Received: 2 September 2013 Revised: 29 June 2017 Accepted: 13 July 2017

DOI: 10.1111/lnc3.12250

ARTICLE

Contextualizing language attitudes: An

interactional perspective*

Grit Liebscher1 | Jennifer Dailey‐O'Cain2

1
Department of Germanic & Slavic
Studies, University of Waterloo
2
Department of Modern Languages and
Cultural Studies, University of Alberta
Correspondence
Grit Liebscher, University of Waterloo,
Department of Germanic & Slavic Studies,
Modern Languages building, 200
University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON
N2L 3G1, Canada.
Email: gliebscher@uwaterloo.ca
Abstract
Language attitudes research has had a history spanning
several decades largely influenced by quantitative
approaches. More recently, interactional perspectives
have added new impetus to the field. This article pro-
vides an overview of interactional approaches to lan-
guage attitudes, which are divided into three main
groups: (a) discursive psychology, (b) approaches that
draw on conversational analysis and interactional
sociolinguistics, and (c) approaches based in the theory
of motivated information management. The authors
argue that these approaches can instigate new questions
and yield new insights into our understanding of lan-
guage attitudes. In positioning qualitative, largely inter-
actional, approaches with respect to one another (and,
briefly, to language attitude study more broadly), this
article also re‐evaluates some terminological inconsis-
tencies across the field and touches on areas that ought
to be considered in future research addressing language
attitudes.

1 | INTRODUCTION

Attitudes towards languages, language varieties, and other aspects about language have long
occupied social psychologists, sociolinguists, and, more recently, scholars interested in the

*
We would like to thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and suggestions. Thanks
also go to our research assistant Katharina Schröder for her help with the initial research bibliography. Research
informing this chapter was made possible in the first place through the generous support by the Canadian Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council for two projects the authors conducted together (#410‐2003‐0378 and #410‐07‐2202).

Lang Linguist Compass. 2017;e12250. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/lnc3 © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1 of 14
https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12250
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interactional analysis of language. One dilemma for these scholars is the very unobservable
nature of attitudes. An attitude, after all, is “a hypothetical construct” that “cannot be
directly observed” and which is “latent, inferred from the direction and persistence of exter-
nal behaviour” (Baker, 1992: 10–11). Attitudes are internal, in other words—they are
thoughts and ideas in people's minds that are largely hidden away unless externalized in
some way—and sometimes they are not externalized at all. In order to observe and analyze
these attitudes, therefore, social scientists have found different ways to externalize those
internal manifestations. These ways include direct methods that explicitly inquire about
perceptions of languages or dialects, as, for example, in perceptual dialectology (Anders,
Hundt, & Lasch, 2010; Garrett, 2005; Preston, 1999). They also include indirect methods
such as the matched‐guise technique (Giles & Bouchard, 1982; Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner,
& Fillenbaum, 1960), in which stereotyped attitudes are traditionally accessed by rating
speech samples on a Likert scale with respect to a series of adjective pairs such as “edu-
cated”/“not educated” or “short”/”tall.” Another indirect method are studies using the tech-
nique of commitment measures (Agheyisi & Fishman, 1970), which is trying to get at
attitudes through utilizing questions requesting information about how willing a person is
to, for example, engage with someone of a particular language or dialect. However, in each
of these methods, the objects of analysis are external expressions of attitudes, believed to
represent those “underlying” internal thoughts and ideas to a larger or lesser extent. This
is because it is impossible to study attitudes without studying their expression, whether that
expression is elicited via a questionnaire or interview designed to elicit language attitudes,
or unelicited, for example, in a newspaper article or naturally occurring conversation. While
the majority of research on language attitudes has been through experimental and/or ques-
tionnaire‐based research (which we refer to as “traditional methods” in this paper), the use
of interactional approaches that make use of interview or conversational data has thus far
garnered less attention, as seen in the fact that overviews of language attitude research (e.
g., Garrett, 2010; Soukup, 2012; Vandermeeren, 2005) scarcely mention or ignore this
research completely. In an attempt to draw wider attention to the exciting work being done
in this end of the field, then, this paper will provide an overview of approaches that focus
on language attitudes as expressed in spoken interaction and discuss their contributions to
the field of language attitude research as a whole.

