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two worlds. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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emergence of identity. New York, NY: Routledge.
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Teacher Education, 25, 219–227.

A Methodological Reflection on the Process of Narrative

Analysis: Alienation and Identity in the Life Histories of
English Language Teachers
JULIA MENARD-WARWICK
University of California Davis
Davis, California, United States

doi: 10.5054/tq.2010.256798

& I’m pretty sure when I first came to the United States, when I was 21
[...] people definitely knew I wasn’t American. And, and then, after

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living here for two years, they just thought I was from a different part of
the United States, and most people still think that, they’ll say [. . .], ‘‘Are
you from ((pause)), uh, Canada? Or New York?’’ [. . .] Somewhere far
away, you know (Ruby,1 Brazilian-American English as a second language
(ESL) teacher, 2005).
This article uses data from life-history interviews with English
language teachers in Chile and California to illustrate methodological
processes in teacher identity research through narrative analysis. To this
end, I describe the steps I took in identifying an issue to be examined,
selecting particular narratives as representative of this issue, and
identifying discursive resources through which this representation is
realized. Whereas most research articles focus on findings and place
methodology in the background (e.g., Menard-Warwick, 2008), this
article takes advantage of the occasion of a Special Issue on Narrative
Research to foreground methodological decisions, inspirations, and
dilemmas, while backgrounding results. This is an article about the
process of writing an article using narrative data. Due to length
limitations, I offer little in the way of in-depth analysis, but my hope is
that novice researchers will find this account of process useful as they
develop their own ways of engaging with narrative data.
An account of a process lends itself to narrative. Therefore, this article
is primarily organized as a narrative. I define narrative as a text that
connects events, actions, and experiences across time and that
additionally evaluates these events and experiences (Labov, 1972). In
this case, I connect and evaluate the actions I take in writing an article.

THEORETICAL JUSTIFICATION: NARRATIVE IDENTITY

CONSTRUCTION
Before I begin telling my story of narrative analysis, I feel the need to
theoretically justify doing so in an academic journal. As Labov (1972)
pointed out, evaluation crucially answers the audience’s implicit
question, so what?; this section can be seen as an extended preevaluation
of the story that I am going to tell.
As Riessman (2008) explained, a central function of narrative is the
construction of identities. When we tell narratives, it is not that we reveal
our identities, but rather that we represent them. That is, narrators claim
certain identities for themselves (Schiffrin, 1996), while at the same time
assigning identities to others (Blackledge & Pavlenko, 2001), both to the
characters who appear in their narratives and to their interlocutors. By
identities, I refer to types of persons or social positions (e.g., mother,
professor, North American), while recognizing that the identities that
1
All names are pseudonyms. For transcription conventions, see Appendix.

REPORTS AND REFFECTIONS 565

each human being can claim are multiple, dynamic, and contradictory
(Norton, 2000). I additionally argue that identities are actually produced
in narrative through the process of representation (Peterson &
Langellier, 2006). In recounting my own experience of narrative analysis
in this article, I represent myself (and thus produce myself) as an expert
narrative analyst, who is confident enough to risk writing an academic
journal article in narrative form.
Moreover, when I analyze teacher narratives from interviews, my
analysis assigns certain identities to the tellers (English teachers,
Californians, Anglo-Americans, etc.), while also attempting to account
for how the tellers represent themselves and others. Thus, in recounting
my own narrative, I am implicated in the processes of identity
construction—claiming identities for myself and assigning them to my
research participants. Nevertheless, through careful delineation of the
procedures I undertake, I hope to draw responsible conclusions that can
elucidate not only the process of narrative analysis but also can help
build a stronger methodological base for the theoretical arguments
about teacher identities and pedagogies that have been advanced in the
literature. As Morgan (2004) argued, identity is pedagogy, since
teachers’ ‘‘choices in methodologies highlight particular identity options
for students’’ (p. 175). If teacher identities are indeed ‘‘crucial in . . .
determining how language teaching is played out’’ (Varghese, Morgan,
Johnston, & Johnson, 2005, p. 22), then analyzing teacher narratives is a
valuable way to investigate language teaching as it is actually practiced.

