Interview Talk as Professional Practice

Abstract

Conventional understandings of interviews with teachers or other educational participants have treated interviewing activity as data collection, and interview responses as reports on the realities of professional practice. This paper proposes that interview data can be analysed differently when interviews are studied as instances of 'language in education' themselves. The interview can be seen as a site of professional practice, not just reflection on practice, in that such interviews contain courses of questioning and methods of accounting that are reflexively part of the generation of educational knowledge. Working from transcripts of two interviews with a beginning secondary school teacher, we focus on the ways in which language is used interactively to recast professional knowledge and discourse.