Interviews in Applied Linguistics: Autobiographical Reflections on Research Processes

This book has been written with several aims in mind. First, it aims to present the author’s perspective on research interviews, acquired over time, to researchers of all kinds (from novice to experienced). Second, while it contains valuable information about the practice of interviewing, it is written in such a way that it avoids the kind of dry and overly structured presentation style that one finds in textbook-like publications on the topic. Third and finally, this book aims to complement previous publications on interviews (e.g. Cicourel, Briggs, Mishler, Kvale) which have approached the topic from a reflexive, sociolinguistic/linguistic anthropological perspective that frames interviews not as information mining expeditions, but as communicative events and conversations.

This unique reflection on research interviews will be of interest to advanced students and researchers in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics and will also be relevant to researchers working in social sciences and humanities disciplines.