BEGINNINGS
I began writing this article by pasting an interview excerpt at the top
of a blank page (see above); this was the quote that first suggested to me
the topic of this article; it was taken from an interview I audiorecorded as
part of a larger study on the identities of English language teachers in
Chile and California. I had wanted to use this excerpt in the article I
wrote about Ruby (Menard-Warwick, 2008), but I was short on space and
left it out. By pasting it on this page, I was picking up a theme that I had
been aware of in my data for several years but had not yet developed in
my writing. In conducting interviews and in initial data analysis, I was
struck by the way that several U.S. teachers emphasized accounts of
alienation from mainstream U.S. culture. In Ruby’s case, she was born in
Brazil to English-speaking immigrants and arrived in the United States as
a young adult. The quote highlights her positioning as someone from
‘‘far away,’’ neither a foreigner nor a local. Another U.S. teacher
(Cherie) grew up in Malawi then married a Tunisian, while a third
(Veronica) was raised in a series of Scientology communities but now

566 TESOL QUARTERLY

considers herself Jewish by conversion, and an honorary Mexican
because of community ties.
I also noticed parallel accounts by U.S. teachers who found
mainstream culture limiting and decided to reach out to other cultures,
a phenomenon I refer to as positive alienation. In Chilean interviews,
accounts of negative and positive alienation were rarer, but nonetheless
present. When I saw teachers citing alienation experiences as influential
in career decisions, it struck me that such experiences were resources for
language teacher identity construction. At the same time I was aware that
literature on identity in TESOL has often fixated on the divide between
native and nonnative speakers (as discussed in Morgan, 2004), without
recognizing how teachers in both categories might construct identities
based on similar feelings of alienation from one’s ‘‘own’’ culture and
attraction to ‘‘other’’ cultures. Thus, I identified ‘‘a gap in the literature’’
several years ago, but many analytical decisions remained.

ANALYTICAL FIRST STEPS: THEMATIC ANALYSES

According to Riessman (2008),2 thematic approaches are the most
common in narrative analysis, and in these approaches, ‘‘content is the
exclusive focus’’ (p. 53). Although many researchers go no further than
thematic analysis, I find it instead a useful first step to identify narratives
‘‘that can aid exploration of [my] study issue’’ (Riessman, 2008, p. 53).
Between 2005 and 2010, I had conducted a series of thematic data
analyses on my teacher interviews as my research project evolved.
Although the theme of alienation emerged in these data analyses, other
themes caught my attention and became the topics of articles, while
alienation remained in the background.
In preparing to finally write about the narratives of alienation, I
reread my interviews with practicing teachers (824 pages of single-spaced
transcripts with 6 English teachers in California and 10 in Chile),
copying and pasting not only specific narratives of alienation but also
related cross-cultural experiences and comments on cultural identity. I
found that many of these narratives and evaluative comments did indeed
connect to teacher identity or reasons for becoming a teacher. Ending
with a 144-page document, I realized that only 20 pages of this contained
excerpts from Chilean interviews, although half my teacher interview
data are Chilean (413 of 824 pages). This simplistic quantitative measure
confirmed my impression that alienation primarily appears in the U.S.
interviews but is not entirely absent in the Chilean interviews.

2
Riessman’s book is the most comprehensive methodological guide to narrative analysis
that I have seen.

REPORTS AND REFFECTIONS 567

 Realizing I needed a tighter focus, I skimmed the 144 pages and
highlighted what I defined as prototypical alienation: that is, narratives
where tellers construct feelings of not belonging in their ‘‘own’’ culture. It
became clear that my most extensive data on this theme come from
Veronica’s interview, more than Cherie’s and Ruby’s interviews combined.
Despite Ruby’s intriguing quote about alienation above, I realized her
narratives really do focus more on intercultural hybridity, the theme of my
2008 article about her (Menard-Warwick, 2008). Of the remaining three
U.S. teachers, only one explicitly stated choosing her career out of a desire
for cross-cultural experiences, a reason also mentioned by one Chilean.
Finally, the four Chilean teachers who expressed feelings of alienation
connected them to the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990), and none
provided extensive narratives on this theme.
As a result of this analysis, I could have reasonably decided that the
connection I was positing between feelings of alienation and the desire
to teach English was too tenuous or not sufficiently prevalent in my data.
However, when I revisited Veronica’s narratives,3 I decided it could be
worth analyzing her fuller development of a theme incipient in other
interviews. Although I lack space in this article to include the full text of
Veronica’s narratives, I provide her account of a teacher’s meeting in the
Appendix as a sample.