2 | THE I MPOR T AN CE OF CON T E X T

The expression of attitudes always occurs within some kind of context: both in the sense of
the wider societal context (e.g., demographic characteristics of participants in experiments,
interviews, or conversations that might influence the expression of their attitudes) as well
as the immediate local context (e.g., did the expression occur within a written editorial, a
talk show, a speech, a questionnaire, or some other sort of setting, and how was it influ-
enced by the place of that expression in the sequential order of the interaction). Such con-
text can provide crucial information for the interpretation of expressed attitudes. For
example, in questionnaire studies, contextual information such as the background of
speakers and experience with dialects has been found to affect how informants answer
questions (Plewnia & Rothe, 2012: 33). Although some new experimental‐tradition models
do allow the context of the expression of attitudes to be taken into account (e.g., Soukup,
2009), research designs still need to better account for the importance of both types of
LIEBSCHER AND DAILEY‐O'CAIN 3 of 14

context (Campbell‐Kibler, 2009: 151). Furthermore, even the most naturalistic of experimen-
tal settings do not give the researcher access to the type of context where attitudes are
expressed all the time in the ordinary practices of everyday life: interaction.
By contrast, interactional research puts a strong emphasis on the importance of the context
of the interaction, and scholars from this tradition have been using qualitative methods to
investigate questions concerned with language attitudes as constructed in the interaction.
Because of its origins in the field of social psychology, language attitude as an object of study
has a long tradition of being seen as cognitive phenomenon, but more recent approaches have
demonstrated the importance of also considering the context in which the attitude is
expressed. In the process, such interaction‐based research has challenged the notion that lan-
guage attitudes are fixed and stable (cf. Soukup, 2012). An overview of this work is given in the
section below.

3 | RELEVANT CONCEPTS

Within the field of language attitudes research, attempts to distinguish concepts such as
attitudes, beliefs, ideologies, stances, and epistemic claims have not always been either pro-
ductive or universally accepted. When it comes to attitudes and beliefs, some treat them
as same (e.g., Yu 2010), while others make a distinction (e.g., Edwards, 2006, 2011).
Edwards (2006: 329) suggests that beliefs and attitudes are wrongfully conflated in the lit-
erature, as indicated by the example: Is knowledge of French important for your children,
yes or no?, which probes for a belief rather than an attitude because the person may
believe that French is important for her children's career success; yet, she may dislike
the language. For Edwards (2011: 83), attitude consists of three elements—cognitive (belief),
affective (emotion), and behavioural. He stresses that attitude has an emotional component
but belief does not, a distinction that becomes especially relevant in analyses based in the
theory of motivated information, such as that centered on excerpt (3) below. In such an
analysis, attitudes are “dynamic and situated” (Pan & Block, 2011: 401) rather than “cogni-
tive structures which are formed early in life and which are resilient to change … [that]
influence understandings of the world, … [and that] influence and shape behavior” (Pajares,
1992, qtd. in Pan & Block, 2011: 392).
While attitudes are sometimes seen as purely individual and contrasted with ideologies
as collective, we rather see these concepts as related and interacting. Following Woolard
(1992: 235), we view language ideology as “a mediating link between social structures
and forms of talk.” In this view, attitudes are shaped by ideologies and vice versa through
language use (cf. Payne, 2010). Pan and Block (2011: 393) also make reference to this view
by referring to “Bakhtinian notions of heteroglossia and polyphony, the idea that individu-
ally expressed beliefs draw on the voices of many as opposed to being a purely individual
matter.” The “voices of many” seems to address the concept of ideology as the collective
appropriation in constant interaction with individual attitudes. Ideologies are then those
collective perceptions that have a social and political dimension, evident in widely‐cited def-
initions of ideologies as “sets of beliefs articulated by users as a rationalization or justifica-
tion of perceived structure and use” (Silverstein 1979: 173) that are regarded as being
universally true (Seargeant, 2009: 348‐9).
Any discussion of attitudes in interaction also needs to take note of the concept of
stance, as elusive as it may be (cf. Englebretson, 2007). Since stance is commonly associated
4 of 14 LIEBSCHER AND DAILEY‐O'CAIN

with subjectivity, evaluation, and interaction, research on stance‐taking is closely linked

