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In the past decade, language memoirs, linguistic autobiographies, and learners’ journals and diaries have become a popular means of data collection in applied linguistics. It is not always clear however how one should go about analyzing these data. The aim of this paper is to offer a critical review of analytical frameworks applied to second language users ’ personal narratives. I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these frameworks in relation to the type of information they seek: subject reality, life reality, and text reality. I argue that some analytical approaches, in particular content and thematic analyses, are insensitive to the interpretive nature of autobiographic data. Subsequently, I offer recommendations for systematic analysis of bi- and multilinguals’ narratives on macro- and micro-levels in terms of content, context, and form. A well-known anthropologist Victor Barnouw once remarked that from a scholarly perspective the main difficulty with life stories, fascinating as they are, is knowing what to do with them (Crapanzano 1984). His remark rings true not only in the field of anthropology but also in our own field, where,
Aneta Pavlenko (Mon,) studied this question.