THE STRUCTURE OF THE INTERVIEW

Each interview contained four phases: (i) discussion of a class recently taught and observed by the interviewer; (ii) discussion of the context of teaching and their practices as teachers; (iii) discussion of how they became ESOL teachers and how their practice has changed over time; and (iv) discussion of students in the class observed. Phases (i), (ii) and (iv) brought in a “here-and-now” aspect to the interview: interviewees were invited to talk about their current practices to the interviewer. Phase (iii) brought in a “then-and-there” aspect: the interviewees were invited to talk about their professional lives, including their choice of becoming an ESOL teacher.

The questions asked in phase (i) seemed to orient towards personal narrative, with or without performance features. Having observed the lesson, the interviewer was in a position to co-construct the narrative of a recent shared past through contributing both questions and comments. The questions asked in phase (ii) seemed to invite generic or iterative narratives, of what was typically or repeatedly the case. Interestingly, performance features occurred regularly here as well. The questions asked in phase (iii) oriented towards life-history narrative, that is, not narratives of the recent past or of the present. Again performance features were in evidence. In phase (iv) the questions oriented responses towards third-person narratives of student lives, as well as generic or iterative and indeed hypothetical narratives (what they typically do or say, what they might do or say). Another narrative subtype identified were narratives of what was not said and did not happen. These can be described tentatively as negated narrative.

Shifts into performance in this dataset overwhelmingly involved shifts or switches into performed direct speech, not especially linked to personal narrative of the canonical sort, but also co-occurring with generic/iterative narrative, hypothetical and negated narrative. They can be understood through the analogy of code-switching and mode-switching: the speaker momentarily shifts or switches into performance in what Hymes (Reference Hymes1996) calls fleeting moments of narrative orientation to the world.

TYPES OF NARRATIVE IN THE DATA

The types of narrative found in the interviews were: personal narrative (with or without performance features, current/recent past or more distant past), generic/iterative narrative (with or without performance features), hypothetical or future narrative (with or without performance features), narrative-as-example or exemplum (occurring in any of the above contexts, with or without performance features), and negated narrative (with or without performance features).

Personal narrative

In the middle of an evaluative discussion on a lesson, an ESOL teacher (L) switches into performance (indicated in bold) to dramatize the thought processes of students who rejoined a class with other students absent on the first day.

(1) L: ESOL teacher, R: Interviewer

Unusually for this dataset quotative “like” is used as a framing device here (line 6). In the following extract the teacher (M) and the interviewer (R) are discussing different students in the class. The story of Miriam's loudness is told to highlight her achievement in speaking more assertively. M does not attribute it to his own interventions, but to Miriam's own agency. The shift into performance is used to dramatize an occasion when she speaks loudly to get his attention, provoking a response from M addressing the manner of her utterance rather than its illocutionary intent. (Pedagogical interactions give a special licence to the teacher to ignore illocutionary intention and comment in this way.)

(2) The story of Miriam's loudness

M dramatizes the reflective processes by which a teacher routinely scrutinizes professional practice, both displaying and evaluating it. Should he inform the students about their performance in speaking or hope by cajoling them to trigger improvement? Is Miriam's improvement in confidence in speaking attributable to his interventions or to Miriam herself?

Generic/iterative narrative

Generic or iterative narrative deals with what happens typically or repeatedly (cf. Baynham Reference Baynham2003, Reference Baynham, Baynham and De Fina2005). In the following discussion the focus is on the desire of students to shift from community-based classes into the more academic college environment. Discussing problems with giving homework, L switches into performance to dramatize something typically or iteratively true.

(3) L: ESOL teacher, R: Interviewer

L's self presentation is evidenced in the “teacher talk” simplification in the language quotatively addressed to the students: “this is homework you do today then we practice tomorrow” (lines 14–15). L also dramatizes the learner language of her students with its deleted copula, using a free direct-speech form without signalling quotative, as shown in (4).

(4)

The reformulation (“the mothers, the students”) indexes the double identities of these students, simultaneously evoking L's pedagogical identity.

Narrative as example

The narrative as example or exemplum is told to illustrate a point (cf. Eggins & Slade Reference Eggins and Slade1997:257–59), sometimes, as here, explicitly framed by a marker such as “for example,” otherwise not prefaced by a marker, leaving its exemplary status to be retrieved pragmatically.

(5) “Kuldeep and Sachin were sitting there doing nothing” L: ESOL teacher, R: Interviewer

The exemplum, with its structuring performance features, the alternation between Maya's request in indirect speech and L's performed thought “Oh God” (line 10), dramatizes a teacher's real-time anxiety in losing control of what students are doing in the class. A dilemma in professional practice is evoked, underlying it as an additional perhaps more important point to the story, that the students were in fact helping each other, drawing on the resources “that I'd given them to lean on,” contributing to a positive representation of professional identity and professional practice: I am the sort of teacher who values students learning from each other and provides resources to support them in doing so.

