Using sociolinguistic methods to uncover speaker meaning in teacher interview transcripts

Given the current popularity of ethnographic methods of researching teaching and teachers, many investigators commonly confront the task of analyzing interview transcripts in order to uncover speakers’ meaning systems and the embedded perspectives on knowledge and practice upon which those meaning systems rely. Others have written about conducting interviews and transcribing them. Many have written generally about sociolinguistics. Yet, I have found few methodological discussions on concrete ways investigators might actually use sociolinguistic methods to extract speaker meaning from interview transcripts, and fewer still that focus on teachers and teaching. This paper introduces that topic by offering both a practical primer on using pragmatics to uncover speaker meaning and an introduction to ways discourse analysis can prove useful for those studying interview records with teachers. What follows is a pedagogical description of how sociolinguistics was used to uncover meaning in a set of 64 interviews with eight teachers.