ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 undergoes a shift in how interviews are theorized and analyzed: from an ‘interview as research instrument’ perspective to an ‘interview as social practice’ orientation (Talmy, 2010). Specifically, it adopts a discourse analytic approach as the method for the analysis of interview data to explore how youth position themselves and others within interactions and with respect to their social milieu during interview exchanges about English proficiency, language ownership and English accents. These interactions suggest that participants used the proficiency of Italians to negotiate their English competence; they held that conceptions of language ownership were fluid, subjective and co-constructed; and they constructed attitudes towards different English accents based on their identities and often in contrast to powerful language ideologies. With this close analysis, this chapter features the ingenious transformative agency of English users in global contexts and the constraints to this agency at the micro- and macro-levels.
