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Narrative Inquiry
Vol. 26:1 (2016) ► pp.1–21

“I hope they have a lot of Vania out there”

Narrative-in-interview, positioning, and ideologies of language and identity in Hawai‘i

| University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

The question of use of second language speakers’ personal narratives-in-interview as data has been widely debated in the applied linguistics field. I subscribe to scholars before me who argue for an analysis beyond content but one that also takes into consideration context and form. Bamberg’s positioning theory (1997; 2004) guides this analysis as I examine the storied world, the storytelling world, and the existing discourses in the personal narratives-in-interview by a woman from the island of Chuuk residing in Hawai‘i. I discuss the linguistic, rhetorical, and interactional properties of her narratives, how she positions herself in relation to ideologies of language and identity that have value in her spaces, and juxtapose them against sociolinguistic and socio-historic contexts in which they were produced. I argue that by looking at the interdependence between all positioning levels (i.e., context, content, and form), it is possible to understand how the narrator positions herself with regards to societal discourses on language and identity both in the micro and macro contexts of the interview space and of Hawai‘i.

Keywords: narrative-in-interview, positioning, Micronesians, immigrants
Published online: 20 December 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.26.1.01lea
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