Playback interviews were pioneered in the 1980s as a method in interactional sociolinguistics to elicit language users' retrospective commentary on linguistic practices (Gumperz 1982; Tannen 2005 [1984]). In the interview session, the researcher plays back sequences of audio or video recordings of interactions to the participants to ask them about their perceptions of the communicative moves that were made in these interactions. Research on language ideologies has hitherto neglected the potential that this form of interviewing bears in order to investigate how social actors position themselves vis-à-vis language use, different styles, and how they evaluate the various resources in their linguistic repertoire.
Drawing on theories that stem from linguistic anthropology, this contribution conceptualizes playback interviews as explicit metapragmatic discourse (Silverstein 1993) which allows participants to look back on and interpret their linguistic practices. In the course of the interview, participants may produce narratives in which they position themselves vis-à-vis their language use.
Playback interviews are therefore a promising method to build a bridge between interactional practices and social structures, a central effort of research into language ideologies (Spitzmüller et al. 2021).
On a theoretical level, I conceptualize playback interviews as a way to establish interdiscursivity between spatiotemporally separated interactional events, i.e., audio recordings of interactions and the interview. Performance and evaluation of communicative practices in the recordings are entextualized and socially enregistered, as social actors contextualize various indexical expressions in their interactions. In the next step, these expressions are de- and recontextualized within the interview. By giving a coherent account of how this interdiscursive process works, we can get an insight into how language ideologies emerge in interaction. Playback interviews, however, like any other form of interviewing, are also an interactional event and should be analyzed as such (Talmy 2010), to account for the researcher's own ideological positioning. Therefore, playback allows all participants in an interview setting to reflect on their linguistic behavior and may also be used in critical sociolinguistic research.
In my contribution, I want to briefly introduce the history of playback interviews and conceptualize them as a form of retrospection and reflection. By presenting examples of my own research on the co-construction of native speakers ideologies and ideologies of communicative competence in interactions of L1 and L2 users of Japanese, I demonstrate that playback interviews are a promising method to conduct research on language ideologies.
Specifically, I will analyze interactionally enregistered discursive elements in audio recordings and how the participants in these recordings reflect and interpret them in playback interview sessions. This contribution will therefore touch on methodological questions, such as how to conduct playback interviews, and develop a theoretical model to illustrate the process of contextualization and how interdiscursivity is established.
References
Gumperz, John J. 1982. Discourse strategies (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Silverstein, Michael. 1993. Metapragmatic discourse and metapragmatic function. In John A. Lucy (ed.), Reflexive language: Reported speech and metapragmatics, 33–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Spitzmüller, Jürgen, Brigitta Busch & Mi-Cha Flubacher. 2021. Language ideologies and social positioning: The restoration of a "much needed bridge". International Journal of the Sociology of Language 272. 1–12.
Talmy, Steven. 2010. Qualitative interviews in applied linguistics: From research instrument to social practice. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 30. 128–148.
Tannen, Deborah. 2005 [1984]. Conversational style: Analyzing talk among friends. New York: Oxford University Press.
