Ethics in Applied Linguistics Research Language: Researcher Narratives [1st ed.] 9781315816937

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Title......Page 6
Copyright......Page 7
CONTENTS......Page 8
List of Illustrations......Page 10
Acknowledgments......Page 11
Foreword......Page 13
List of Contributors......Page 20
Ethics in Applied Linguistics Research: An Introduction......Page 26
PART I Laying the Groundwork......Page 38
1 Training in Research Ethics among Applied Linguistics and SLA Researchers......Page 40
2 Data Selection as an Ethical Issue: Dealing with Outliers in Telling a Research Story......Page 63
PART II Applying Ethics to Different Linguistic Communities......Page 76
3 Quotidian Ethics in the Neoliberal University: Research and Practice Collide......Page 78
4 Narrative of Ethical Dilemmas in Research with Immigrants with Limited Formal Schooling......Page 91
5 Ethical Dilemmas and Language Policy (LP) Advising......Page 108
PART III Ethics, Voice, and Multilingualism......Page 126
6 Research, Relationships, and Reflexivity: Two Case Studies of Language and Identity......Page 128
7 Negotiating Ethical Research Engagements in Multilingual Ethnographic Studies in Education: A Narrative from the Field......Page 146
8 Ethical Issues in Indigenous Language Research and Interventions......Page 167
9 Ethical Issues in Linguistic Ethnography: Balancing the Micro and the Macro......Page 186
PART IV Ethics and the Media......Page 204
10 Ethical Challenges in Conducting Text-Based Online Applied Linguistics Research......Page 206
11 Prying into Safe Houses......Page 220
12 Ethics in Activist Scholarship: Media/Policy Analyses of Seattle’s Homeless Encampment “Sweeps”......Page 243
Afterword......Page 262
Index......Page 265

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ETHICS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS RESEARCH

Ethics in Applied Linguistics Research explores how ethical issues are negotiated in different areas of language research, illustrating for graduate students in applied linguistics the ethical dilemmas they might encounter in the research methodology classroom and how they might be addressed. This volume serves to demystify the complex ethical decision-making process by its accounts of renowned researchers’ ethical practices as they transpired on the ground and how they negotiated externally imposed research codes. The collection investigates and records the research practices of prominent international applied linguists from a wide variety of subdisciplines, including discourse analysis, educational linguistics, heritage and minority education, language planning and policy, language and technology, literacy, second language acquisition, second and foreign language pedagogy, and sociolinguistics. By problematizing research practices that draw on a range of methodologies, Ethics in Applied Linguistics Research puts front and center the urgency to prepare the next generation of applied linguists with the tools and knowledge necessary to conduct ethical research in an increasingly globalized and networked world. Peter I. De Costa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages at Michigan State University. His primary area of research is the role of identity and ideology in second language acquisition (SLA) and English as a lingua franca. His publications appear in such academic journals as Language Learning, Language Policy, Language Teaching, Research in the Teaching of English, and TESOL Quarterly.

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Second Language Acquisition Research Series Susan M. Gass and Alison Mackey, Series Editors

Monographs on Theoretical Issues: Schachter/Gass Second Language Classroom Research: Issues and Opportunities (1996) Birdsong Second Language Acquisition and the Critical Period Hypotheses (1999) Ohta Second Language Acquisition Processes in the Classroom: Learning Japanese (2001) Major Foreign Accent: Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Second Language Phonology (2001) VanPatten Processing Instruction: Theory, Research, and Commentary (2003) VanPatten/Williams/Rott/Overstreet Form-Meaning Connections in Second Language Acquisition (2004) Bardovi-Harlig/Hartford Interlanguage Pragmatics: Exploring Institutional Talk (2005) Dörnyei The Psychology of the Language Learner: Individual Differences in Second Language Acquisition (2005) Long Problems in SLA (2007) VanPatten/Williams Theories in Second Language Acquisition (2007) Ortega/Byrnes The Longitudinal Study of Advanced L2 Capacities (2008)

Liceras/Zobl/Goodluck The Role of Formal Features in Second Language Acquisition (2008)