ANALYTICAL SECOND STEPS: STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

In deciding to write about Veronica, I recognized that her life history
appeared not as one seamless account, but rather in episodes. As Riessman
(2008) noted, the structural approach to narrative analysis looks at ‘‘how
narratives are organized . . . to achieve a narrator’s strategic aims’’ (p. 77).
Based on my thematic analysis, the episodes that seemed most relevant to
Veronica’s overall self-representation can be categorized as either
Childhood and Youth or Teaching High School. The narratives in the
first category concern the following: (a) traveling from one Scientology
community to another as a child with her mother, (b) moving from Los
Angeles to Orange County4 as a teenager, and (c) making a new life with a
French boyfriend in France. The narratives in the second category explore
(a) difficulties in communicating with White students, (b) a multicultural
holiday party, (c) a teacher’s meeting (see Appendix), and (d) ease in
communicating with Latino students. The first and last of these could be
seen as a single narrative, comparing a negative encounter with a White
student to a positive encounter with a Latino student, even though they
3
These were audiorecorded in a single interview in my university office on 6 January 2006.
4
Orange County is a suburban area south of Los Angeles. Currently multiethnic, it was a
destination for White flight in earlier decades.

568 TESOL QUARTERLY

appear at different points in the interview. These narratives connect to her
teachers’ meeting narrative, in which she communicates more easily with
Latino than White colleagues; moreover, they have a strong thematic
relationship with the story about her painful move from (multiethnic) Los
Angeles to (White) Orange County as a teenager.
Thus a useful way to describe the structure of Veronica’s narratives is
through the contrast she herself constructs between her comfort with
Latinos and her discomfort with White people, even though she herself is
White. In settling on this description, I decided to explore the narratives
that explicitly construct this comparison between experiences in White
and Latino communities: moving from Los Angeles to Orange County,
the teachers’ meeting, communicating with White and Latino students.

ANALYTICAL THIRD STEPS: IDENTIFYING LINGUISTIC

RESOURCES
Having decided which narratives to focus on, I turned to the specific
language used to construct the events and evaluations in these
narratives. Though space in this article precludes me from completing
a linguistic analysis of Veronica’s stories, I include here examples of
linguistic resources that seem important for exploring her perspectives
on teacher identity.5 This is not an approach mentioned by Riessman
(2008) but is common in discourse analysis (e.g., Fairclough, 1992).
One linguistic resource for narrative is words that provide sensory
details. For example, Veronica mentions the smell of a laundry
detergent used by the families of her Latino students, which always
reminds her of the ‘‘affinity’’ she feels for their community. A different
kind of detail she includes is the names of minor characters, from a
German classmate named Wolfy; to her first boyfriend Jesús, who
pronounced her name in Spanish as ‘‘Verónicaaaa’’; to the five
indistinguishable blonde White girls in one English class she taught:
‘‘like Kirsten, Karly, Kelly, five K-names.’’
Labels for particular ethnicities are also an important resource in
Veronica’s construction of identities. First, in her sixth grade Los Angeles
classroom, she mentions Central American, Korean, and German, then
summarizes as ‘‘Asian, Latino, White, just a huge mix.’’ Orange County, in
contrast, is described as ‘‘this pure White land.’’ In describing her current
students, she mentions ‘‘kids who speak Spanish’’ and ‘‘White girls . . .
(who) all look alike,’’ ‘‘Latinos,’’ ‘‘Muslim kids,’’ and ‘‘Mexicans.’’
Similarly, she describes her colleagues: ‘‘the professional Mexican women
I’ve worked with, they’re tough, and they’re smart, and they’re funny, and
5
All of the resources I note here are lexical, but a more complete analysis would include
syntactic and phonological resources as well.

