Book review: Matthew T Prior, Emotion and Discourse in L2 Narrative Research

Abstract

In contrast to the mass movement of migrants shown in the media, Prior’s study gives a glimpse into the emic detail of migrant lives when their journey is over. Much of the book is devoted to a self-reflexive discourse analysis of extracts from a series of interviews with East Asian refugees, focusing on contributions seen as problematic. First, though, Prior resolves to remedy the absence of reflexivity in traditional conversation analysis and disclose his own emotional history in the context of his professional biography. He describes how an earlier empirical investigation into migrants’ language learning experiences had included research interviews in which the participants persistently told stories about themselves, producing the data that are recycled here. It is the author’s biographical narrative, followed by the interview excerpts, and similar extracts from transcriptions in the literature, that is among the most readable sections of the book.