ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the benefits and challenges of interviews with young learners in SLA. In addition to measuring children’s language development, it is useful for adult researchers to understand about children’s views and perspectives on language learning. Interviews with young learners can be insightful as long as the children’s needs, interest and abilities are taken into account, i.e., it is advisable to explore various participatory approaches or the use of artifacts rather than just focusing on spoken discourse. Individual, pair and group interviews as well as walk-around interviews work well with different ages in different contexts. Adult researchers who believe that children are capable and their insights valuable can create dialogical spaces where children feel confident to contribute despite the obvious power gap between adults and children that is difficult to mitigate against. Following the call by the UNCRC (1989) that children’s voices should be heard in all contexts, adult researchers can incorporate interviews into their work with the caveat that there is no such thing as the authentic voice of the child, but instead, such voices are always the product of the social and cultural context and the relevant relationships between children and adults.
