Transdisciplinary qualitative paradigm in applied linguistics: autoethnography, participatory action research and minority language teaching and learning (original) (raw)
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The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 2020
Translanguaging claims to advance social justice as a transformative pedagogy. This paper analyses a tension which developed over the life span of a European research project which aimed to improve the educational experience for Eastern European Roma pupils through teachers' employment of a translanguaging pedagogy. Roma are ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous, but as a minority group face continued racism, whilst Roma pupils face educational exclusion. The voices of Roma parents, pupils and activists and academics alerted us to potential threats in utilising translanguaging as a political act for transformation in education. They revealed a central tension between recognition of linguistic pluralism for emancipation at school level
Minority language researchers and their role in policy development (free access)
Language, Culture and Curriculum, 2012
This paper deals with the role of researchers in the development of language policies for European minority languages. This question is placed in the context of a long-standing debate in sociology to which several authors have contributed; among them are Max Weber, Howard Becker and Alvin Gouldner. This article also briefly refers to the European Charter for Researchers. A summary is given of the local research settings of Friesland and the Basque Country where my studies into European minority languages, language policy and multilingual education are carried out. This article mentions three possible roles for a researcher: academic scholar, policy adviser and language activist. A key issue in all this is to find a balance between ‘detachment’ and ‘involvement’. There is a dynamic in the different roles and the balance shifts over time. This is further complicated by being a relative insider to one language group and relative outsider to the other.
In his influential book, Imagined Communities (1982), Benedict Anderson proposes that language is more than a marker of identity and has much more than a semiotic sense. Language, Anderson says, has a rhetorical meaning, and thus is capable of generating imagined communities and of constructing particular identities. This volume, imagined and produced by graduate students in the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University, draws from the work of students across the college--bilingual education, international educational development, comparative education, curriculum and teaching, teaching of English, teaching English to speakers of other languages, applied linguistics, reading and language arts, speech and language pathology--and the larger university. In so doing, it reflects the multiple perspectives in which the study of languages in society is negotiated across Columbia University, particularly at Teachers College. The volume thus reveals the academic breadth and diversity of a scholarly community interested in the role of languages in communities and in education, across academic departments and disciplines. It is our hope this collection of papers will contribute towards creating a central place for the study of multiple languages and literacies in communities and schools, highlighting the important role that non-dominant languages and discourses play in the lives of many.
International Journal of Educational Research Open , 2021
This article presents an autoethnographic inquiry of a professor's journey when integrating qualitative research practices into the community college linguistics course. With the abundance of studies on undergraduate students' quantitative research experiences in STEM and health sciences, the study addresses a gap in the research literature in humanities and social sciences and focuses on one professor's experiences through the theoretical lens of the ecological perspective and the methodological lens of an autoethnography. Analysis of the focal participant's and undergraduate students' journal entries and interviews with students allowed for constructing a narrative account of the challenges and successes when preparing to teach, when teaching qualitative research to undergraduate students, and when reflecting about the participant's conceptual self from a critical standpoint.