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Philp/Adams/Iwashita Peer Interaction and Second Language Learning (2013) VanPatten/Williams Theories in Second Language Acquisition, Second Edition (2014) Leow Explicit Learning in the L2 Classroom (2015) Dörnyei/Ryan The Psychology of the Language Learner – Revisited (2015) Monographs on Research Methodology: Tarone/Gass/Cohen Research Methodology in Second Language Acquisition (1994) Yule Referential Communication Tasks (1997) Gass/Mackey Stimulated Recall Methodology in Second Language Research (2000) Markee Conversation Analysis (2000) Gass/Mackey Data Elicitation for Second and Foreign Language Research (2007) Duff Case Study Research in Applied Linguistics (2007) McDonough/Trofimovich Using Priming Methods in Second Language Research (2008) Larson-Hall A Guide to Doing Statistics in Second Language Research Using SPSS (2009) Dörnyei/Taguchi Questionnaires in Second Language Research: Construction, Administration, and Processing, 2nd Edition (2009) Bowles The Think-Aloud Controversy in Second Language Research (2010) Jiang Conducting Reaction Time Research for Second Language Studies (2011) Barkhuizen/Benson/Chik Narrative Inquiry in Language Teaching and Learning Research (2013) Jegerski/VanPatten Research Methods in Second Language Psycholinguistics (2013) Larson-Hall A Guide to Doing Statistics in Second Language Research Using SPSS and R, Second Edition (2015)

Plonsky Advancing Quantitative Methods in Second Language Research (2015)

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De Costa Ethics in Applied Linguistics Research: Language Researcher Narratives (2015) Mackey and Marsden Instruments for Research into Second Languages: Empirical Studies Advancing Methodology (2015) Of Related Interest: Gass Input, Interaction, and the Second Language Learner (1997) Gass/Sorace/Selinker Second Language Learning Data Analysis, Second Edition (1998) Mackey/Gass Second Language Research: Methodology and Design (2005) Gass/Selinker Second Language Acquisition: An Introductory Course, Third Edition (2008)

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ETHICS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS RESEARCH Language Researcher Narratives

Edited by Peter I. De Costa MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Taylor & Francis The right of Peter I. De Costa to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data DeCosta, Peter, author. Ethics in applied linguistics research : language researcher narratives / Peter De Costa, Michigan State University. pages cm. — (Second Language Acquisition Research Series) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Applied linguistics—Research. 2. Language and languages—Study and teaching—Moral and ethical aspects. 3. Research—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title. P53.76.D43 2016 418.0072—dc23 2015013746 ISBN: 978-0-415-73905-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-73906-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-81693-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Foreword by Lourdes Ortega List of Contributors Ethics in Applied Linguistics Research: An Introduction Peter I. De Costa

ix x xii xix 1

PART I

Laying the Groundwork

13

1 Training in Research Ethics among Applied Linguistics and SLA Researchers Scott Sterling, Paula Winke, and Susan Gass

15

2 Data Selection as an Ethical Issue: Dealing with Outliers in Telling a Research Story Brian Paltridge

38

PART II

Applying Ethics to Different Linguistic Communities

51

3 Quotidian Ethics in the Neoliberal University: Research and Practice Collide Sue Starfield

53

viii

Contents

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4 Narrative of Ethical Dilemmas in Research with Immigrants with Limited Formal Schooling Martha Bigelow and Nicole Pettitt 5 Ethical Dilemmas and Language Policy (LP) Advising Joseph Lo Bianco

66 83

PART III

Ethics, Voice, and Multilingualism

101

6 Research, Relationships, and Reflexivity: Two Case Studies of Language and Identity Sam Kirkham and Alison Mackey

103

7 Negotiating Ethical Research Engagements in Multilingual Ethnographic Studies in Education: A Narrative from the Field Patricia A. Duff and Klara Abdi

