Читать книгу Bilingual Couples in Conversation - Silja Ang-Tschachtli - Страница 33

The questionnaire (see Appendix I) was designed with the intention of covering areas that were important to the interviewees’ lives as bilingual, bicultural couples, and of prompting a substantial amount of speech production and interaction between the partners. It includes questions about their relationship history, their language use (inside and outside the home) and their attitudes towards bilingualism, biculturalism and their partner’s language and culture. Furthermore, there were a number of questions concerning the expression of positive and negative emotions, the use of terms of endearment and their swearing behaviour. Because I also wanted to examine how they express positive and negative emotions when conversing together, I asked questions that I expected to trigger a positive reaction (e.g. “What attracted you about each other when you first met?”; “What are the advantages […] of living in a bilingual, bicultural relationship?”) or a negative reaction (e.g. “Were there any initial conflicts?”). I also asked a number of questions that I expected to elicit certain linguistic behaviour from the interviewees, as they would force the couples to negotiate (e.g. “Who is funnier?”; “Who is more polite?”), to criticize or commend each other (“How proficient is your partner in your language?”) or to talk about potentially sensitive subjects (“How do you get along with your extended family?”; “What are your plans for the future?”).

The questionnaire was structured with the objective of making the couples feel relaxed and comfortable from the beginning of the interview. I therefore started with a question that was supposed to encourage them to feel positive about their relationship and hence to speak more freely about it (“How did the two of you meet?”). I then moved on to relatively general questions about their language use and their lives together, before broaching more specific questions and, finally, addressing more sensitive or personal topics. With the help of this structure, I aimed to attain a high level of openness from the participants.

An interview situation with a pre-set questionnaire has many advantages, but also some potential drawbacks. On the one hand, my presence and my questions may have had a slight impact on the naturalness of the conversations. Some of the couples also felt a bit nervous at the beginning, or were slightly anxious about certain questions, which might have had an effect on the way they talked to each other. On the other hand, the questionnaire served to give the conversations a frame and guaranteed that I received the information necessary for the content analysis from the couples. This permitted a comparison between the conversations and the couples’ answers.