3.2. Methodological aspects of the narrative approach to research

the level of involvement in learning a foreign language is greater when the image of the country of stay before and during the sojourn is constantly confronted and appropriately modified, similarly to the perception of oneself as a language learner. As a rule, foreigners profit not so much from the gradual acceptance of local customs but rather from the willingness to get to know the new environment through contact with the local community, leaving the comfort zone and certain personal transformation, which does not, however, lead to the negation of one’s true self from before staying abroad. It also helps the foreigners to be more motivated to participate in local life, even though they may sometimes consider themselves intruders or tourists in their new surroundings. The data obtained by the Spanish researchers also confirmed that no learning progress could be achieved without an interaction in a foreign language. For example, in one of the essays they analysed, a Japanese research participant emphasised the impact of speaking the local language on the feeling of comfort and well-being during a stay abroad. In her case, her lower knowledge of Spanish translated into a sense of personal instability abroad and even into health problems: “In my opinion, nothing makes a person feel more like an outsider than being unable to communicate. […] With all the unfamiliar sounds, my head was aching within the hour” (Martínez-Arbelaiz and Pereira, 2020, p. 119). Based on all analysed data, the researchers concluded that “language proficiency can impact identity development and identity changes, in turn, can affect language proficiency” (Martínez-Arbelaiz and Pereira, 2020, p. 123).

By analogy, in Chapter 4 we try to determine the extent to which speaking Polish can help foreigners adapt to living in Poland.

In theoretical terms, the narrative approach is derived from ethnomethodology, the developmental concepts by Lev Vygotsky (1978), the notions of dialogism and heteroglossia by Mikhail Bakhtin (1986), and the socio-cultural theory. Its origins are rooted in the ethnographic life stories researched in the early years of the last century. The classic work of Polish and American sociology by William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, entitled The Polish peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920), is based precisely on the narrative approach. In later years, Harold Garfinkel (1967), an American sociologist and the originator of the ethnomethodological approach to studying societies, used this approach to explore the methods of human communication and particularly to explain how people assign meaning to experiences and organise their social world using the documentary method.

Ethnomethodological research avoids idealising and generalising. Garfinkel did not trust quantitative research methods and attached great importance to the analysis of human relationships. He dealt with the subjective nature of human experience, including communication through language perceived as a tool for interpreting and explaining social interactions, and noted that people distinguish selected facts that form a certain pattern or conform to some rule when they interact in social situations. Afterwards, they use the pattern to make sense of the facts themselves. Garfinkel claimed that people constantly isolate such patterns or rules and use them to understand new events or facts. He called this behaviour the “documentary method”. Garfinkel’s followers, such as Don Zimmerman and Melvin Poller (1970), sought to explain how members of certain groups perceive, describe and explain social behaviour. Overall, ethnomethodological research has made a significant contribution to the understanding of how humans make sense of the world around them and their social interactions. It was ethnomethodology that made it possible to understand the fact that the knowledge shared by interlocutors is not isolated or decontextualised but related to action.

Another researcher who inspired our research approach was Mikhail Bakhtin (1986), a Russian literary scholar and philosopher who opposed the universalisation of rules and definitions as well as the tendency to build systems or patterns. Instead, he advocated focusing on the context and interpreting events and the meaning of language from the other person’s perspective: understanding the interlocutor as well as the situation, events, and even the landscape, by being close to, yet not connecting with, her or him. In this interpretation, agreements reached by two different people or agreements reached by the same person but confirmed in different time-spaces will never be identical, but convergent at best. Bakhtin also stated that words are never neutral but bear traces of their history, reflecting the speech with echoes of other voices from other times and places (Bakhtin, 1986). Therefore, Bakhtin called for accepting the wealth of experimental and interpretative possibilities that life provides us with. He also emphasised the significance of the place (that he called the locus) from which something is perceived or observed, thus expressing his strong support for the explanation of the physical world with reference to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. For Bakhtin, the world of cultural, artistic and linguistic meanings was also relative (Folch-Serra, 1990).

A narrative is also a valuable research method because it enables individual differences in cognition and interpretation to be captured. It helps the respondent to observe the events that create the so-called internal focalisation (Potter, 1996). Although members of a given community may use accepted conventions to express their social identity, each person uses these resources differently, depending on the way they want to present themselves (Yates, 2005). According

to the Bakhtinist approach, to operate in a specific socio-cultural context, we do not “don a range of masks or impersonate a repertoire of roles”, but “declare oneself(s) situated among the existing languages of heteroglossia” (Klancher, 1998, p. 29). This interpretation requires clarification, as one is not always capable of making such declarations literally, nor is one always aware of one’s positioning. In the context of research, heteroglossia, i.e. defining meanings in a given context, reveals itself in socially and culturally conditioned situations that are readable to the other person – in this case, to the researcher who interprets or tries to understand the reported behaviour. This is an attitude that we strongly advocate in this book.

Differences in how respondents use conventions may result from personal psychological conditions, style of expression, relationships with particular groups or the immediate context of interactions. According to Elinor Ochs (1993), identity is shaped both by the individual playing a given social role in a specific context (e.g. parent, student, teacher) and by individuals for whom the role is played. This means that although interlocutors have a similar, socially developed pool of conventions, they use them in different ways, depending on personal circumstances or expectations.

Due to the methodological benefits of the narrative approach, the late 20th century saw its successful adaptation to research in history, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, sociology, and business sciences. It is applied to gain insight into the individual experience of an interlocutor. A positive side effect of such research is often processing “negative stories of […] troubles into stories pointing to alternative possibilities of interpretation and action” (Gertsen and Søderberg, 2010, p. 249).

Over time, narratives also began to be used in communication research and applied linguistics in general. Their contemporary revival can be attributed to the creative interviewing concepts developed by Jack Douglas (1985) and active interviewing proposed by James Holstein and Jaber Gubrium (1995). Linguistic narrative research is primarily aimed at exploring human experiences as revealed in the stories told (Gudmundsdottir, 2001). This approach makes it possible to analyse individual accounts of personal experiences and reflections expressed in narratives, as well as to organise fragmentary accounts into a meaningful whole, reflecting the complexity of life (Elliot, 2005; Riessman, 2008). Despite its relatively short tradition in qualitative and interpretive research, the narrative approach has received a lot of attention in recent years, as reflected by the growing body of literature on the subject (cf. Wąsikiewicz-Firlej, 2014).

It should be noted, however, that the very understanding of the narrative approach differs among researchers. John Creswell argues that in a qualitative approach, “case study, biography, phenomenological or ethnographic research can