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ABSTRACT
This article briefly presents key methodological issues in interview data transcription. These include (a) listening to talking data, (b) shaping talking data, (c) communicating talking data with an interpretative intent, (d) reproducing or (re)constructing talking data, and (e) building data credibility. This methodological consideration shapes how interview data in particular should be transcribed based on a particular methodological choice or orientation. The contribution of this article is to provide a conceptual and practical guide for novice qualitative teacher researchers in the area of TESOL who engage in continued professional development through teacher or practitioner research so that they are methodologically well informed of managing, analyzing, and interpreting interview data, so called written research artifacts. In this article, I contend that transcription serves as a useful tool for representing, analyzing, and interpreting talking data. This interview research can be one of the ways to explore teacher's articulated beliefs and practices in the TESOL landscape.
Keywords: Interview data, research methodology, teacher research, TESOL, transcription
Introduction
Transcription has played a central role in spoken language analysis and representation. It is part of the qualitative research activities designed to capture and unpack the complicatedness and meanings of naturally occurring phenomena (e.g., values, beliefs, feelings, thoughts, experiences) in social encounters. These phenomena can be best captured through talking or stories constructed or jointly constructed by participants and researcher. This talking or story telling is commonly mediated through interviews. There is no denying that transcribing interview data becomes the norm in most qualitative research studies. Literally, transcription is a useful means for turning digitally recorded interview data (findings) into transcripts, but methodologically speaking, transcription is the act of representing original spoken text (recorded talking data) in written discourse as well as analyzing and interpreting instances of these data (Bird, 2005). These data take the form of transcripts, which are viewed as texts, jointly created by research participants and researchers through dialogic and negotiated conversations. In other words, transcription is seen as the act of data representation, analysis, and interpretation. Indeed, it is a social activity that involves a sound methodological orientation inasmuch as the centrality of transcripts methodologically forms the basis for what research questions are being addressed.
To fill this burgeoning need, this article briefly discusses some key...