Potential pitfalls of interpreting data from English-French tandem conversations
Sylwia Scheuer, Céline Horgues
Abstract
The chapter focuses on methodological issues involved in analysing, coding and<br> interpreting data from the <em>Spécificités des Interactions verbales dans le cadre de<br> Tandems linguistiques Anglais-Français</em> (<em>Characteristics of English/French spoken<br> tandem interactions</em>) corpus of English-French tandem exchanges. Each of the 21<br> tandem pairs recorded consisted of a native speaker of English and a native speaker<br> of French. The participants were video and audio recorded while performing tasks<br> (conversation and reading) in both languages. So far, two major threads of research<br> on the corpus data have emerged: corrective feedback and communication break-<br> downs. We have attempted to gain insights as to when or why corrective feedback<br> is given to the non-native tandem partner and when or why communication be-<br> tween the partners gets compromised. Findings from those previous thematic areas<br> serve as the basis for the present study. The major challenge we have encountered<br> in conducting the analyses is the ambiguity and complexity of our conversational<br> data. Both corrective feedback and communication breakdowns may have multi-<br> ple – and not always obvious – causes and may or may not be clearly signalled<br> by the participants. In the chapter, we discuss the various problems we faced and<br> addressed while coding the data, as well as how the methodological choices we<br> made affect our results and conclusions. The discussion is amply illustrated with<br> examples from the corpus.