Qualitative Research Interviews in Second Language Acquisition

Abstract

The interview is a spoken (and written) genre popular in news, politics, and entertainment across the contemporary world, and also employed for varied purposes in social science and humanities research. Within the field of second language acquisition (SLA), qualitative interview research has examined the following: how groups of speakers structure language within an interview; the linguistic features of second language (L2) speech; the ideas about language or language learning represented in interviews; and the attitudes and social structures that L2 speakers invoke through language. Since we particularly hope that this entry can be informative for the novice SLA researcher, we follow our discussion of the uses of interviews outlined above with an exploration of L2 interview data from two studies in progress prepared by PhD students.