Dear Nimrod:

That's quite vague to start with. Before you could theorize, you need to hypothesize. What are your variables and what does the literature have in store for you?

It seems you're going to use content coding and transcription for data collection. And it can be as frustrating as it is fruitful but you'll have a lot to work with, that's probably where you should seek for the unrepresented.

Thanks for your thoughts, Naeem. Since this is a qualitative study, I started with no hypothesis in mind. My communication pursuit is to find out if intercultural communication is a rhetorical act that accomplishes teaching and learning. To do so is to analyse the 'rhetorical practices' of teachers in an intercultural classroom context. I was advised to theorise (higher form of abstraction) from the narrative data. I did so but it seems that the way I theorised was 'functionalist' in nature, and my adviser doesn't approve of it. Yes, you're right, textual coding is both frustrating but fruitful once you see the unrepresented. I still have to figure out that 'unrepresented'. Cheers - Nimrod

Deat Colleague Nimrod Delante,

I can think of two areas of rhetorical theory:

A phenomenological approach that will emphasize the growth of theory as your insights from narrative accumulate. deciding in advance what will be important in narratives to be studied, before we read them, is a rather deductive and cart-before-horse approach. Leave open room for discovery.

Propose this to your committee.

Nested variables: I used the ideas of variables being formed simultaneously, nested together, rather than as separate entries in my dissertation on Chicago Immigrant Woman's writing. This was a historical study of four published immigrants writing from 1890 to 1940. I avoided preformed categorizing as much as possible and used theories such as contrastive rhetoric--how these woman from different social, religious, linguistic, cultural backgrounds found a voice in an earlier time in Chicago, managed to work and publish. I don't have the name of the woman who came up with the "nested variables' approach but it is worth looking at. Check the diss.

The diss is here at RG

Thesis From 'Spoken of' to speakers: Chicago immigrant women's writ...

Dear Nimrod:

Now I have a clearer sense of what you're doing. I wish to tell you what I think and I don't know if it can be of any inspiration to you or not. But even if I'm wrong, it can tell you a lot about what you shouldn't do.

You can conduct a thematic analysis of the content you have coded. In other words, you can search for the most frequent themes that occur in the discourse of each one of your foreign teachers and then, code them for positive, negative and neutral affects. In the next step, examine if the overall valence (+/-) of the discourses has had a differential impact on student "attitudes" across different classrooms.

About coding for positive/negative affects, please view the following article by Singer et al.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjQp_qg-JzdAhUNElAKHUVxDfsQFjAAegQIAhAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fselfleadership.org%2Fpdf-files%2F123_Herrmman_Bo%25CC%2588ckler_2017_JoCognEnhance.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1-yrGLi8GQbL5iTn8V7vF3

Hope it helps. And wish you luck.

Cheers,

Naeem

Thank you Gloria Lee and Naeem. I completed my PhD in Oct 2019 and I just published a part of my dissertation in July 2020.

All the best to your research endeavours,

Nimrod