with studying attitudes in interaction, since a focus on stance “marks an orientation toward
conceiving of language in terms of the functions for which it is used, based on the contexts
within which it occurs” (1). DuBois (2007: 163) defines stance as “a public act by a social
actor, achieved dialogically through overt communicative means (language, gesture, and
other symbolic forms), through which social actors simultaneously evaluate objects, position
subjects (themselves and others), and align with other subjects, with respect to any salient
dimension of the sociocultural field.” As Garrett (2010: 163) points out: “attitudes can be
seen as stances on issues in public debates,” especially “within argumentative contexts”.
Even non‐public contexts such as private conversations can include expressions of stances,
however, when they draw on available information as transmitted through wider public
discourses.
As with attitudes in general, these stances can be expressed explicitly, that is, through
metalanguage (Jaworski, Coupland, & Galasinski, 2004), or implicitly, that is, by
implicature (Grice, 1975) or through the sequential order of conversation. Language atti-
tude expressions, as well as how they are treated by others in the interaction, can be
affected by another concept relevant here: identity. While language attitudes arise from
issues of identity, that is, by means of an association of a language with its speakers
(Edwards, 2006: 326), current conceptions of identity tend to view it as a complex pro-
cess of self‐ and other‐categorization (cf. Bucholtz & Hall, 2010) that involves autobio-
graphical and ecological histories as much as the (negotiated) legitimacy to perform
aspects of identities as recognizable categories. From this perspective, identity is formu-
lated, contested, and reevaluated by the participants in the interaction just as are atti-
tudes, ideologies, stances, and formulations of knowledge, that is, epistemic claims
(Heritage, 2013).

4 | LANGUAGE ATTITUDE RESEARCH WITHIN THE

I N T E R A C T I O N A L T R A D I T I O N : T H R E E MA I N AP P R O A C H E S

One characteristic of any interaction is intersubjectivity, that is, the notion of give and
take between interactants and the co‐construction of meaning (cf. Bucholtz & Hall,
2010). Therefore, since this intersubjectivity is then also an element of how language atti-
tudes are negotiated and constructed in the interaction, the discussion in this paper is
focused on research that is based on naturally occurring conversations or conversational
interviews. For this reason, we are not discussing approaches such as impression manage-
ment based on judgement and prediction (e.g., Gudykunst & Ting‐Toomey, 1990) as well
as Tajfel and Turner's (1979) social identity or accommodation theory. By contrast, we
advocate for approaches that view attitudes as complex outcomes of the intersubjective
nature of the interaction.
Most research on language attitudes in interaction can be divided into three approaches
according to the main analytical framework they use (cf. Tophinke & Ziegler, 2006): (a)
discursive psychology, (b) approaches that draw on conversational analysis/interactional
sociolinguistics, and (c) approaches grounded in the theory of motivated information man-
agement. The first of these, discursive psychology (Edwards & Potter, 1992; Potter, 1998;
Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Wetherell & Potter, 1992), was originally conceived not as a
LIEBSCHER AND DAILEY‐O'CAIN 5 of 14

way of reconceptualizing the study of language attitudes in particular but more broadly as
a non‐cognitive and constructivist form of social psychology. Drawing on a combination of
speech‐act theory, ethnomethodology, and semiology, its theoretical framework orients
toward the analysis of language use and the ways in which that use “orders our percep-
tions and makes things happen and thus … how language can be used to construct and
create social interaction and diverse social worlds” (Potter & Wetherell, 1987: 1). The
framework's main assumption is that the images we have in our minds that correspond
with the objects in our world are only brought about through talking about—and more
specifically through the evaluation of—those objects.
Within the discursive psychology framework, language attitudes (like other kinds of atti-
tudes as well) are viewed as specifically constructed in talk, and the “objects” these atti-
tudes refer back to are the specific languages, language varieties, or linguistic features
that are being evaluated. This evaluation then occurs in its conversational context through
the process of constructing various social categories by relating them to these languages,
varieties, or linguistic features. Take, for example, this excerpt from Thøgersen (2010:
301‐2, line numbers added), in which an interviewer is asking a respondent about how
to regard efforts to keep Danish pure from foreign influences:

Excerpt 1:

1 Respondent: It depends very much on the point of view. If it is from a

2 nationalistic point of view, I think it is very negative.
3 Interviewer: And if it is from a democratic?
4 Respondent: Then it is something completely different. That's it! If it is
5 from a wish to include as many as possible, then it is great,
6 if it is to protect something authentically, uniquely Danish, then
7 it nauseates me.