What didn't happen: Negated narrative

In addition to generic/iterative and hypothetical narratives, there is a more unusual narrative type evidenced in the data, albeit less frequently than the others—a form of negative/negated narrative: the story of what didn't happen.

(6) M: Teacher, R: Interviewer

The topic of the discussion is the negative proposition that learners are not taught to speak and listen in their own languages. Following from this proposition is the positive proposition that learners therefore find activities that focus on speaking and listening odd and difficult to adapt to. The negative proposition is dramatized by a switch into performance, both generic and negative: something that no one ever says. It is something of a tribute to the resilience and flexibility of the performance mode that it can be strategically brought into play in such a wide range of semantic environments. It also suggests, importantly for narrative theory, that performance features need to be separated from co-occurrence with personal narrative and treated as a feature of discourse more generally. The identification of these argumentative propositions indicates that narrative is not the only game being played here (cf. Hill & Zepeda Reference Hill, Zepeda, Hill and Irvine1993, Baynham Reference Baynham, Costello and Mitchell1995), suggesting that performance features typically associated with narrative are also to be found in argument structures.

JOINT CONSTRUCTION OF NARRATIVE WITH INTERVIEWER

The recent-past narratives prompted by the interviewer's questions about the class just taught afford opportunities for joint construction both of the interview and of narrative. Here the interviewer (R) and the teacher (L) are discussing a detail of the class that R has just observed.

(7) “She maybe felt a bit stressed”

The incident provides an opportunity for discussing the possible effects of R being in the classroom as a researcher, triggered by L's “as you know” (line 5), through which L aligns herself to R as having shared the experience in question. This enables R to take a role in co-constructing the narrative (“I think … I think” and the even more evidentially authoritative “She knew …”), giving rise to L's very hedged evaluative comment “but yeah knowing that you could see her work was maybe a little bit worrying” (lines 14–15), to be further discussed below.

SHIFTS INTO PERFORMANCE

Characteristic of this data, rather than canonical performed personal narrative, is a complex texture involving the interaction of different kinds of narrative and argument structures, with strategic shifts into performance. Performance features have been in evidence in all of the data presented thus far, co-occurring with the different types of narrative identified and not especially associated with personal narrative. This is interestingly at odds with Wolfson's prediction (Reference Wolfson1976, Reference Wolfson1982) that the interview as a frame mitigates against performance features. Wolfson also argued, of course, that “the degree of solidarity between the participants will affect the verbal behaviour of the subject” (Wolfson Reference Wolfson1976:197). It may be that solidarity features in the relationship between interviewer and interviewee in this study can explain this.

SPEAKER STANCE AND ALIGNMENT IN THE INTERVIEW

In “The story of Miriam's loudness,” M shifts away from mimetic performance into diegetic summary.

(8) M: teacher

This reformulation (lines 6–7) shows how shifting/switching into and indeed out of performance is itself a stylistic choice. Here the speaker starts in performance (“And I say look the point is- ”) and reformulates to complete the utterance in diegetic summarizing mode (“You know you explain sort of communication going on and so on”). What is the significance of the reformulation strategically? Having illustrated the types of narrative involved in the interviews, I will now show how these shifts in and out of performance contribute to the construction of speaker's stance and alignment, both in relation to current discourse time (the unfolding of the interview as a joint construction of interviewer and interviewee) and story time (the classroom events that are being narrated/talked about). Stance has been the topic of sustained research interest for nearly two decades (Ochs Reference Ochs, Duranti and Goodwin1992, Reference Ochs, Gumperz and Levinson1996, Hunston & Thompson Reference Hunston and Thompson2000, Englebretson Reference Englebretson2007, Johnstone Reference Johnstone and Jaffe2009). The stance literature is extensive and for brevity I orient the discussion to DuBois’ recent synthesizing definition: “stance is a public act by a social actor, achieved dialogically through overt communicative means, of simultaneously evaluating objects, positioning subjects (self and others), and aligning with other subjects, with respect to any salient dimension of the sociocultural field” (Dubois Reference Dubois and Englebretson2007:163). Stance in this sense is intimately connected to positioning and alignment. This interview was an invitation for interviewees to display and comment on their professional practice, thereby indexing professional identities, through the stances they take up, and what they align to, both towards the interview co-participant (the interviewer) and what the talk is about (their practice and the contexts for it). In talk these two dimensions of stance tend to overlap, so that speakers are typically simultaneously orienting to the topic under discussion and their co-participant in discourse.

