Preparing for the interviews 66

In February 2006 I began collecting data from eight main student participants. I developed an interview calendar that defined the timeline to follow in interviewing all participants four times during the course of the year, with intervals of about two months between meetings. The four waves of study were set to take place in February/March, May/June, August/September and November/December. By designating a maximum period of two months for each wave I gave myself an eight-week window to complete each wave, thus avoiding the pressure of fairly fixed dates for the interviews. As it happened, each interview round only took two to three weeks to run. The data-collecting calendar is reproduced in Figure 5.

2005

2006

Figure 5. Data collection timeline

According to the schedule, I originally anticipated finishing the data-collecting stage after interviewing each participant five times in total (once for the introductory interview plus once for each of the rounds). In fact, in the end some of the respondents were interviewed six times, and one seven. Extra interviews were at times dictated by necessity (as for example when the previous interview had not been completed for some reason) and other times by opportunity (impromptu interviews sometimes took place right after the observations sessions). During the course of the year, two respondents withdrew from the study (one moved to Australia, the other discontinued her Italian studies). The main data-collection stage ended in December 2006 with all rounds of interviews completed for six of the original eight participants.

4.7.2.1 The interview guides

From the outset I assumed that because of the socially constructed nature of identity, the sense of Italianità of the learners under study was likely to be enmeshed with

elements of their sociocultural context and of their own self-concept. Following from this, I expected that gaining a comprehensive view of the main personal and situational influences on a learner’s motivation could also provide some clues to some of the ways their construction of their own Italian identity might be implicated in their L2 motivation. The prospect was, however, complicated by the adoption of a view of both motivation and identity as dynamic constructs. According to this view, motivation and identity are created and developed in response to factors, relationships and interactions whose influence changes over time, meaning that in order to get a comprehensive picture of the links between aspects of learner identity and L2 motivation, one must track their ongoing development, and study the factors that are implicated in their changes over time. In view of the complex nature of the investigation, it was decided that the best way to approach the elicitation of the data would be through flexible interview guides containing different types of questions.

Interviews were normally planned to begin with questions aimed at capturing the participants’ perspective on their current situation. In this part of the interview specific questions such as “Do you feel very motivated?” or “What motivates you…?” were avoided. Instead, questions were worded so to invite some general discussion, comments and anecdotes relating to the participants’ current or recent learning experiences. Questions such as “What can you tell me about the last two months?” or “How have things been since I saw you last?” worked well because they gave the participant the opportunity to provide a general overview of the situation which often included details about their motivational state and any recent significant events. This part of the interview was largely unstructured and followed the pattern of a naturally occurring conversation, and so was also effective in breaking the ice and allowing the participant to approach the process of self-disclosure in their own terms. After this introductory stage, probes were often used to gather further data on particular points or issues raised by the participant’s general account, or to invite reflection on how circumstances might have changed since the last meeting. In later interview rounds, details of data from previous interviews were often used as discussion starters or as ways to invite comparisons with past experiences, a strategy that also gave the interview a logical progression. At times, questions included in this part of the interview would emerge spontaneously from the exchange, while other times they were predetermined and originated in the analysis of data from previous interviews as ways to deepen my understanding of some significant issues or themes.

The second part of the interview was more structured and implied a more focussed investigation of the influences on the students’ motivation. The initial draft of this section of the guide was based on a list of motivational influences informed by my review of literature on language learning motivation, and in particular by the temporal models of L2 motivation proposed by Dörnyei and Ottó (1998) and Williams and Burden (1997) (see section 2.2.3). The list was then split into three sections and each of the three lists obtained this way formed the basis for one of the first three waves of the investigation in 2006. At the time of composing this section of the guide I was aware of the potentially reductionist effects of pre-determining a range of factors to be investigated, so measures were put in place to counteract this possibility. The first was to design and use the questions to invite discussion around general topics rather than specific answers. To ascertain the motivational role of the respondents’ family, for example, I would ask questions such as “What can you tell me about your family?” or “What does your family think of…?”. By leaving the respondent a large degree of freedom as to what to include in their answer I hoped to avoid guiding them into a specific consideration of the motivational role of each factor, and letting this emerge by their general discussion instead. The second strategy employed was to personalise each guide on the basis of previous data from the same participant. This could involve for example excluding factors that had already been shown to be irrelevant, or returning to previously covered issues for further probing. Ultimately, this resulted in very different interview guides tailored for each of the participants while still ensuring that everyone had been given the opportunity to reflect and comment on the range of factors on the original list.

4.7.2.2 Specific questions

Throughout the whole study only two questions were intended to be presented to all the learner participants in the same form. The identity-continuum question was designed to stimulate the participants’ thoughts about their own Italianità and of the factors that influencing it. It involved giving the learner a drawing of a continuum between ‘Italian’ and ‘non-Italian’ and asking them to place themselves on it. In most cases, an explanation for their choice followed naturally, providing data useful for a contextualisation of the initial response; if not, I would ask for it. The question worked particularly well in obtaining a picture of the degree of Italianità the respondents attributed to themselves and of what they believed to lie at its basis (e.g. I am Italian

because of the way I feel when I am in Italy, I am Italian because my family is Italian). Sometimes the exercise would prompt the respondent to consider the elements that were missing from their Italianità (e.g. Italian fluency, full ‘Italian blood’) and so to link the response to a discussion of their L2 motivation. Even richer data was collected when the respondent was uncertain and expressed their own train of thoughts while they considered the issue, as often in these cases their responses showed not only something of how their constructed their Italianità, but also of how this was linked or interacted with other facets of their identity, such as their Kiwi identity or their membership of certain social networks. Finally, the question’s visual element made it particularly memorable and often it would be remembered or revisited during a later interview, stimulating additional data around the issue.

The magic overnight fluency question involved asking the respondent for their reaction to a hypothetical scenario within which they wake up one morning to discover they can speak Italian. The question was initially designed with the aim of freeing the respondents from time and circumstantial constraints to reveal the nature of the capital they hoped to gain by learning their heritage language; however in the end it also led to evidence to do with the respondents’ constructions of their ideal selves, of the obstacles in achieving these and of the compromises involved in negotiating their ambitions, both in terms of language learning and identity (re)construction.

4.7.2.3 Piloting

Pilot interviews were conducted in January 2005 with two heritage language learners found among the students of the Italian courses at the local night-school using the semi structured interview guide developed for use with the main participants to the study. The main purpose was to test the two-part format of the guide, refine the wording of the questions and gain some experience in the interview process. The exercise was altogether successful and only prompted minimal changes to the guide.