In this example, the possible social categories “nationalistic” and “democratic” are
invoked by the two participants in the interaction, creating two competing images for
how to best characterize this type of purism. The respondent's attitude toward purism thus
depends on whether the motivations behind a particular expression of purism are “nation-
alistic” (in which case the attitude is negative) or “democratic” (in which case the attitude
is positive).
From the perspective of discursive psychology, then, the fact that a single person's atti-
tudes can be constructed differently on a moment‐to‐moment basis is regarded not as a
problem that is best solved with a robust experimental design, but as an ordinary feature
of everyday conversation, and as easily understood if the context within which the attitude
was expressed is not abstracted away. In fact, this impermanence is seen as so crucial to
the understanding of attitudes that discursive psychologists have argued that experimenta-
tion is an inappropriate way of dealing with attitudes in the first place, since attitudes
always need to be analyzed within their discursive context (Potter & Wetherell, 1987, see
also Jaworski et al., 2004: 25‐6).
The second approach is based on conversation analysis (Sidnell, 2011) and interactional
sociolinguistics (Gumperz, 1982). Central to this approach are the aspects of sequentiality,
intersubjectivity, and language use as action or as “doing something.” As Liebscher and
Dailey‐O'Cain (2009) argued, language attitudes as seen in this tradition are informed by
6 of 14 LIEBSCHER AND DAILEY‐O'CAIN

three levels of analysis, including a content‐based level, a turn‐internal semantic and prag-
matic level, and finally, an interactional level. The following example, discussed more at
length in Liebscher and Dailey‐O'Cain (2009: 202ff.), serves to introduce this approach.
The example is from a corpus of conversations that the authors video‐recorded in Saxony,
in the eastern part of Germany, between 2000 and 2003. In the excerpt, Lena is a local per-
son from Saxony, Ralf is her teenaged son, Norbert a friend who migrated from western
Germany to Saxony after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and GL and JD are the
researchers.
LIEBSCHER AND DAILEY‐O'CAIN 7 of 14

A content‐based discourse analysis allows us to identify those parts of the interaction

that are relevant for an analysis of language attitudes; in this case that speakers talk about
Saxon (“sächsisch”), the particular German dialect spoken in the area. A turn‐internal or
semantic approach further allows us to focus, for example, on the descriptions used for
8 of 14 LIEBSCHER AND DAILEY‐O'CAIN

the dialect (strongest Saxon, worst dialect, stigma), through which the speakers evaluate the
dialect very negatively. An interactional analysis then draws attention to the fact that Lena
frames her utterance in Line 24 as a contradiction to a statement that Ralf made earlier
(Line 7): Saxon is the worst dialect. Ralf, in turn, had contradicted Norbert, who had pre-
viously referred to Saxon as High German in Line 1 (which means standard German but
here also implies a positive evaluation). Sequentially, the expressed language attitudes here
arise within a rather playful argument structure, where Ralf asserts himself against his par-
ents and other adults in this interaction. From an authoritative and knowledgeable position
as a mother (who has heard Ralf use the dialect himself) and a local person (who is
extremely familiar with the dialect), Lena in Line 24 then points out a contradiction
between Ralf's expressed attitude and his own use of Saxon. While admitting to the use
(Lines 25 and 27), he brings forward another line of argument: he limits his negative eval-
uation to the sound as he perceives it (Line 27: it just sounds bad), that is, makes the eval-
uation something personal, while also drawing on the ideology of the stigma of this dialect
based on its sound qualities. He finishes his turn in Line 28 by using an “extreme case for-
mulation” (cf. Pomerantz, 1986) to legitimize his claims, after which interactants usually
pursue no further contradiction. This can be seen in the response by Lena in Line 29
who then aligns herself with Ralf's evaluation of the dialect by formulating it as something
many people believe.
Drawing on positioning theory (Harré & van Langenhove, 1991) as a useful additional
framework in the analysis of language attitudes, we can also observe in this particular
example that Norbert in line 31 agrees with the negative stigma but locates this evalua-
tion outside of himself and within the political past. This allows him to identify with
locals and to position himself as a favourable migrant through the ways in which lan-
guage attitudes position individuals (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005). Through this formulation,
he also resists and reevaluates the stigmatisation. This reevaluation involves a self‐repair
(cf. Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977) with a cutoff in Line 31, when Norbert starts to
formulate where this attitude comes from but finishes by formulating a state‐of‐affairs
instead.
This kind of fine‐grained analysis offering insights into the linguistic resources used in
the formulation and negotiation of language attitudes has also recently been used to ana-
lyze the relationship between the construction of language attitudes to the construction of
sociolinguistic spaces, as well as the relationship between the construction of language atti-
tudes and the construction of identities (König, 2014; Liebscher & Dailey‐O'Cain, 2013;
Studler & Cuonz, 2014). However, this kind of analysis is also a broader tradition not lim-
ited only to recent work, as similar kinds of analysis are found in Winter (1992), and Riehl
(2000), among others. Other researchers within this tradition also link language attitudes
more specifically to the analysis of emotions, for example, by drawing attention to the ways
in which language attitudes are formulated by making use of emotion verbs (Tophinke &
Ziegler, 2006:10). This type of interactional analysis can also be used to discuss language
attitudes in their links to broader stereotypes (Riehl, 2000) and to the construction of
knowledge and authority (Liebscher & Dailey‐O'Cain, 2014), ideologies (König, Dailey‐
O'Cain, & Liebscher, 2015), and topoi, that is, discourse themes (Arndt, 2010) and as these
affect and are affected by the expression of language attitudes. Finally, research pursued
through this interactional approach has also provided us with a better understanding of
the kinds of linguistic resources that are commonly used to express language attitudes
(König, 2014), including metaphors (Cuonz, 2010).
LIEBSCHER AND DAILEY‐O'CAIN 9 of 14

