Steven Talmy

Qualitative Interviews in Applied Linguistics: From Research Instrument to Social Practice

Interviews have been used for decades in empirical inquiry across the social sciences as one or the primary means of generating data. In applied linguistics, interview research has increased dramatically in recent years, particularly in qualitative studies that aim to investigate participants’ identities, experiences, beliefs, and orientations toward a range of phenomena. However, despite the proliferation of interview research in qualitative applied linguistics, it has become equally apparent that there is a profound inconsistency in how the interview has been and continues to be theorized in the field. This article critically reviews a selection of applied linguistics research from the past 5 years that uses interviews in case study, ethnographic, narrative, (auto)biographical, and related qualitative frameworks, focusing in particular on the ideologies of language, communication, and the interview, or the communicable cartographies of interviewing, that are evident in them. By contrasting what is referred to as an interview as research instrument perspective with a research interview as social practice orientation, the article argues for greater reflexivity about the interview methods that qualitative applied linguists use in their studies, the status ascribed to interview data, and how those data are analyzed and represented.

Bridging the Gap: Cognitive and Social Approaches to Research in Second Language Learning and Teaching.

For some, research in learning and teaching of a second language (L2) runs the risk of disintegrating into irreconcilable approaches to L2 learning and use. On the one side, we find researchers investigating linguistic-cognitive issues, often using quantitative research methods including inferential statistics; on the other side, we find researchers working on the basis of sociocultural or sociocognitive views, often using qualitative research methods including case studies and ethnography. Is there a gap in research in L2 learning and teaching? The present article developed from an invited colloquium at the 2013 meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in Dallas, Texas. It comprises nine single-authored pieces, with an introduction and a conclusion by the coeditors. Our overarching goals are (a) to raise awareness of the limitations of addressing only the cognitive or only the social in research on L2 learning and teaching and (b) to explore ways of bridging and/or productively appreciating the cognitive-social gap in research. Collectively, the nine contributions advance the possibility that the approaches are not irreconcilable and that, in fact, cognitive researchers and social researchers will benefit by acknowledging insights and methods from one another.

Becoming “Local” in ESL: Racism as Resource in a Hawai‘i Public High School

Drawn from a 2.5 year critical ethnography in the ESL program of a Hawai‘i public high school (Tradewinds High), this article examines racializing and racist conduct directed at Micronesian students by a group of old-timer ESL students, primarily of East/Southeast Asian inheritance. Racialization and racism directed at Micronesians positioned them as members of an out-group of FOBs (fresh off the boat) and served as resources for old-timer ESL students to produce identities of distinction as non-FOBs, an in-group glossed as Local ESL. Analysis of classroom interaction demonstrates how the production of Local ESL identity led to the recursive instantiation of a “mainstream/ESL” hierarchy within the ESL program that mapped onto a racist hierarchy of racial identifications in the Tradewinds and wider Hawai‘i contexts. The article concludes with questions for reflection about how TESOL educators and researchers might work to incorporate as topics for instruction matters concerning race, racialization, and racism.

Interaction in qualitative questionnaires: From self-report to intersubjective achievement

Abstract Survey questionnaires are among the most widely-used research methods in applied linguistics, adopted for everything from large-scale quantitative studies measuring social-psychological variables to qualitative studies that solicit participant views on a range of different topics. Despite the variety of purposes that survey questionnaires are used for, the most common approaches to analysis of the data they yield involve content analysis using descriptive or inferential statistics and/or enumeration of emergent themes. The study reported in this article conceives of questionnaire data in notably different terms: as occasioned (conditionally-relevant responses sequentially-projected by a question), recipient-designed (devised for the research context and researcher), and thus, as thoroughly interactional phenomena (Drew 2006; Sacks 1992). The study examines the identity construction of French as a second language (FSL) teachers on a professional development sojourn in France, drawing on a data-set in part comprised of participants’ open-ended responses to a 48-item questionnaire concerning whether their “confidence as French language teachers” increased as a result of their involvement in the sojourn. However, rather than conceiving of participants’ answers as revelations of changes in their interior states, the study draws on insights from conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis to examine how “confidence” was recruited as a discursive resource to “do being” a particular kind of L2 French teacher. We demonstrate how the presence and problematics of a (French) native-speaker archetype for the FSL teachers was in part formulated through close analytic attention to both the sequential and categorial features of researcher/respondent interactions occasioned by one open-ended response item in the questionnaire. This alternative approach to analyzing questionnaire data offers important insights about L2 teacher identity. It also addresses more fundamental questions concerning the discursive and interactional basis of ostensibly non-interactional research methods like survey questionnaires. Additionally, the insistence on an explicit methodological framing of the research process promotes greater theoretical and methodological consistency, and of particular importance, a significantly expanded conception of and accounting for researcher reflexivity.

Knowledge Mobilization and Innovation in the Development of a PBL Cohort for Teaching English Language Learners: Successes, Challenges, and Possibilities

Professors Margaret Early and Steven Talmy are specialists in teaching English language learners at the University of British Columbia, where they established and coordinated the teaching English language learners (TELL) preservice teacher education cohort. In this chapter, they discuss results of a study they conducted that investigated the merging of TELL with an existing problem-based learning (PBL) cohort. The newly merged teaching English language learners through problem-based learning (TELL/PBL) cohort would adopt a PBL approach in preparing teacher candidates (TCs) to work successfully with elementary school students for whom English is an additional language. The chapter reports on the results of the first year of the merger to provide an account of knowledge mobilization that occurred as cohort coordinators, faculty advisors, and instructors collaborated to design, plan, and implement TELL/PBL curriculum and pedagogy, as well as important challenges that arose when specialists in TELL worked to integrate a PBL orientation and, conversely, when specialists in PBL worked to integrate a TELL orientation. The chapter is aimed at providing an empirical base to inform next steps the TELL/PBL cohort can take.