Purpose: The aim of this article is to address some aspects of a cross-cultural interview study conducted in a PhD research project. This is done by reflecting on and discussing the influence of language and culture on the research process, as experienced by the researcher. Design/methodology/approach: The experiences have been taken from an…

This paper discusses how persons of multicultural backgrounds describe in interviews their everyday experiences when using Finnish. The focus is on categories of linguistic (non)belonging described in interview interactions. The data consist of 23 single and pair interviews of 33 informants in total and come from two interview datasets. Data are…

This study investigates the language ideologies manifested in the linguistic hierarchies produced by relevant EU governmental/political institutions through their language requirements for visa application documents. Based on the theoretical framework of Language Management Theory (LMT), this study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining…

When conducting interviews with multilinguals, researchers make (often invisible) decisions about the interview language(s). Whilst the research design may require a particular approach in some cases, linguists generally recommend giving participants a choice or interviewing them in their first language. There are ethical and methodological…

This article details the transcription process we developed to handle bimodal and multilingual interview data collected during our research into the teacher language awareness (TLA) of two high-quality teachers in a Swedish bilingual school for the deaf. Both teachers used a combination of spoken Swedish, spoken English, and Teckenspråk (Sweden's…

Suresh Canagarajah is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor and Director of the Migration Studies Project, Departments of Applied Linguistics and English, Pennsylvania State University, USA. Having a BA with a major in English from the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, and a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin, USA, Professor…

Interview-based research in multilingual situations can present researchers with specific ethical challenges relating to language-based power play, data handling and presentation. Studies indicate favouring the L1 (first language) as an interviewing language may produce better quality data, but external pressures can favour English as the dominant…

In this article, I describe the challenges I encountered and the process I navigated in conducting discourse-based interviews (DBIs) with multilingual transnational participants in disaster recovery in the context of community-based research. Attending to the messiness and complexity of community-based research in the aftermath of human-induced…

Professional interpreters are obliged by their codes of ethics to interpret the speakers' speech faithfully, including offensive, profane or vulgar language. In order to achieve this goal, interpreters need to be pragmatically competent, so as to understand the intention and effect of the offensive remark in the source language and be able to…

Drawing on Conversation Analysis, this paper investigates how an English native speaker interviewer utilizes clarification requests as a form of recipient design during an interview to resolve problems of non-understanding. This data is contrasted with interviews between English language learners at a private university in Taiwan. The findings…

This paper explores the use of creative techniques in a study of the experiences of Russian-speaking linguistic-minority migrant children in English state-funded primary schools at Key Stage Two (7-11 years old). The methodology is based on an interpretative paradigm using a qualitative research approach: a longitudinal multiple-case study with…

This study (a) conducted a feature analysis of the spoken data of Chinese university students in pronunciation, grammar, and discourse, (b) investigated the contributions of the discrete linguistic features to the perceptual ratings on foreign accent, comprehensibility, delivery, and general language use. Ten university learners were selected from…

Benefits of the study-abroad (SA) experience have been reported in many studies. However, most prior studies on EFL students' SA experiences track students in relatively short ESL programs during school vacation months. In addition, EFL learners' SA experiences in non-English-speaking countries, where English is not the L1, remain underexplored.…

This article examines the multilingual repertoires of adult and adolescent Poles living in Norway. The study draws on language portraits and interviews conducted with 14 adults and 12 adolescents living in and around Oslo. The article first discusses multilingualism of the research participants through an analysis of the 26 portraits and then…

Research comparing the use of retrospective interviews (RIs) and think-aloud protocols (TAPs) as two data sources of writers' composing processes is almost nonexistent. Trying to address this research gap, the present study examined the data obtained from the task-specific RIs and TAPs about the composing processes of 30 second language (L2)…