Interview on an Institutional Context

Talk to one person who has seen this context. They may be someone you are able to speak with face to face or if they are at a distance you might do this via Skype or other technology. Discuss with this person your ideas for how your chosen context might be developed and ask them what they think about your ideas and whether they would be useful for this setting. This person is busy and you can only have 15-20 minutes of their time. You will need 5 minutes of this time to explain your project to them and five minutes to gain ethical clearance.

As you are exploring rather than testing your ideas, you opt for an unstructured interview as your research instrument.  In preparing for the interview, you should construct a set of potential issues that you could use to encourage your selected person to talk about the relevance of your claims for individuals of different ages, contexts, and purposes. In your discussion, you should encourage your interviewee to think about these new ideas and initiatives of yours, and how they will affect learners (help/not help or even hinder them) to become effective communicators. (You will need to be sensitive to the needs and abilities of the speaker if asking “why”).

You are to audio-record your interview and transcribe key excerpts of this as data that you will use as evidence. Your transcription should follow standard conversational analysis conventions.  Your interview may be in a language other than English, but, if so, you will ALSO need to translate the data that you use as evidence into English. The translation will not be part of the word count.  You do not have to provide a complete transcript of the interview.

TASK

On the basis of this interview, write a reflection, drawing out the implications the interview had on your original views. This reflection must address the following questions. The length of each section will depend on your data.

1. To what extent did the interview support your initial ideas?
2. What unanticipated issues emerged of theoretical or practical importance?
3. What changes would you now make after piloting your research? (Ling 393)

Pilot of your ideas (2000 words; 25% of your final grade)