is something for a different post. ↩︎
3. I am grateful to Prof. Friederike Klippel for reminding me that what we often treat as new innovations are, often, reinterpretations of long-standing questions about how languages are learned and taught. ↩︎
4. In what follows I will use the terms interchangeably. I have, at times, made a distinction between theorising/theorisation as the process of meaning making and (small-t) theory as the product. I am no longer sure that there is a distinction to be made, as theory is always provisional and constantly negotiated. In this sense, the boundaries between process and product are blurred. ↩︎
5. One of the clearest explanations of the diverse meanings associated with the word ‘theory’ can be found in Chapter 2 of Fundamental concepts of language teaching, by H.H. Stern (1983). Despite being an older book, still indispensable reading for anyone who is serious about understanding language education. ↩︎
6. Ask me how I know. ↩︎
7. In this section, I am drawing on my conversations with Julian Edge, some of which are recorded in Chapter 3 of Edge (2011; see additional reading). ↩︎