REPORTS AND REFFECTIONS 569

bawdy, and I love them, I feel a little safer with them than my Anglo
teachers at my school’’ (see Appendix). Thus she combines one resource,
ethnic labeling, with another resource, specific evaluative adjectives, such
as ‘‘tough, smart, funny.’’ Moreover, she makes explicit evaluative
statements (e.g., ‘‘I feel a little safer with them’’).

ANALYTICAL FOURTH STEPS: EXPLORING DIALOGIC

VOICING AND PERFORMANCE
Riessman’s third approach explored how stories are ‘‘coproduced in a
complex choreography—in spaces between teller and listener, speaker
and setting, text and reader, history and culture’’ (2008, p. 105). Here, it
becomes important to note my influence on Veronica’s story, my
questions, evaluative comments, and backchanneling. Reading the
interview transcripts, I find that my most common contribution was
the word ‘‘Mmmhmm,’’ indexing attention and interest (see Appendix).
However, the narrative that contrasts Veronica’s happy life in multi-
cultural Los Angeles with her extreme discomfort in the ‘‘pure White
land’’ of Orange County came in answer to my question about how
she began learning second languages. She first explained that her
multilingual classmates had inspired her, then described moving to
Orange County. In so doing, she implies that her inspiration to become
multilingual was reinforced by her evaluation of (monolingual) Orange
County (‘‘it was hell for me’’). In fact, my single question about second
language learning propelled her story without a break from Los Angeles
to Orange County then on to France. In this way, Veronica’s narrative
connects her desire to learn languages to her identification with
immigrant communities, sophisticated Europeans, and indeed almost
anyone outside the U.S. mainstream (the Orange County students
treated her as a ‘‘pure outsider’’). My series of ‘‘mmmhmms’’ ratified
these connections as both reasonable and relevant.
Thus Veronica’s narrative was constructed in dialogue with a supportive
interviewer, who said little but encouraged her to continue drawing
connections between varied cultural experiences, not all tied explicitly to
language learning. However, even more interesting to me as analyst are
internal dialogues within narratives. As Bakhtin (1981) argued, novelists
‘‘refract their own intentions’’ (p. 292) through their orchestration of
diverse voices. From this perspective, reported speech in novels—and by
extension all narratives—can be seen as representing relevant social
identities, and indeed entire social worlds. Examining Veronica’s
narratives, I found that most of the reported speech portrays her own
voice. For example, she quotes herself making a comment in the teachers’

570 TESOL QUARTERLY

meeting about the hiring of a new principal: ‘‘that person better not be
White!’’ (see Appendix). The voices she includes in dialogue with her own
are primarily from Latinos who accept and support her, as when one
student told her, ‘‘You’re an honorary Mexican’’ (see Appendix). Thus,
through dialogic voicing, Veronica constructs a social world where,
despite a sharp border between Anglo and Latino Californians, she
manages to situate herself on the Latino side.

THE FINAL STEP: ANALYSIS OF RELEVANCE

Although I find narrative analysis to be intrinsically satisfying, that
does not justify its use in research. Generally, the academic value of
narrative analysis lies in the light it can shed on research questions, as a
way to construct new disciplinary knowledge—such as the connections
between teacher identities and pedagogies (Varghese et al., 2005).
My problem here is that I never observed Veronica teach,6 so all I
know of her pedagogy is what she was able to report to me. She drew
articulate and fascinating connections between her identities and
pedagogies, as when she dialogically voiced her different ways of
speaking to Latino and White students. However, it would be easier to
write a strong article about Veronica if I had observed the same trends in
her classroom that she describes in narrative. This was the foundation of
my 2008 article about Ruby.
And yet, I tell myself, if I really want to look at alienation narratives,
Veronica’s go the deepest. This brings me to my own positionality and
why I am attracted to this theme. My research in ESL grew out of my
decade of ESL teaching—but I need to consider why I entered this field
in the first place.
I was born in California to a monolingual English-speaking family with
no recent history of immigration. But, like Veronica’s mother, my
parents were seekers, and their alienation from mainstream U.S. society
meant that I spent much of my adolescence in a small Canadian town,
where, like Veronica in Orange County, I felt myself a ‘‘pure outsider.’’
Landing in Seattle as a young adult, and trying to make sense of the
urban environment, I felt drawn to immigrant and refugee (‘‘outsider’’)
communities, and my decision to teach ESL was thus similar to
Veronica’s. Although I was White and a native English speaker (NES),
I did not feel at home in ‘‘the mainstream.’’ In my research on teacher
identity, I did not consciously seek out narratives of alienation, but when
I encountered them, they resonated with my experience.

