Management summaries and the follow-up interview in language biography research
Management summaries and the follow-up interview in language biography research

Summary/Abstract: This article’s main aim is to determine the advantages and limits in the utilization of a specifically developed type of follow-up method in combination with language biography interviews. The material consists of a series of language biography interviews conducted in Czech with Vietnamese women in their 20s and 30s who migrated to the Czech Republic as children, and subsequent follow-up interviews. In the language biography interviews, the participants discussed their experiences and problems connected to the acquisition and use of Czech and Vietnamese. In the follow-up interviews, selected passages from the first interviews, above all those containing management summaries (cf. Nekvapil 2004) were played back for the interviewees and their reflections sought. The analysis considers the interactional aspects of the interviewees’ responses as well as the specifics of the additional and/or reformulated management summaries contained within them. The research thus enables the formulation a set of shared language problems experienced and managed (or not) by several members of an increasingly relevant group in the Czech sociolinguistic context. It also confirms that, in the context of the individual language biography,the management summaries do not change significantly over time, rather, that interviewees merely add or leave out individual details.

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