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The analysis of narrative data in applied linguistics has focused to varying degrees on their content, form, and context, with content and thematic analyses being the focus in much of the narrative research in language learning and teaching (Pavlenko 2007). The aim of this article is to report on a positioning analysis of a small story about the imagined ‘better life’ of a migrant, pre-service teacher. Positioning analysis operates on three levels, which together require the analyst to examine the content and characters in the story, the interactive performance of the story, and the positions that are agentively taken by the narrator vis-à-vis normative discourses. Positioning analysis thus considers content, form, and context. I propose and demonstrate an extended version of this approach which enables inclusion of data beyond the small story. The analysis reveals how the teacher interactively constructs an answer to the question ‘Who am I?’ in her story.
Gary Barkhuizen (Mon,) studied this question.