interviewed only fellow Fulbrighters who all had a high level of proficiency in English. Later on in the project, I realized that the more liberal definition of bilingualism (i.e., various degrees of language skills enabling communication in a certain community) would allow me to access more participants and make my narrative more varied and engaging.
After designing the interview questions, I thought would enable my interviewees to help me and my potential readers gain a better understanding of what being a bilingual is like, I started recruiting participants while in the U.S. The recruitment process was not as smooth as I had expected. It was my first experience of trying to collect data for an interview project. Looking back, I am not sure if choosing one focus group (e.g., Fulbrighters, English teachers, PhD students, heritage speakers, etc.) would have made this collection more much smaller but a lot more comprehensible and easier to write up. Eventually I decided I would attempt to make this unexpected element part of my own unique narrative made up of these individual language autobiographies.
For this project I conducted semi-structured interviews. In this type of qualitatitve interviews participants are offered a series of open-end questions on a specific topic. According to lots of social science scholars, the reason why this specific kind of interviews is routinely studied in narrative inquiry is that it allows both the interviewer and interviewee a high degree of flexibility as the former can «gently» guide the latter to elaborate on certain points depending on the answers provided. These interviews are also called «exploratory», as despite its general directions given before the interview a researcher can «go deep for a discovery» modifying their line of inquiry (Magaldi and Berler, 2020).
As for the participants, it was obvious that all of them would share some sort of interest in linguistics (the topic of bilingualism specifically). Some of them might have imagined what to expect in the process before getting the interview questions and the guide. What is more, at some point of their own learning/teaching careers, they must have contemplated similar or the same issues I asked them to dwell on in their talk. The individuals who were helping me recruit the participants and the interviewees themselves were professors of Linguistics or their students. The other part were fellow Fulbrighters coming from a range of backgrounds that I knew to a varying extent. The remaining part were individuals who were also interested in linguistics and responded to my social media posts about my project.
As for a few factors that have to be considered while conducting such studies, I am perfectly aware of how the effect of «prior relationship» (Mann, 2010) as well as power balance with the interviewees has to be taken into account in this type of a qualitative study. It certainly determined the participants’ motivation to be interviewed. Some (mostly Fulbrighters) were my friends and willing to help. Others (those with no background in Linguistics) found my research idea interesting and were curious to reflect on these issues. There were also a few students who agreed to be interviewed so that their professors would give them some extra credits. That for sure had some sort of effect on how the interview was going and the rapport between me and the participant. Being recorded might have made some individuals more self-conscious.
As I was watching back all of these interviews while working on this book, I realized how much «the voice of the interviewer» (Mann, 2010) (i.e., mine) was present in interviews. I faced a sort of a dilemma while thinking of ways to analyze and present my interviews. Instead of providing the transcripts as researchers often do in their research papers, in this book I decided to present the interviews as narratives told through my own lens as I was trying not to distort the original message and quote some of the parts that were formulated in the manner I found unusual. To show my own personal touch even more and to take advantage of that not being a PhD paper, before each story I decided to include the information on how I met each of the participants and how I myself was navigating through associated linguistic, cultural, political issues at the time. In scientific terms I was examining «a larger sociohistoric context of narrative production» (Mann, 2010). After each interview I also provided some reflections on what I heard and some further thoughts that this particular participant inspired in me.
There are different ways to analyze interviews that are commonly used by linguists (e.g., content analysis (Gheyle & Jacobs, 2017)). In the section following the interviews I will be classifying those issues into groups (i.e., language learning and teaching, identity, culture, politics). I am aware of «the temptation to carve out those more quotable parts that serve our purposes» (Pavlenko, 2007). However, as much as I will be trying to stay objective, I agree that as a writer at this stage I am bringing some of my own biases into the project.
I am perfectly aware of the possible limitations of such studies and possible criticisms of some methods of collecting qualitative interview data and analyzing it addressed in scientific literature. For example, as part of this project I have been focusing only on the oral narrative data obtained from the participants. Besides, as my stay in the U.S. was limited, I had no opportunity to conduct longitudinal studies. Another crucial factor is the language of the interviews. All of them were conducted in English. Even though all of the participants are confident English users, it is obvious that they might have faced some difficulties getting their message across and making it more nuanced, which native speakers did not. Finally, as I previously said, I did not attempt to target any specific groups of bilinguals and included individuals with various levels of language competence into the project. I hope that despite all of these obvious limitations, my readers will be able to benefit from the following 51 interviews that are to be read either individually or in the same order they are presented in the book.
Part 1.3. MEET MY BILINGUALS!
First, before you get to know my bilinguals and find out about their linguistic adventures, let’s imagine I asked myself these same questions on my long flight from Paris to Miami on August 21, 2017. This will also be a way for me to introduce myself to those who might not know me while talking about my own language journey that got underway way before I found myself on this plane crossing the Atlantic for the first time in my life.
Me and my life-long commitment to English (Olga, Russia)
Languages spoken: Russian, English, German, some Italian, French, Spanish.
Field of study/career: English teacher, translator, researcher (Linguistics).
I had my first English class at Grade 2 at the age of 8. For months before that «big day», I had been growing more and more excited. As I had learned some of the English alphabet, I thought I would master English when I had learned all the letters and would simply use them instead of the corresponding Russian ones. For example, I remember writing the Russian word for «granddad» (дед in Russian) as «ded» naively thinking that was a proper English word! I had no idea what kind of disappointment I would be in for when my real English classes started!
Back in the 1990s English wasn’t a compulsory foreign language to learn in Russia until Grade 5. At my school in a small town in the country’s southwest, it was possible to start taking it earlier as an optional free class. Even though in the post-Soviet Russia English didn’t enjoy the same level of prestige as it would around a decade or so later, it still seemed a good idea to start at an earlier age.
It didn’t take me too long to start getting disappointed – it wasn’t about specific difficulties I had, but that was because of the teacher who would spend almost the entire class yelling and screaming
