Publications

Publication details [#61075]

Leal, Priscila. 2016. “I hope they have a lot of Vania out there”. Narrative-in-interview, positioning, and ideologies of language and identity in Hawai‘i. Narrative Inquiry 26 (1) : 1–21.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/ni

Annotation

The question of use of second language speakers’ personal narratives-in-interview as data has been widely debated in the applied linguistics field. This paper subscribes to earlier scholars 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 it examines 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. This study discusses 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. It is argued 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.