Reflections on doing research bilingually: focusing on processing and presenting EFL teachers’ stories in Chinese and English Tzu-Hsuan/Carol Liu School of Education, University of Manchester

My Study Research focus on 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.

Processing the teachers’ stories On data generation:  unintentional discrepancy in interviewing them created different storytelling contexts  being a non-native English speaker, I asked native speaker’s assistance of critical reading to increase readability of the NESTs’ stories On data analysis / interpretation :  the distinction between English and Chinese became blurred,  t he generation of coding possibilities involved both languages  I began to translate some of the Chinese narratives into English when doing the analysis (i.e. when producing commentaries of codes).  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.

Presenting the teachers’ stories On writing-up: I learnt to ask myself whether I had transparently reported on the use of and the co-switching between English and Chinese in the process of carrying out my research whether I had sufficiently delivered the Taiwanese English teachers’ voices (through my translation) in my thesis even though the majority of the readers would be English speakers