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This study seeks to bring a more interactionally grounded perspective to the concept of “rapport” and its relevance for qualitative interviewing practices. Building on work within conversation analysis (CA), it respecifies rapport as affiliation and, more specifically, empathy. Analysis centers on case study data from an interview with an asylum seeker from the Philippines. It examines how interviewer and interviewee move in and out of empathic moments across the interview sequences as they manage their affective stances related to the events the interviewee describes and, in turn, by managing their empathic alignments with each other. These empathic moments share a number of features: they primarily come after response delays and the interviewee’s response pursuits, they are part of assessment sequences built by lexical reformulation and repetition, they entail stance matching and upgrading mainly through the use of prosodic resources, and they involve the interviewee asserting his primary rights to characterize and assess his own experiences. The article concludes by recommending more attention to the affiliative and empathic dimensions of qualitative interviewing.

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Autobiographic research interviews have become an accepted and valued method of qualitative inquiry in TESOL and applied linguistics more broadly. In recent discussions surrounding the epistemological treatment of autobiographic stories, TESOL researchers have increasingly called for more attention to the ways in which stories are embedded in interaction and thus are bound up with the social contexts of their production. This paper advances these efforts by demonstrating an empirically grounded approach to storytelling as interaction. Drawing on the research tradition on storytelling in conversation analysis, the article offers a sample analysis of a story produced in an L2 English interview with an adult immigrant in the United States. By engaging sequential conversation analysis, membership categorization analysis, and occasioned semantics, it examines the interactional practices through which the storyteller and story recipient launch, produce, and end the telling of a story that furthers the purpose of the autobiographic interview. By following closely the participants' coordinated actions as they unfold in time, we trace how the parties accomplish the storytelling as an intelligible and meaningful activity through sequence organization and turn design. We conclude with recommendations for extending storytelling research in TESOL to meet the evolving needs and interests of the field.