The third and most recent proposed approach to analyzing language attitudes in interaction
draws on the social psychological theory of motivated information management (Afifi & Weiner,
2004; Fowler & Afifi, 2011) in order to analyze language attitudes (Giles, 2011; Giles & Rakić,
2014). This framework is specifically designed to analyze the regulation of information and
the process of sense‐making, and as such, it is particularly useful in situations where the
expressed language attitude involves an “uncertainty gap,” as in the excerpt below (from Giles,
2011: 11, line numbers added):

Excerpt 3:
01 A: Where you from, then?
02 B [confidently smiling]: Santa Barbara, California.
03 A [indicating somewhat perplexed]: No, I meant where you really from?
04 B [indicating despair]: Yeh, I'm really from Santa Barbara!
05 A [somewhat agitated]: No, you have an accent, where did you originally come from?
06 B [somewhat reluctantly]: OK, Wales, but I have been in the States for over 22 years.
07 A [somewhat surprised and confused]: Oh?!

Within a motivated information management interpretation, A's increasingly pointed ques-

tions can be seen as being prompted by an information gap with respect to B's origins. In other
words, A hears B speaking with an accent that is dissimilar to the local accent they are used to
hearing and attempts to reconcile this with the notion of B's insistence on being a local. The pro-
cess by which the two of them make sense of this uncertainty unfolds over three stages: interpre-
tation, evaluation, and decision‐making (Giles, 2011: 31). At the interpretation stage, A becomes
aware that they are uncertain about B's origins; at the evaluation stage, A considers their options
about how to deal with their uncertainty; and at the decision‐making stage, A makes a string of
attempts at relieving that uncertainty.
While empirical research carried out within this framework has tended to focus on the infor-
mation‐seeker, Giles (2011: 31) nonetheless conceives of language attitudes as involving “parallel
processing by both speaker and listener‐judge who can reciprocally assume each of these roles.”
At each stage, the participants' information management is associated by analysts with particu-
lar emotions (presumably identified via indicators such as tone of voice, sighs, laughter, facial
expression and eye gaze, among others), and indicated in square brackets in the transcript. This
framework therefore not only regards language attitude situations as negotiative ones involving
specific processes of sense‐making, but also situations in which the role of emotions is central.

5 | FUTURE DIRECTIONS

In everyday life, it is through interaction that attitudes are negotiated, contested, and turned into
practice. Therefore, the analysis of language attitude expressions within their interactional con-
text can show how the inherently social nature of their construction can lead to their spread and
perpetuation. In other words, interaction research can examine how attitudes emerge in and
through interaction, since “[l]anguage attitudes are created through interaction, and it is
through interaction that they are later negotiated” (Liebscher & Dailey‐O'Cain, 2009: 200). In
addition, we gain further insight by combining a fine‐grained interactional analysis with an anal-
ysis of broader ideologies, enabling us to gain access to the ways in which language attitudes
originate and change. It is therefore also through the interactional study of language attitudes
10 of 14 LIEBSCHER AND DAILEY‐O'CAIN

