Living Language. Laura M. Ahearn

Living Language - Laura M. Ahearn


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is extremely important to remember, however, that in many societies, the interview is not the preferred way of communicating information – if it is a speech genre familiar to the interviewees at all. A researcher who attempts to use interviews in such a society will either obtain mistaken information or no information at all. For this reason, Briggs (1986:93) strongly encourages researchers in all fields (not just linguistic anthropology) to “learn how to ask” in culturally appropriate ways by paying close attention to how people in the community use language in all sorts of situations. Briggs (2007) also urges us all to become more aware of how the ideas people express in interviews circulate in many different venues – in scholarly articles and books, informal conversations, and the mass media, for example.

      In sum, as important as the interview is as a research method, it is often mistakenly assumed to provide a simple, straightforward path toward “the facts” or “the truth.” Interviews can indeed provide rich insights, but they must be appreciated as the complex, culturally mediated social interactions that they are.

      Surveys and Questionnaires

      Closely related to interviews are surveys and questionnaires, which are often employed to collect demographic data such as age, education level, languages spoken, income, and so on. Sometimes, respondents fill out the survey or questionnaire themselves; other times, the researcher or a research assistant goes through it with the respondent item by item. These research instruments can be used to collect information about opinions, experiences, or beliefs. Respondents might be asked, for example, “On a scale of 1 to 5, how much do you agree with the following statements?” Or, “How many hours per day on average do you watch television?” Or, “List the first five adjectives that come into your mind when you think of your wedding.” Many of the same caveats that apply to interviews also apply to surveys and questionnaires, but they can provide valuable perspectives on some topics.

      Naturally Occurring Conversations

      As important as recording naturally occurring conversations can be for many linguistic anthropologists, there are nevertheless several drawbacks to this method. Transcribing such conversations takes an average of six hours of transcription for every hour of conversation – often more. Recorded words can become detached from their social contexts, thereby making the meanings even more indeterminate than usual. And finally, the amount of data that can be analyzed in a single short conversation is enormous, so hundreds of hours of recorded conversations can quickly become overwhelming to analyze. Despite these disadvantages, however, there is an important benefit to recording or videotaping as many interactions as possible: it allows the researcher to study complex, multimodal linguistic practices in greater detail, thereby avoiding the tendency to draw conclusions based on faulty memories, received notions, or one’s own language ideologies.

      Experimental Methods

      Matched Guise Tests

      A researcher interested in language ideologies might conduct a matched guise test, a process that involves recording individuals as they read a short passage in two or more languages or dialects (“guises”). In other words, if four people are recorded, eight (or more) readings of the same passage might be produced. For example, a researcher interested in whether listeners judge people who speak African American English differently from those who speak standard American English might choose four individuals who can code-switch fluently between these two ways of speaking. Each of these four individuals would record two readings of the same passage, one in African American English, the other in standard American English. These eight readings would then be shuffled up and played back to other people who do not know that there were only four readers instead of eight. The listeners would be asked to rank each of the eight readings, rating each according to how honest, intelligent, sophisticated, likable, and so on, they thought the reader was. By comparing the scores listeners give to the same speaker reading in African American English vs. standard American English, it is possible to hold a person’s other voice qualities constant and thereby determine how much influence simply speaking one or the other of these language variants has on listeners’ attitudes toward the speaker. In other words, matched guise tests can provide a measure of people’s unconscious language ideologies – which can be related to racial prejudices.6


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