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A growing number of studies have examined qualitative research interviews in terms of how researchers' own identities and agendas are implicated in the construction of interviewees' responses. Adopting the constructionist conception of research interviews, the current study introduces a comparative analysis of 2 interviews with a multilingual speaker of Korean, English, and Japanese conducted by 2 researchers who come from distinctive cultural, linguistic, and professional backgrounds. Informed by ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and membership categorization analysis, the current analysis reveals how the interviewee came to co-construct a different set of accounts with each interviewer in comparable segments where the same topics were discussed. The focal segments examined in this study can be seen as an illustration of how this Korean student interacting in her everyday life with others may co-construct her ever-shifting identities vis-a-vis membership categories such as American, Korean, or Korean-American. (Contains 11 notes and 8 excerpts.)

Using the methodological framework of conversation analysis (CA) as a central tool for analysis, this study examines a peer interactive task that occurred in a Japanese as a foreign language classroom. During the short segment of interaction, the students shifted back and forth between the development of an assigned task and the management of problems associated with their lack of lexical knowledge. The close observation of the participants' vocal and nonvocal conduct during these different types of sequences and sequential boundaries demonstrates how the students transform in a moment-by-moment fashion their converging or diverging orientations towards varying types of learning and learning opportunities. Through the presentation of a single case analysis, this study discusses one way of applying CA techniques to the study of classroom interaction in order to promote an overall sensitivity to the intricacies of classroom talk and to generate critical reflection on classroom policies and instructional designs.

A growing number of studies have examined qualitative research interviews in terms of how researchers' own identities and agendas are implicated in the construction of interviewees' responses. Adopting the constructionist conception of research interviews, the current study introduces a comparative analysis of 2 interviews with a multilingual speaker of Korean, English, and Japanese conducted by 2 researchers who come from distinctive cultural, linguistic, and professional backgrounds. Informed by ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and membership categorization analysis, the current analysis reveals how the interviewee came to co-construct a different set of accounts with each interviewer in comparable segments where the same topics were discussed. The focal segments examined in this study can be seen as an illustration of how this Korean student interacting in her everyday life with others may co-construct her ever-shifting identities vis-à-vis membership categories such as American, Korean, or Korean-American. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores recent changes in the landscape of second language acquisition (SLA) and foreign language pedagogical (FLP) research. Firth and Wagner's (1997) proposal for the reconceptualization of SLA has been supported by SLA and FLP researchers who share the sentiment concerning the need for increased attention to social and contextual dimensions beyond the diversity of their theoretical and methodological orientations. In the meantime, a growing number of studies have adopted conversation analysis (CA), the sociological methodology on which Firth and Wagner have built their arguments, to examine data involving second language speakers, even though not all these studies may be viewed as addressing the issue of language learning and therefore may not belong to the category of SLA studies. The review of developments in the last decade points to potentials and remaining issues in using CA to conduct SLA and FLP research and to draw pedagogical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the methodological framework of conversation analysis (CA) as a central tool for analysis, this study examines a peer interactive task that occurred in a Japanese as a foreign language classroom. During the short segment of interaction, the students shifted back and forth between the development of an assigned task and the management of problems associated with their lack of lexical knowledge. The close observation of the participants' vocal and nonvocal conduct during these different types of sequences and sequential boundaries demonstrates how the students transform in a moment-by-moment fashion their converging or diverging orientations towards varying types of learning and learning opportunities. Through the presentation of a single case analysis, this study discusses one way of applying CA techniques to the study of classroom interaction in order to promote an overall sensitivity to the intricacies of classroom talk and to generate critical reflection on classroom policies and instructional designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]