Edinburgh Napier University

  The aim of this presentation is to show how moving across, beyond and through disciplinary boundaries and methodological approaches can open up new ways of seeing and knowing in Applied Linguistics research. The study was conducted at a university in Thailand involving 28 English language learners.
In this investigation, I entextualized the selfie from its usual digital home and inserted it into the flesh-and-blood English language classroom by way of a modified photo elicitation interview. I had intended to use the selfie as nothing more than a visual ‘aid’ for an English fluency activity. However, the ensuing analysis of the data turned out to be resistant to the ‘tried and tested’ meaning-making frameworks used in Applied Linguistics. Taking a cue from Childers’ (2014) notion of promiscuous analysis, I allowed analytic orientations from the lingual, the visual and the digital to infiltrate each other in order to generate new insights. I discuss how I imported a coding framework from digital communication studies, made sense of the results with inspiration from visual perspectives, and, hopefully, moved the theorising forward in the field of language learning (see Victoria 2018).