Interviews in Applied Linguistics: Autobiographical Reflections on Research Processes

This book is a personal reflection on research interviews. Written as an autobiography, it invites the reader to accompany the author on his personal journey of over three decades of research carried out on a range of topics in a range of contexts. It mixes academic genres, moving back and forth between life-story telling and more standard academic writing.

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.

David Block is ICREA Research Professor in Sociolinguistics at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He is author of Political Economy and Sociolinguistics: Neoliberalism, Inequality and Social Class (2018), Post-Truth and Political Discourse (2019) and Innovations and Challenges in Identity Research (2022). He co-edits the Routledge book series Language, Society and Political Economy with Will Simpson.