Analyzing Storytelling In TESOL Interview Research

Abstract

Autobiographic research interviews have become an accepted and valued method of qualitative inquiry in TESOL and applied linguistics more broadly. In recent discussions surrounding the epistemological treatment of autobiographic stories, TESOL researchers have increasingly called for more attention to the ways in which stories are embedded in interaction and thus are bound up with the social contexts of their production. This paper advances these efforts by demonstrating an empirically grounded approach to storytelling as interaction. Drawing on the research tradition on storytelling in conversation analysis, the article offers a sample analysis of a story produced in an L2 English interview with an adult immigrant in the United States. By engaging sequential conversation analysis, membership categorization analysis, and occasioned semantics, it examines the interactional practices through which the storyteller and story recipient launch, produce, and end the telling of a story that furthers the purpose of the autobiographic interview. By following closely the participants' coordinated actions as they unfold in time, we trace how the parties accomplish the storytelling as an intelligible and meaningful activity through sequence organization and turn design. We conclude with recommendations for extending storytelling research in TESOL to meet the evolving needs and interests of the field.

Reflecting on the Research Interview as a Socializing Interaction

“…Consistent with discussions on the collaborative nature of interviews (Block, ; Kasper & Prior, ; Mann, ; Starfield, ; Talmy, , ), this analysis has shown the role played by my social identities as a professor and teacher educator and my assumptions and biases in shaping the trajectory of these interviews and the meaning that was co‐constructed within them. Yet it is also evident that my words and actions had a potential impact beyond the local interactional context of the interview.…”

Investigating Language Tutor Social Inclusion Identities

“…In this article I have analyzed several short stories told by tutors during narrative interviews to examine the cognitive, sociocultural, and emotional work they do and the identities they construct with their learners in performing that work. In analyzing the stories‐ in ‐interaction (Kasper & Prior, ), I began by focusing on the characters in the story ( who ); who they are, their actions in the story space, and their interrelationships. At the same time, I systematically examined the story for any references to the places in which the action unfolded ( where ), and when it did, and made interpretive connections between these three dimensions; that is, what their interrelationships told me about the content of the stories—what happened in the story, and how this action contributed to shaping the identities of the tutors.…”

“…When , and what happened/will happen then ? The focus on these three dimensions is not particularly innovative in narrative inquiry, but doing so in the way I have suggested requires the analyst to undertake a detailed examination of the story text and thus prevents a cursory scanning of the story in search of (often vague) themes, what Kasper and Prior () refer to as “commonsensical glossing and the strategy of taking isolated bits of what tellers say as evidence of theoretical concepts” (p. 231). During this process, connections among the who , where , and when dimensions are made and become thematically meaningful in relation to the topical content of the inquiry.…”

A Short Story Approach to Analyzing Teacher (Imagined) Identities Over Time

“…Storytelling in these excerpts (short stories) is accomplished interactively—the stories are co‐constructed. Kasper and Prior () make a distinction between analytical approaches to interviews which emphasize stories in interaction and stories as interaction, the latter prompting emic, conversation‐analytical methods which bring to light “the important role of storytelling as doing social actions such as … constructing identities and social relationships in the here‐and‐now of the ongoing talk” (p. 230). These two emphases could perhaps be seen as lying along a continuum, and, if so, short story analysis would fall toward the stories‐ in ‐interaction end but also be associated to some extent with aspects of stories‐ as ‐interaction.…”