Potential pitfalls of interpreting data from English-French tandem conversations

The chapter focuses on methodological issues involved in analysing, coding and
interpreting data from the Spécificités des Interactions verbales dans le cadre de
Tandems linguistiques Anglais-Français (Characteristics of English/French spoken
tandem interactions) corpus of English-French tandem exchanges. Each of the 21
tandem pairs recorded consisted of a native speaker of English and a native speaker
of French. The participants were video and audio recorded while performing tasks
(conversation and reading) in both languages. So far, two major threads of research
on the corpus data have emerged: corrective feedback and communication break-
downs. We have attempted to gain insights as to when or why corrective feedback
is given to the non-native tandem partner and when or why communication be-
tween the partners gets compromised. Findings from those previous thematic areas
serve as the basis for the present study. The major challenge we have encountered
in conducting the analyses is the ambiguity and complexity of our conversational
data. Both corrective feedback and communication breakdowns may have multi-
ple – and not always obvious – causes and may or may not be clearly signalled
by the participants. In the chapter, we discuss the various problems we faced and
addressed while coding the data, as well as how the methodological choices we
made affect our results and conclusions. The discussion is amply illustrated with
examples from the corpus.