121

8 Ethical Issues in Indigenous Language Research and Interventions Steven L. Thorne, Sabine Siekmann, and Walkie Charles

142

9 Ethical Issues in Linguistic Ethnography: Balancing the Micro and the Macro Fiona Copland and Angela Creese

161

PART IV

Ethics and the Media

179

10 Ethical Challenges in Conducting Text-Based Online Applied Linguistics Research Xuesong Gao and Jian Tao

181

11 Prying into Safe Houses Suresh Canagarajah

195

12 Ethics in Activist Scholarship: Media/Policy Analyses of Seattle’s Homeless Encampment “Sweeps” Sandra Silberstein

218

Afterword by Jane Zuengler Index

237 240

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 1.1 1.2 5.1 12.1 12.2 12.3

Graduate training in research ethics Graduate training in RCR over time Policy-shaping forces of ideology, interests, and information by community representatives, experts, and public officials City workers enter the Queen Anne greenbelt City workers in hazmat suits Pink tents in “Nickelsville”

24 26 96 221 221 224

Tables 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1

2.2 7.1

RCR domains Participant background data Rankings of RCR scenarios Frequency of directions, suggestions, recommendations, and clarification requests in the original version of the paper (per 500 words) Frequency of directions, suggestions, recommendations, and clarification requests in the revised paper (per 500 words) Klara’s research and ethical review timeline

17 20 23

44 45 137

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume is the result of many years of wrestling with how to conduct ethical research in applied linguistics. While I can safely say that I have not found the ethical Holy Grail, I will concede that through the process of editing this volume and participating in conversations with other applied linguists I have become more critically aware of how such crucial work can be done and why. I thank my Ph.D. supervisor, Jane Zuengler, for teaching and showing me the importance of conducting ethical research. I deeply appreciate her spending many hours of her time schooling me in the countless ways of becoming an academic scholar and professional. She set an exemplary model of intellectual and personal integrity for me to follow in my career. I am also indebted to the series editors, Susan Gass and Alison Mackey, for granting me the opportunity to develop this volume. I would like to extend my thanks to the Graduate School of Translation, Interpretation, and Language Education at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey for funding my trip to the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) 2011 conference, which marked the first time I presented on the topic of ethics. I would also like to thank the College of Arts and Letters (CAL) at Michigan State University for the resources to organize a colloquium on ethics at AAAL 2014 in Chicago and at the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) 2014 conference in Brisbane, and subsequently develop this volume for publication. In fact, a number of the contributors to this volume participated in the AAAL and AILA colloquia. However, all authors need to be thanked for working with me diligently and patiently over the several rounds of revision and editing. A shout-out also goes to my amazing reviewers: Jeff Bale, Mike Baynham, Christine Casanave, Graham Crookes, Francis Hult, Christopher Jenks, Kendall King, Ena Lee, Elizabeth Miller, Suhanthie Motha, Rita Silver, and Stephanie Vandrick.

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Acknowledgments xi

My work has benefitted immensely from open dialogue with my students at Michigan State University, particularly those enrolled in my doctoral qualitative methods course (LLT 874), and my research assistant, Sarut Supasiraprapa. Their critical insights helped sharpen my thinking, which, in turn, also laid the groundwork for an ethics-related research article (published in TESOL Quarterly, edited by the research issues editor, Constant Leung) and a book chapter (in a volume edited by Brian Paltridge and Aek Phakiti) that were written while preparing this manuscript. For help with the final stages of proofreading and formatting of this volume, special thanks to Magda Tigchelaar. Leah Babb-Rosenfeld and Elysse Preposi at Routledge showed much encouraging enthusiasm. I thank them for their forbearance and understanding in seeing this book to print. To Jim Seals I continue to be grateful for supporting my academic endeavors and offering spiritual guidance. Lastly, I dedicate this book to my parents, Augustine and Sally De Costa. Thanks, Dad and Mum, for all you have done for me. Unfortunately, any and all shortcomings are my own responsibility.