6
I observed five U.S. teachers and three Chilean teachers out of all the teachers I
interviewed.

REPORTS AND REFFECTIONS 571

 As a responsible scholar, what do I do with these insights? NES
teachers have tended to be portrayed in the literature as prototypically
White, monocultural, and middle-class (e.g., Kubota, 2003). Indeed,
Veronica connected White identity with inappropriate pedagogy, ‘‘you
can have pretty open and empathetic White folks who still don’t know
what the hell they’re doing,’’ (see Appendix), and I wouldn’t deny this.
Nevertheless, my interviews show that teacher identity in TESOL
(including NES teacher identity) is more complex, and Veronica’s
comment is an incomplete picture of connections between identities
and pedagogies in TESOL.

CONCLUSION
I have not actually written an article about narratives of alienation in
English teacher life histories, but rather a reflection on my preparations
to write such an article. While writing, it has become clear to me that I
could do a wonderfully insightful and personally satisfying analysis of
Veronica’s life history narratives, but that I cannot (yet?) justify this to
myself as a stand-alone article on connections between teacher identities
and pedagogies.
At the same time, I believe that this reflection has value precisely
because I am not trying to justify a written product through detailing my
process of analysis. Whenever in the past I have described my
methodological decision-making, I have avoided writing about the
inevitable dead ends that I have explored. In the past I have portrayed
my process as more seamless, effortless, straightforward, linear—and less
intuitive and subjective—than it really tends to be.
That is not to say that this article is a completely transparent account
of experience or that my past methodological accounts were false (just
‘‘neatened up’’ a little). In this article, I try to represent my process
accurately, but, in so doing, I also construct the identity of a more-
transparent-than-usual researcher. I construct a representation of
sincerity, of struggle, of doubt—perhaps hoping that aspiring narrative
researchers can learn from the mistakes of someone they perceive to be
‘‘expert.’’ Like all narratives, my story of research should not be seen as a
report of ‘‘the facts,’’ but rather as a dialogic process in which I construct
temporal connections and theoretical evaluations out of imperfectly
remembered personal experiences.

THE AUTHOR

Julia Menard-Warwick is an associate professor in the linguistics department at

University of California Davis, California, United States, where she teaches graduate
and undergraduate applied linguistics classes, including language pedagogy, and

572 TESOL QUARTERLY

language and gender. Before beginning doctoral studies in the School of Education
at University of California Berkeley in 1999, she taught English as a second language
(ESL) for 10 years at a community college in Washington state, and for 1 year at a
university in Nicaragua. Her ongoing research focuses on language pedagogies,
bilingual development, cultural identities, and language ideologies in both U.S. and
Latin American contexts. Currently, she is working on a book about English
language teaching in California and in Chile. Her previous book, entitled Gendered
Identities and Immigrant Language Learning, was published by Multilingual Matters in
2009. She first engaged with narrative in early childhood but considered this interest
to be a vice unworthy of serious study until some of her professors in her doctoral
program set her straight. With their encouragement, and with the help of some
wonderful storytellers studying ESL at an adult school, she managed to turn an
ethnographic study on adult literacy into a dissertation about narrative and gender.
Although she occasionally publishes articles on other topics, narrative research
remains her passion, and in one way or another, she manages to sneak narratives
into almost everything she writes.