Reflections on Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education
Educational Linguistics, 2017
Educational Linguistics is dedicated to innovative studies of language use and language learning. The series is based on the idea that there is a need for studies that break barriers. Accordingly, it provides a space for research that crosses traditional disciplinary, theoretical, and/or methodological boundaries in ways that advance knowledge about language (in) education. The series focuses on critical and contextualized work that offers alternatives to current approaches as well as practical, substantive ways forward. Contributions explore the dynamic and multilayered nature of theory-practice relationships, creative applications of linguistic and symbolic resources, individual and societal considerations, and diverse social spaces related to language learning. The series publishes in-depth studies of educational innovation in contexts throughout the world: issues of linguistic equity and diversity; educational language policy; revalorization of indigenous languages; socially responsible (additional) language teaching; language assessment; first-and additional language literacy; language teacher education; language development and socialization in non-traditional settings; the integration of language across academic subjects; language and technology; and other relevant topics. The Educational Linguistics series invites authors to contact the general editor with suggestions and/or proposals for new monographs or edited volumes. For more information, please contact the publishing editor:
Drawing upon elements of collaborative autoethnographic inquiry and shared narrative inquiry, this trioethnographic inquiry reports on how three transnational-translingual pracademics from the Global South with diverse personal-professional trajectories in the Global North critically examined their experiences being transracialized across transnational contexts. Although we, the co-authors, represent raciolinguistic majorities in their countries of birth (i.e., South Asia), we, ironically, have also experienced transracialization within minoritized communities of fellow immigrants in the US. Furthermore, building on Alim's (2016) proposition that transracial subjects' "raciolinguistic practices have the potential to transform the oppressive logic of race itself" (p. 34), this collaborative inquiry proposes that actively agentive transnational transracialized participants question and challenge the systems of essentialized racial categorization across geographical, national, and linguistic contexts, especially when their fluid racial identities become salient and/or they are racialized in transnational contexts. The overarching goal of this trioethnographic inquiry was to engage in a critical dialogue and examine overlapping racializing experiences as well as to constructively challenge the raciolinguistic marginalization of minoritized 'transnationaltranslingual pracademics' from the Global South in the Global North. Our collaborative inquiry underlines how this can be achieved through critical dialogue, professional practices, critical pedagogies, and advocacy work within and outside the classroom, ultimately leading to a more socially-just, decolonized, and anti-racist applied linguistics.
Diversity & Inclusion Research, 2025
There is significant pressure on translingual communities, who draw upon and blend all the linguistic and semiotic resources with which they have come into contact (i.e., language, material objects, the built environment) to navigate linguistically inaccessible infrastructures in their new setting. We examined the role language plays within one Local Government Area (LGA) in Western Australia via a larger Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) project; re‐visiting the politics of resourcefulness and focusing on examples of linguistic privileging and linguistic invisibility.The overall study included an initial needs analysis survey which enabled critical conversations around identified problems. These were further unpacked through data collected via interviews/focus groups; shadowing community leaders and LGA/not‐for‐profit employees in their contexts. This offered opportunities to document how stakeholders navigated or resolved known problems. The data was analysed iteratively and thematically to inform and expand conversations around potential collaborative efforts.This article focuses on the analysis of interview and focus group data in one LGA which highlighted systematised linguistic privileging of individuals who speak certain forms of English, and the rendering of community languages as invisible by the system. In response communities created resourceful spaces where collaborative semiosis licensed collective meaning making through the community's full spatial and translingual resources, enabling access to resources, utilisation of community‐generated skills, sharing of local knowledge and fostering of recognition for individuals as agents in civic life, countering the linguistic invisibility they experienced.For institutions, such as LGAs, to catch up with communities, they need to recognise and sustain community translingualism as an essential resource. Our article outlines a viable framework for dismantling linguistic privileging and invisibility in favour of sharing language responsibility with translingual communities.
The Teaching of Minority Languages as Academic Subjects: Pedagogical and Theoretical Challenges
The Modern Language Journal, 1995
This article raises questions about the practice of teaching minority (ethnic/immigrant) languages as a&ic subjects in multilingual settings and points to directions in which the field of applied linguistics must move in order to develop adequate principles of language learning that can support such instruction. The article consists of three principle sections. Section one defines the term "linguistic minority" and offers examples of linguistic minority populations. Section two describes the teaching of Spanish to bilingual-Spanishspeaking students in the United States. It then illustrates the broad problems and questions encountered in teaching minority languages as school subjects by drawing on the discussion of the history, development, and current status of the teaching of Spanish to bilingual minorities in the U.S. Section three proposes a reconceptualization of the language teaching focus within applied linguistics that takes into account the problems and challenges surrounding the teaching of minority languages. KATHYAND OLIVIER ARE IN FIRST GRADE. Every week for 30 minutes they study French. By 606-616.