ALIGNMENT OF CO-PARTICIPANTS TO EACH OTHER

It is interactive commonality that Wolfson argued was so strikingly absent in the failed interviews she considered, yet which is strikingly present in the data under consideration, due to the congruence of social roles of interviewers and interviewees described above (all of the research team were or had been ESOL teachers). As Cortazzi and Jin (Reference Cortazzi, Jin, Hunston and Thompson2000) point out, the evaluation of performance features is dependent on shared norms for evaluation. The availability of shared norms to align to could be explained in terms of congruence in social role between interviewer and interviewee, using Sarangi and Slembrouck's (Reference Sarangi and Slembrouck1999) distinction between discourse role and social role.

As suggested earlier, the alignment of co-participants to each other and to the topic of the interview is based on the assumption of a high degree of commonality. This varies to some degree across interviewers: those who were currently ESOL teachers invoking maximum solidarity with interviewees, or those who, having formerly been ESOL teachers, have now moved into academic roles, creating more social distance. There are interesting indications, which I cannot develop here, that performance features in the interviews co-relate with the relationship between participants, with the closer the relationship the higher incidence of performance features. This would further support Wolfson's arguments about the importance of the relationship between interviewer and interviewee in this respect.

In order to understand the mechanisms of orderly interaction, it is always interesting to look at instances where such shared understandings become problematized; there is such an instance in extract (7) (“She maybe felt a bit stressed”) quoted above. The invitation to co-construct the classroom narrative (“as you know”) led to an evaluative discussion of whether a student felt stressed at sitting next to the researcher (R). A potential awkwardness arises in that the incident highlights R not in his role as a colleague but in another social role, that of researcher. This triggers a performed “small story” (repeated below from extract (7)), the purpose of which is to assure R that he is more than welcome in the class.

(9)

L's heavily hedged evaluative comment “but yeah …,” instead of confirming the welcome nature of his presence, actually confirms that R's ability to see the student's work “was maybe a little bit worrying” for the student concerned.

Such brief instances of conversational trouble temporarily pull apart the smooth lamination of social and discourse role, demonstrating how the interviewer is managing the potentially divergent social roles of colleague and researcher. The interviewer's self positioning or stance, as the sort of researcher (and indeed the sort of teacher) who does not make students nervous is potentially challenged, resulting in the high degree of hedging with which L challenges R's espoused stance. This can be profitably understood in terms of face work (Brown & Levinson Reference Brown and Levinson1987) or what Locher and Watts (Reference Locher and Watts2005:1) call relational work. L's hedging redresses R's positive face.

ALIGNMENT AND STANCE OF CO-PARTICIPANTS TO THE INTERVIEW TOPIC

In the previous discussion I examined an instance when the smooth unfolding of the interview became momentarily problematized. Here I return to some instances of the smooth lamination of social (collegial) and discourse (interviewer/interviewee) roles in the exemplum quoted above in (5), repeated here in (10).

(10)

R aligns to L's initial statement (“yeah they were all doing that”), suggesting a smooth lamination of social and discourse roles, untroubled by the moments of conversational difficulty identified above. This leaves L free to articulate and favorably self-evaluate the activity being described. The narrative arises out of a conflict between the amount of support and the amount of independence a group of students might need to perform a task effectively, between the notion of students being helped by a teacher to learn and students helping each other. It dramatizes the conflict and L's uncertainty about which way to go, discursively projecting her stance as a reflective and self-questioning practitioner, going through moments of self doubt, while taking a risk with an activity that comes right in the end.

The discursive construction of professional stance is of course not entirely composed of narratives of professional triumphs. The narrative of Miriam's loudness provides another example of the discursive construction by the teacher (M) of a professional stance in relation to an incident in his teaching. In “The story of Miriam's loudness,” he projects a persona of professional indecision (“I was dithering”). According to him, Miriam's gratifying loudness is not attributable to her teachers’ cajoling, despite the interviewer's attempt to suggest as much (“is this a result of you telling them”). The interviewer then aligns with M's interpretation that the initiative came from Miriam herself and was not a consequence of his teaching (“but she seems to have decided to assert herself?”). He briefly entertains an argument against a noisy, buzzy class, suggesting, as mentioned above, that argumentative structures as well as narrative are closely intertwined in these interviews. M constructs for himself in discourse a tentative, self-questioning stance, yet one in which robust positive values can be identified, such as that of students asserting themselves, speaking loudly even if interruptively. The way that he confidently responds to her request, by commenting on the manner of it, suggests that a confident pedagogical stance informs his apparent tentativeness.