Rethinking interviews as representations of spoken language in learner corpora
Abstract
Following the call to examine the role of learner corpora in SLA research (Bell and Payant 2021), this paper discusses spoken learner corpora ––specifically those collected through interviews–– and considers the aspects of spoken learner language that they represent. The interview is both an elicitation technique and a complex genre. The overlapping of the two conceptualisations under the same term may give rise to problems of definition about the nature of the language collected and, as a consequence, to difficulties in interpretation when assessing the characteristics of spoken learner data. In this paper, we use original research to exemplify some of the areas that need some rethinking in terms of future reconceptualisation about how spoken data are collected and analysed. This research shows the potential impact of the degree of interviewer/interviewee engagement with the task, suggesting that not enough attention has been paid to the genre of interview in learner corpus research.
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