Includes bibliographical references and index.

In the 2010-2011 academic year, I conducted an ethnographic case study of a Ukrainian university in a predominantly Russian-speaking city that was beginning to teach subjects in English. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship among these three languages and additional foreign languages in the university, as well as the relationship between the decision to use English as a medium of instruction and national policies that promote Ukrainian but are at times ignored in Russian-speaking regions of the country. The purpose of this research case is twofold. First, I show how I developed interview questions about language policy that seemed to reflect local norms of communication and offered a means of eliciting answers relevant to my research questions. Second, I show how I applied conversation analysis to the nevertheless unexpected answers to understand why respondents answered as they did, that is, what they were oriented to in my question. Once I understood their orientations to language policy, I could then interpret the actual answers from a perspective of the power of the individual and institution over the national government in language policy.

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