This article takes a microanalytic perspective on the speech and gestures used by one teacher of English as a second language in her intensive English program classroom. Videotaped excerpts from her intermediate-level grammar course were transcribed to represent the speech, gesture, and other nonverbal behavior that accompanied unplanned explanations of vocabulary that arose during three focus-on-form lessons. The gesture classification system of McNeill (1992), which delineates different types of hand movements (iconics, metaphorics, deictics, beats), was used to understand the role the gestures played in these explanations. Results suggest that gestures and other nonverbal behavior are forms of input to classroom second language learners that must be considered a salient factor in classroom-based second language acquisition research.

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Despite a considerable amount of research on oral proficiency testing over the last 20 years, little is understood about the interview process itself and the spoken interaction that takes place in it. This article presents a qualitative analysis of one aspect of interviewer-candidate interaction, namely, the types of linguistic and interactional support that the native speaker interlocutor provides to the non-native speaker candidate in a one-on-one interview. Results indicate that eight types of interlocutor support are prevalent in the corpus of 58 transcribed Cambridge Assessment of Spoken English (CASE) interviews studied. It is suggested that these are positive findings in the sense that documented conversational practices are present in this assessment context; there is also reason for concern since the effect of such support on outcome ratings of proficiency remains unclear.

This paper examines various criteria that have been proposed for evaluating the increasing number of empirical studies carried out using qualitative research methods, and it demonstrates how such criteria may privilege certain forms of qualitative research while excluding others. A broader disciplinary view is taken by defining qualitative research, and by discussing in more detail the two qualitative traditions that have achieved prominence in applied linguistics, ethnography, and conversation analysis. Then, select existing evaluative criteria for qualitative research proposed by applied linguists, as well as additional criteria developed outside applied linguistics, are examined. Finally, the issue of criteriology is considered, on which some of the assumptions underlying the existing evaluative criteria are based. To conclude, this article discusses the complex relationship between research method and evaluative criteria and the role of professional journals in establishing and validating such criteria.

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