Never in the recent history of foreign language education have we seen so much earnest concern for the philosophies which underlie research methods. The primary force behind this concern has been the rise of a socio-cultural paradigm in foreign language education from which new ways of integrating teaching theory and practice are emerging. All but one of the papers collected in this volume were presented and discussed at the international seminar Understanding the Language Classroom and New Directions for Language Teaching Research held in Kobe, Japan, from 14 to 17 March 2007. The volume has reframed research accounts of classroom and learner issues by clarifying the powerful connections between philosophically different families of both recently developed and conventional research practices: Exploratory Practice, Action Research, Narrative Inquiry, Learner Autonomy, and Strategy-based Language Learning.
