Part of the English Language and Linguistics Research Seminar Series
About this talk
Alexandra Georgiou, UCL Institute of Education, will be presenting a paper 'Conducting multilingual classroom research with refugee children: opportunities and challenges'.
As a result of the recent refugee crisis, classrooms around the world are now becoming more linguistically and culturally diverse. This is a phenomenon that has not been fully examined yet and requires the employment of multilingual methodological approaches.
In this presentation, I use a post-reflective account to discuss the challenges and opportunities occurred when conducting research with multilingual participants whose language and culture I did not share. The seven participants of my PhD research -where the data for this presentation are extracted from- were newly arrived refugees from war-torn countries, including Syria, Iraq, Iran and Somalia. Their linguistic repertoire included Arabic and Farsi, whereas the majority of their peers, their teachers and myself were speakers of Greek. I analyse how a repertoire approach towards multilingualism (Blommaert & Backus, 2013; Busch, 2015) when collecting and representing data, allowed me to create opportunities for ensuring linguistic equity between the languages observed in the fieldwork and authenticity of participants’ voices.
The findings should be of particular importance to early career researchers and educators working in the fields of classroom ethnography, language and education.
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Please find details of all events in this series of the English Language and Linguistics Research Seminars here.