REFERENCES

Bakhtin, M. (1981). Discourse in the novel. In M. Holquist (Ed.), The dialogic

imagination: Four essays (pp. 259–422). Translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist.
Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Blackledge, A., & Pavlenko, A. (2001). Negotiation of identities in multilingual
contexts. The International Journal of Bilingualism, 5, 243–257. doi: 10.1177/
13670069010050030101.
Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.
Kubota, R. (2003). Unfinished knowledge: The story of Barbara. College ESL, 10, 11–
21.
Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city: Studies in the black vernacular.
Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Menard-Warwick, J. (2008). The cultural and intercultural identities of transnational
English teachers: Two case studies from the Americas. TESOL Quarterly, 42, 617–
640.
Morgan, B. (2004). Teacher identity as pedagogy: Towards a field-internal
conceptualisation in bilingual and second language education. International
Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 7, 172–188. doi: 10.1080/
13670050408667807.
Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning: Gender, ethnicity and educational
change. Harlow, England: Pearson.
Peterson, E. E., & Langellier, K. M. (2006). The performance turn in narrative
studies. Narrative Inquiry, 16, 173–180. doi: 10.1075/ni.16.1.22pet.
Riessman, C. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage.
Schiffrin, D. (1996). Narrative as self portrait: Sociolinguistic constructions of
identity. Language in Society, 25, 167–203. doi: 10.1017/S0047404500020601.
Varghese, M., Morgan, B., Johnston, B., & Johnson, K. (2005). Theorizing language
teacher identity: Three perspectives and beyond. Journal of Language, Identity, and
Education, 4, 21–44. doi: 10.1207/s15327701jlie0401_2.

REPORTS AND REFFECTIONS 573

 APPENDIX

Veronica’s Teacher Meeting Narrative

Veronica: I once had a student say to me, that, she said, just ‘‘Well, you know, we’re all
Mexicans here,’’ and I said, ‘‘I’m not Mexican,’’ and she said, ‘‘No, you’re an honorary
Mexican’’ [. . .]
Julia: Mmhmm. And do you also feel like an honorary Mexican from your relationship with
(your) students?
Veronica: I do, you know, [. . .] I do feel, and that affinity for, especially, I think Mexican
women, I really, really enjoy.
Julia: Mmhmm.
Veronica: (They’re) the professional Mexican women, I, women I’ve worked with, they’re
tough, and they’re smart, and they’re funny, and bawdy, and I love them.
Julia: Mmhmm, Mmhmm.
Veronica: I feel a little safer with them than my Anglo teachers at my school, I tend to
gravitate to them, or some of the male teachers ( ), but most Anglo teachers, I stay out of their
(hair).
Julia: ((laughing))
Veronica: Because I might say something that’s completely misconstrued, and I can, I once
said something, we were, we were in hiring for a new principal this year, so we had a Latino
principal for two years, he was wonderful, and then he went back (as) a [university] professor,
and then there’s (the void), who was going to be our new principal, my colleague, who’s Latina,
was on the hiring committee, and I happened to run in, into her when I was at some kind of
district meeting with a bunch of other teachers, people I didn’t know that well, and we all were
sitting around, and ( ) ‘‘( ), tell me, what’s the scoop? Who’s the new principal gonna be?’’ and
she went, ‘‘Well, there’s some good, some, someone really interesting,’’ and I said, ‘‘That person
better not be White.’’
Julia: ((laughing))
Veronica: And I was at (the) table with all these White teachers, and one of the women went,
‘‘What do you mean! (That’s)’’ and [my colleague] laughed, because I, I mean I just feel like I
can, people get it, what I’m meaning, she got it, she knew what I meant, and it turns out we have
a Latina as our principal, I was like, ‘‘Yeah!’’ ((laughing)) I told her that too, I said, ‘‘I’m so glad
you’re Mexican.’’ (laughing)
Julia: Uh-huh.
Veronica: You know, because someone needs to be there for our Mexican students.
Julia: Mmhmm, Mmhmm.
Veronica: And you can have pretty open and empathetic White folks who still don’t know
what the hell they’re doing, (you know), anyway, yeah, I do, I’m Jewish-honorary-Mexican.
((laughing))

Transcription Conventions
( )incomprehensible
(text)transcriptionist doubt
[text]researcher paraphrase
[…]text omitted
((text))paralinguistic behavior

574 TESOL QUARTERLY