Volume 9, Issue 4 - Special Issue: The social life of methods, Guest Editors: Gabriele Kasper and Steven J. Ross

This study seeks to bring a more interactionally grounded perspective to the concept of “rapport” and its relevance for qualitative interviewing practices. Building on work within conversation analysis (CA), it respecifies rapport as affiliation and, more specifically, empathy . Analysis centers on case study data from an interview with an asylum seeker from the Philippines. It examines how interviewer and interviewee move in and out of empathic moments across the interview sequences as they manage their affective stances related to the events the interviewee describes and, in turn, by managing their empathic alignments with each other. These empathic moments share a number of features: they primarily come after response delays and the interviewee’s response pursuits, they are part of assessment sequences built by lexical reformulation and repetition, they entail stance matching and upgrading mainly through the use of prosodic resources, and they involve the interviewee asserting his primary rights to characterize and assess his own experiences. The article concludes by recommending more attention to the affiliative and empathic dimensions of qualitative interviewing.

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.

Verbal reports, specifically in the form of concurrent verbalizations (i.e., think-alouds [TAs]), have played a foundational role in the production of knowledge in applied linguistics. Most often drawn upon because the talk they generate is deemed to accurately reflect individual learners’ thought or cognitive processes as they complete an L2 task, concurrent verbalization methods have been central to investigations of and claims about the learning, use, and assessment of L2 vocabulary, listening, speaking, reading, and writing (among others). And although critical discussion concerning the quality of spoken data obtained through concurrent verbalization methods continues among L2 researchers (e.g., Cohen, Andrew D. 1987. Using verbal reports in research on language learning. In Claus Færch & Gabriele Kasper (eds.), Introspection in second language research , 82–95. Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters; Cohen, Andrew D. 1996. Verbal reports as a source of insights into second language learner strategies. Applied Language Learning 7(1–2). 5–24; Cohen, Andrew D. 2013. Verbal report. In Carol A. Chapelle (ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics . Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell), the majority of this discussion has focused primarily on how best to generate talk which “more accurately reflect[s] the actual thought processes” of L2 users (Cohen, Andrew D. 2013. Verbal report. In Carol A. Chapelle (ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics . Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell: 1). The result has been to further naturalize approaches to concurrent verbalizations which treat language as a neutral means for accessing cognition, and similarly, which treat the verbalizations themselves as individually accomplished events. In this article, my aim is to diversify the critical discussion by describing how discursive psychology (e.g., Edwards, Derek & Jonathan Potter. 1992. Discursive psychology . New York: Sage; Potter, Jonathan. 2006. Cognition and conversation. Discourse Studies 8(1). 131–140) and a conversation analytic perspective (e.g., Kasper, Gabriele. 2009. Locating cognition in second language interaction and learning: Inside the skull or in public view? International Review of Applied Linguistics 47. 11–36; Markee, Numa & Mi-Suk Seo. 2009. Learning talk analysis. International Review of Applied Linguistics 47. 37–63) can be combined to present an alternative to both ‘naturalized’, as well as sociocultural, understandings of concurrent verbalization data and methods. To this end, after establishing some of the key differences between information processing, sociocultural, and discursive approaches, I draw on data from two recently published TA-based studies in an attempt to accomplish two goals: the first is to shift critical discussion towards issues of epistemology, methodology, and research representation, and the second is to identify methodological issues about which researchers working from different conceptual orientations might engage in cross-paradigmatic dialogue.

As multiparty activities focus groups afford participants opportunities to interact with each other rather than only with the moderator. The methodological literature recommends focus groups for data generation precisely for these structural affordances, but few studies examine how the interaction in ongoing focus groups evolves. Consequently it remains largely obscure how focus groups produce disciplinary knowledge. Addressing this gap from the perspective of conversation analysis, the study examines focus group interaction as the participants’ joint accomplishment, with particular attention to the interactional practices that exhibit the participants’ orientation to the institutional activity and its agenda. The focus groups were conducted as part of a program evaluation study with Korean teachers of English who participated in a study-abroad teacher development program in the U.S. The analysis reveals how the participants contingently initiate activity and topic shifts in keeping with the institutional purpose and invoke their collective identity as an epistemic community as they jointly construct responses to the moderator’s questions. The conversation-analytic lens reveals how the focus groups generate profound, nuanced, and grounded knowledge about the program under evaluation from the perspective of the key stakeholders and by implication about the topical concerns for which the focus groups were conducted in the first place.

Roleplay is used as a method for education and training, assessment, and research across a wide range of academic and occupational domains, including applied linguistics. In the assessment of speaking and pragmatic competence, roleplay is used to examine how test takers produce and understand social action-in-interaction and in this way overcomes the problem of “construct under-representation”. Roleplay is also chosen for assessment purposes because it accommodates the opposing needs for authenticity and standardization in the design of assessment instruments. While the research literature is mainly concerned with the issue of how roleplay corresponds to real-life interaction, this study asks the more fundamental question of how participants manage to produce roleplays as intelligible unfolding social scenes in the first place. Specifically it explores how the roleplay setup becomes interactionally consequential in roleplays designed to assess the interactional competence of students in an English for academic purposes program. From the joint perspectives of conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis, the study demonstrates how the roleplay participants mobilize their generic and setting-specific interactional competences to accomplish the scenario as a shared practical activity. It shows how the participants jointly “talk the institution into being”, and what details from the setup they treat as necessary, optional, or dispensable. In this way the study reveals the local endogenous order of roleplay as a device for knowledge generation, training, and assessment and spawns further topics for research on roleplay design and interactional competence in a language assessment context.

A critical condition for obtaining valid data in a psycholinguistic experiment is that the participants understand how to perform the experimental tasks. Participants usually are not familiar with the organization and requirements of the experiment and are therefore given instruction and often practice opportunities prior to the actual test trials. Pre-experimental instruction is a regular component of the experimental set-up, yet no research exists on how the activity is organized with a view to its purpose in the research context and as the experimenter’s and participant’s joint interactional project. This case study is the first to begin to fill the gap. The instruction in focus aimed at preparing the participant to take part in a reaction time experiment designed to measure the implicit grammatical knowledge of L2 speakers of English. Building on ethnomethodological and conversation-analytic research on instruction delivery and understanding displays in different settings, the analysis reveals how in the course of the instruction the asymmetric epistemic statuses (Heritage 2012) of researcher and participant were incrementally aligned as they collaboratively accomplished explanation sequences and worked through practice items. It also shows how both participants selectively referenced the onscreen written instructions and how these became resources for the experimenter’s explanations and the participant’s evolving understanding of the experimental requirements. The main goal of this paper is to bring an unexamined but indispensable component of the experimental research process to applied linguists’ attention and encourage further studies in this area. A further intention is to explore pre-experimental instruction practices in a larger archive of task instructions and eventually empirically test whether the interaction during instruction delivery is at all related to variation in the reaction times as measures to operationalize cognitive processes.