that explicitly or implicitly expressed societal ideologies can be investigated, since “it is in the
interplay between usage and social evaluation that much of the social “work” of language—
including pressures toward social integration and division, and the policing of social boundaries
generally—is done” (Jaworski et al., 2004: 3).
Some recent work exploring this link between expressed language attitudes and broader ide-
ologies has already begun to bear fruit. This includes Payne's (2010) analysis of language use,
attitudes, and ideologies in a school in a small southern US city and Showstack's (2012) analysis
of the links between students' identities as bilinguals, their language attitudes as expressed in
discourse, and broader socially constructed ideologies. These studies suggest that more attention
to the links between an interaction‐focused study of language attitudes and language ideologies
may be able to provide us with insights into the developmental aspects of language attitudes,
including not just how these are constructed in interaction, but how they link to aspects of
socialization.
Another direction worth further future exploration is that of the connection between
language attitudes and emotions (as suggested by research within the theory of motivated infor-
mation management discussed above), which would delve further into the ways that emotions
such as disrespect, shame, disgust, anger, or pity mediate attitudes. Further research along these
lines also has the potential to contribute to an understanding of the way that communicative
self‐efficacy (i.e., the different categories of belief in one's ability to communicate effectively, cf.
Fowler & Afifi, 2011) can play a role in the construction of language attitudes.

6 | CONCLUSION

In surveying research on language attitudes from an interactional perspective, we have

made the argument that this kind of perspective needs to be included in language attitudes
research at large. These contributions to—and expansions of—language attitude research
have largely gone unnoticed within a field that, while making room for new experimental
approaches, has not yet taken the step of making that same kind of room for interactional
approaches. One reason for this may be that researchers are still holding up the dominant
notion of language attitudes as cognitive and static as constructions in the minds that can
be accessed rather than as contextual and constructivist. We would encourage scholars with
an interest in language attitudes to take another look at the advances in understanding that
can be made through interactional approaches. We have argued in this chapter that the
interaction‐based approaches discussed here allow analysts to get closer to understanding
the position of language attitudes in everyday life, because it is through interaction that
they are enacted, contested, and transmitted. Similarly, taking into account the contextual
factors shaping expressions in both qualitative and quantitative language attitude studies
allows better comparability across studies and helps reveal the complexities in the expres-
sions of language attitudes. Further, the intersubjective, sequential dimensions of interaction
reveal much about how language attitudes are shaped and re‐shaped as well. If our goal in
language attitudes research is a better understanding of what determines and defines atti-
tudes, such an understanding cannot be complete without analyzing them as they are cre-
ated in interaction.
At the same time, however, we are aware that a complete understanding of language atti-
tudes also requires knowledge that cannot be gained through interactional approaches alone,
such as information about which kinds of expressions of language attitudes are more common
LIEBSCHER AND DAILEY‐O'CAIN 11 of 14

than others, which groups of people tend to express attitudes that may differ from those
expressed by others, and how attitudes change over time (e.g., Yu, 2010).
Whether using experimental or interaction‐based approaches, the contextual aspect of
language attitudes cannot be avoided, and its inclusion within the broader field of language atti-
tude research has not only already led to a better understanding of how language attitudes work
but also has the potential to produce much exciting work still to come.

ORCID
Grit Liebscher http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2821-840X

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Grit Liebscher (PhD, University of Texas at Austin) is a Professor of German applied

linguistics in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Waterloo,
Canada. She uses interactional sociolinguistics and conversation analysis to address ques-
tions of language and identity, multilingualism within and outside the foreign language class-
room, and intercultural communication. She has published on code‐switching in the
classroom, the use of laughter and the display of knowledge in interaction, and on language
attitudes. She co‐edited (with a team of scholars from the University of Waterloo) a book on
Germans in the North American diaspora. She also co‐authored a book with Jennifer Dailey‐
O'Cain entitled Language, Space, and Identity in Migration, published by Palgrave Macmillan
in 2013.
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Jennifer Dailey‐O'Cain (PhD, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) is a Professor of German

applied linguistics with a specialization in sociolinguistics at the University of Alberta in
Edmonton, Canada. Her research includes work on codeswitching in the classroom, lan-
guage, migration, and identity in both Germany and German‐speaking Canada, language
attitudes in post‐unification Germany, and the differential use of English in social media
communication among German young people on the one hand and Dutch young people
on the other. Her book on this last project, published by Palgrave Macmillan in their Lan-
guage and Globalization series, is entitled Trans‐National English in Social Media.

How to cite this article: Liebscher G, Dailey‐O'Cain J. Contextualizing language

attitudes: An interactional perspective. Lang Linguist Compass. 2017;e12250. https://doi.
org/10.1111/lnc3.12250