From a theory-less into a theory-ful qualitative researcher in the field of TESOL: A Personal Anecdote

Doing injustice to the data, undertheorization, is a scary phenomenon in the field of TESOL. In this presentation, I will take my attendees into my world of how I used to think of qualitative research before and after I was introduced to Alecia Jackson and Lisa Mazzei\u27s (2012) Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data Across Multiple Perspectives. This book challenged my qualitative skills and helped me think with theory when I deal with qualitative data in my papers. The types of research questions I used to ask have changed when I started thinking with theory, and so did the coding and thematizing processes. The question now is: to what degree do junior scholars in the field of TESOL need to think with theory when dealing with qualitative data? To this end, I will go through some PhD dissertations-- that were written for the field of TESOL and that followed qualitative methods-- in order to see how those junior scholars think when they conduct qualitative studies, in a hope that we can shape the needs of PhD candidates in TESOL to think with theory in qualitative studies