Curriculum, learning and teaching
Linguistic autobiographies of international students as a starting point for research Clare Brumpton, with ISL students and staff
Finding our focus Each Research Institute runs for a school year and begins with several weeks of exploratory activities. These are designed to get students thinking more deeply about something they otherwise take for granted, making connections and easing them into a more critical mindset. We always choose language as our starting point, because most students arrive at ISL with two or more languages and so it is something of which they already have direct experience. It also means that their expertise is not restricted by their proficiency in the majority language: many of the students in the group have started learning English in the past 2-3 years. This is key to our work. We believe that every student has expertise in their own experiences, and that these can be the basis of powerful work. We do not ‘teach’ research methodology – or teach in the traditional sense at all. Instead, the students generate a range of possible questions and then narrow them down collaboratively. They go on to design the methodology, analyse the data and formulate their conclusions in the same way. This is a student-led project and process, with the staff involved in a facilitator’s role rather than a traditional teaching role. ISL students write: From language stories to research question The exploratory activities begin with our ‘language stories’. These creative biographical accounts have immense power to communicate each person’s experiences with languages and their cultural backgrounds. They are full of researchable
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themes which can be developed into possible research questions. For this reason we were introduced to language stories at the very beginning of our research journey. The first stage is to read and thematically analyse language stories produced by international students in other international schools (see Carder, 2007) and from previous years (at ISL Surrey, UK). We used these as inspiration to write our own. We started by creating a timeline that showed which languages we spoke, when they were introduced to us, and which countries we’ve lived in. We then put this into a story and described how these languages have impacted our lives, how they’ve changed our identities over time, and how they made us the international students we are today. This year, the themes that emerged from these stories were accents, language acquisition and language loss, languages in dreams, and parental linguistic influence. Through the process of ‘funnelling’ (narrowing down topics of interest) and a group discussion on whether each potential question was do-able, innovative and interesting, we came up with a research question: “Does the summer holiday affect fluency in L2 English, and to what extent?”. As the work on the project has kept us all interested and engaged until the very end, it seems we chose the right question! To our knowledge, language stories are more commonly used as a method of data collection rather than to find
ISL students researching Dutch Autumn |
Spring
ISL staff write: The Research Institute at the International School of London (ISL) is an innovative extra-curricular activity that allows Middle Years students to plan, conduct and present an original research study. It challenges them to go beyond the requirements of the curriculum and to engage with rigorous empirical work: the sort of activity that most would only encounter in the later stages of university education. It is not selective by academic ability. In this article, we describe one part of our process, the lessons we have learned and how other schools can get involved.
| 2019
