Thomas S.C.Farrell - Brock University, Canada

Teachers can reflect on their practices by articulating and exploring incidents they considercritical to themselves or others. By talking about these critical incidents, teachers can makebetter sense of seemingly random experiences that occur in their teaching because they holdthe real inside knowledge, especially personal intuitive knowledge, expertise and experiencethat is based on their accumulated years as language educators teaching in schools andclassrooms. This paper is about one such critical incident analysis that an ESL teacher inCanada revealed to her critical friend and how both used McCabe’s (2002) narrativeframework for analyzing an important critical incident that occurred in the teacher’s class.

incident analysis; reflective practice; narrative framework