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Linguistic autobiographies of international students as a starting point for research
Clare Brumpton, with ISL students and staff
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.
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 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 student researchers themes of interest which could lead to a research question. The thematic analysis of language stories at the very beginning was a good way of being introduced to the research process, so it made it easier for us to develop further steps in our research. Students in international schools have rich multicultural experiences we can reflect on and, as shown, our language stories can serve as a springboard for innovative research in international schools.
ECIS MLIE Conference
In April 2019, we presented our project (and the language stories that inspired it) at the London-based ECIS Multilingualism in International Education (MLIE) conference. This conference gives educators and researchers an opportunity to learn about, discuss and reflect on best practice in the field of language pedagogy and home language development. It was a chance for us to present for the first time in front of an adult audience outside of school, and to communicate our work and findings with a group of people who understood the field from their own research and work. We ran a workshop based on the process of using language stories to reach a research question. The audience were given the chance to write their own language stories, to work with others to analyse themes, and to suggest possible areas of research based on these. We presented our poster to teachers and researchers, giving us the chance to meet lots of people who were interested in finding out more about our work. We also got to interview some of the main academics and researchers at the conference, and asked what advice they would give to young researchers – as well as finding out about their favourite parts of the research process.
Being a researcher: What we’ve learnt and enjoyed
“My favourite bit in the research process was transcribing. It was nice to organize everything and colour code it so it was no longer a big mess, and I thought it was pretty fun to do!” (Graydon)
“I really liked the fieldwork because it gave us a chance to actually go out and experience what researchers do when they interview people for something really important.” (Shirin)
“The most important thing that I’ve learnt was analysing the data and narrowing down my findings, because I always had a hard time in doing that, and through the process that we did it was much easier.” (Fatima)
“I’ve learned how to interpret the findings and find the best way to collect data, and my favourite stage was gathering the data.” (Ludovica)
“My favourite part was writing the report because it is the final step when you finalise your thoughts and draw conclusions, which leads to feedback within the group, which has improved my own work.” (Kate)
“I really liked it when we had the opportunity to present our research to other people, and they kind of understand it, they are amazed by what you do, and it’s a really nice feeling!” (Cecilia)
“One of my favourite moments was when we were trying to find a film for the film retelling task (data collection tool), because we had several films and they were all very different. We had different opinions about which one to choose. It was fun to see how we all moved from different ideas and came up with one film we all liked.” (Carlo)
Reference
Carder M (2007) Bilingualism in International Schools: A Model for Enriching Language Education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters
