Undertaking narrative inquiry bilingually against a monolingual backdrop

1. Undertaking narrative inquiry bilingually against a monolingual backdrop Richard Fay Xiaowei Zhou (‘Vivien’) Tzu-hsuan Liu (‘Carol’) School of Education, University of Manchester, UK

2. University of Manchester • UK based HEI context • English-medium • Internationalised • School of Education • Language teacher education • MA and PhD levels • TESOL practitioners • Intercultural communication • Narrative momentum

3. The narrative angles … • Exploring researchers’ (and supervisor’s) growing awareness of bilingual possibilities and how these might be operationalised in a largely English-medium academic (supervision and examination) context. • The issue arose during Vivien and Carol’s narrative-based PhD studies. • Our exploration of this issue is based on our (researcher and supervisor) stories of our developing awareness of it, i.e. our developing researcher (and supervisor) competence .

4. Some exploration possibilities … • Macroor political level – problematising English-medium, internationalised higher education in the UK (and other English-based contexts) and also the ‘dominance’ of English-medium scholarship • Meso or institutional level – recognising the linguistic richness of our postgraduate community of TESOL practitioners and intercultural communication researchers …. (i.e. not typical but ….) • Microor research study level-- the ways in which individual researchers (and their supervisors) embrace the affordances of bi-/multi-lingual research practices and manage the complexities involved in this.

5. Carol’s study • Research focuson the perspectives of local and expatriate TESOL practitioners participating in the Taiwanese FETR project in rural primary schools. • Explored via narrative interviews conducted in English or Chinese at four points throughout the year in question. • One reflection on the research process was that during data transcription and restorying “my brain was divided into two” but during data analysis “the distinction between English and Chinese became blurred”.

6. Vivien’s study • Research focuson the academic acculturation of students from mainland China on an Economics-related Masters programme at Manchester. • Explored via a mixture of weekly ‘mood data’ and their Chinese-medium narratives of ‘initial academic experiences’ as told at four points throughout their year-long MA programme. • One finding was that the intensity of the storied acculturative experiences reduced over time.

7. Carol’s story • On her data generation: I observed that I spent more time listening to the Westerners whereas I tended to have more conversation with the Taiwanese. This unintentional discrepancy in interviewing them created different storytelling contexts. • On her data analysis / interpretation: The generation of coding possibilities involved both languages and I began to translate some of the Chinese narratives into English when doing the analysis. I did not think such switching between the two languages had had any significant implications for my study ...[however, this] translation involved me interpretatively, and since my translation of the Chinese narratives embedded my interpretation of their experiences … it needed to be explicitly accounted for with transparency. • On her writing-up: I also asked myself whether I had sufficiently delivered the Taiwanese English teachers’ voices in my thesis even though the majority of the readers would be English speakers

8. Vivien’s story (I) • Masters period(based in China, a dept. of English): bilingual considerations - translation issues when writing-up the research report. • PhD period(based in UK, a School of Education): developing awareness and ability of critical thinking bilingual considerations – more than translation …

9. Vivien’s story (II) Implications of undertaking research bilingually: extra resources and responsibilities throughout the research process The bilingual aspects of my PhD research: • Contextualisation – social responses in both China and UK … • Conceptualisation – both English-medium and Chinese-medium literature … • Data generation – negotiation with the participants about the linguistic resources; Chinese/English-informed narrative-inducing techniques … • Data processing – developing a transcription protocol for my Chinese data • Data analyses and interpretation – drawing onmy English-medium and Chinese-medium experiences … • Thesis write-up – translation issues, transparency, reflexivity …

10. Richard’s story • Essentially mono-lingual (English-speaking) • International / intercultural (research) projects • Collaborative research instincts (Bulgarian, Chinese, Greek, Spanish) • Enriched but also challenged by such collaborative work • Proto-awareness of the bilingual aspects of research • Awareness brought to life with Vivien and Carol (changing dynamics of our collaborative activities) • … and broadened through discussions with colleagues, other student researchers, literature reviews etc • Awareness being further developed through this narrative study of researchers’ and supervisor’s growing awareness of the multilingual affordances and complexities

11. Mapping the territory … Doing research multilingually: An exploratory seminar ( Durham University School of Education, July, 2010 ) Many researchers, both doctoral and post-doc, collect and/or generate data in one or more languages and present them in another. Such multilingual possibilities create both affordances and complexities but often the issues involved remain hidden and unspoken. This is partly a matter of translation: sometimes researchers analyse and then translate, sometimes they translate and analyse, and sometimes a combination of the two. The multilingual complexities also occur when, for example, researchers work with interpreters or other research facilitators, when they decide on the analytical procedures, and when drawing on literature in a variety of languages.

12. 谢谢 THANK YOU Contact:frjfay@aol.com