A Breath of Wind into the Still Air of Language Study Skills”: A Multi-voiced Narrative

The present narrative inquiry recounts the attempts made by an English language teacher and a supervising researcher for creating learning/ searching spaces in which the students could explore their learning concerns. The course attenders were a community of forty female freshmen studying at a state university in Tehran, Iran. The exploratory journey involved encouraging the students to reflect on their language learning hi/stories/, discovering their personally or socially-felt language ”concerns”, forming searching communities, taking library tours for finding relevant sources, acting on the raised concerns through deployment of appropriate procedures, and eventually exhibiting the findings. All these steps were accompanied with keeping reflective narratives on the part of the teacher and the students in which they externalized the challenges they were experiencing, and how they were making sense of the undergone explorations. Both the teacher and the students held the idea that creation of meditational spaces, mainly in form of supportive communities, had aided them to bring renewed life to their teaching and learning and experiencetransformative practices

Keywords:

Narrative inquiry , Mediation , Transformation