Efforts and Struggles of a Bilingual Researcher in U.S. Academia

• In Event: Questioning in the Margins: Centering Qualitative Methodology and Methods in Historically Marginalized Traditions

Abstract

Myriads of studies have covered the translanguaging practices of transnational emergent bilinguals, that is, fluidly intermixing their home languages, their developing English, semiotic and cultural repertoires to embody their transnational affiliations (Li & Zhu, 2013). However, little attention has been paid to the roles of transnational bilingual researchers in those studies. Based on my field notes and analytic memo during my dissertation study, this presentation will explore my efforts and struggles as a Korean transnational bilingual researcher who is working with Korean emergent bilingual youths.

My main effort for the participating emergent bilinguals was to create a translanguaging space that can best reflect their meaning making processes embodied via translanguaging. Hence, I created an online translingual book club for local Korean transnational emergent bilinguals. Data collection, including book club discussions and pre/post interviews, was conducted via translanguaging for the participants to engage in their daily language practices. For transnational bilinguals, translanguaging is the in-the-moment and liminal embodiment of who we are and who we are becoming as transnationals (see Clifton & Fecho, 2018).

However, my effort to engage in translanguaging for every part of the research made transcribing and data analysis more challenging than expected. I had to manually transcribe the discussions and interviews that were in both Korean and English, because cultural nuances could be best understood by a cultural insider with bilingual competency (Hanna & Ortega, 2016). Data analysis, especially for In Vivo coding, was also challenging. My participants often expressed their feelings in Korean, and it was hard for me to translate these words into English that can best deliver cultural nuances.

Another hurdle was to write a research paper to be submitted to journals which only accept papers written in Standard English, and to my dissertation committees who were not speaking Korean. The best way for the data to be read, especially in the U.S. academia, was to use Standard English. The original bilingual transcript was simultaneously placed with the translated transcript, which lost humor and cultural nuances after translation. Despite my effort to create a translanguaging space for my participants and for my research processes, I had to follow the monolingual norms of the academia that in turn, erased and silenced the translanguaging spaces that I created.

As long as English-only monolingualism is the norm in U.S. academia, bilingual or multilingual researchers’ linguistic repertoires are not an asset for them to present their work. Hence, in this presentation, by sharing my analytic and writing processes, I would like to suggest translingual data analysis processes and translingual writing processes as a new norm. It must be hard to debunk the monolingual norm, however, researchers’ creative and splendid diverse linguistic repertoires should no longer be a barrier but should be an asset, especially in this superdiverse world (Vertovec, 2007, 2010). Participants will be invited to reflect on this question: How can researchers integrate multilingualism in analytic and writing processes, especially in U.S. academia?

Author

• Eun Young Yeom, University of Georgia
  Presenting Author