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FOREWORD

A book about research ethics in applied linguistics was long overdue. This book, and its polyphonic content, will not disappoint. Much can be learned from a close reading of the voices gathered here. But why worry about ethics in applied linguistics, and why now? There are many good reasons to be found across the 12 chapters in this collection. It is not a coincidence that they should span a wide palette of concerns. Attention to research ethics in applied linguistics becomes particularly central in view of two sociological developments in academia, both captured in this collection. One is the presence of ethics review boards in many (though not all) universities around the world. They fulfill an important role in their mission to oversee the ethical treatment of human subjects. But they also come with bureaucratic pressures that can pose major gatekeeping hurdles, particularly for qualitative, emergent design research paradigms. Bigelow and Pettitt ( Chapter 4) and Duff and Abdi ( Chapter 7) show that zealous ethics review boards unfortunately can end up curtailing applied linguists’ ability to investigate and serve under-researched populations. These pressures are being felt by seasoned faculty and apprenticing students alike. The responses—the contributors in this book seem to agree—must be strategic, sophisticated, and practical, if they are to support both success in obtaining institutional ethics clearance and resistance against potentially invasive regulations. I conclude from my reading of the book that an appropriate response must be minimally two pronged. We need ever deeper ethics training for new generations of applied linguists, of the kind investigated by Sterling, Winke, and Gass ( Chapter 1). In addition, we will need from all active researchers in the field the kind of creative responses that many scholars in this collection offer (Bigelow & Pettitt, Chapter 4; Duff & Abdi, Chapter 7; Copland & Creese, Chapter 9).

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The corporatization of universities is the other sociological development that is changing the climate of conducting university-sponsored research. As Starfield ( Chapter 3) poignantly shows, the new business mindset is often antithetical to the wider moral goals of education and socially useful knowledge. The dilemmas are particularly acute for faculty in applied linguistic programs, given their direct involvement with people from minority and disenfranchised populations through research, consultancy, and teaching. In lieu of definitive responses, Starfield hints at local activism and advocacy within one’s institution as strategies that might afford some space for the negotiation of improved research and professional ethics in business-minded institutions. Other reasons for the keen engagement with the ethics of applied linguistic research come from the vibrant epistemological diversity that has characterized the field for at least two decades now (Benson, Chik, Gao, Huang, & Wang, 2009). Qualitative researchers have always been particularly attentive to situated ethics, or to microethical decision making, and a preponderance of authors in the book examine the microethics of research practices from the specific epistemological perspectives of research programs that unfold within the diverse traditions of interpretive-qualitative and critical research, including ethnography (Bigelow & Pettitt, Chapter 4; Copland & Creese, Chapter 9), language socialization (Duff & Abdi, Chapter 7), critical pedagogy (Canagarajah, Chapter 11), and critical discourse analysis (Silberstein, Chapter 12). “Ethically important moments,” a term that was coined by qualitative educational researchers Guillemin and Gillam (2004), arise in all research regardless of epistemological allegiance. However, the intersubjective, emic, and situated nature of qualitative research epistemologies means that ethically important moments are catapulted to the forefront of the research process. Indeed, the distinctions between ethics, methodology, and theory—which other more traditional research approaches purport to maintain—are truly blurred and transformed under nonpositivistic ways of knowing. All contributors in this book would agree, I believe, that there will always be a need to bridge wisely and ethically the unavoidable gap between a good plan for how to meet both the mandated principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice and our personal commitment to empowering language minorities, on the one hand, and situated ethical response in practice, on the other. This corresponds to some extent with the important distinction between macroethical principles and microethical decision making made by Kubanyiova (2008, 2013). Many authors endorse it in their chapters. The questions that arise in the book-long conversation about microethical decision making are complex. How can a researcher properly evaluate the ethical consequences when deciding whether to include or exclude atypical data, outlier participants, or findings with potentially ethically worrisome consequences? Ethical decision making must be contextual and situated. For example, Copland and Creese ( Chapter 9) discuss how in one study some data are atypical but important to tell a more complete

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Foreword

research story, while in another study other data are so unkind and dangerous to participants that they are better left out. Paltridge ( Chapter 2) shows how in one study an outlier is instrumental in ensuring that rival knowledge is not excised, and in another study another outlier can be safely removed from analysis. Gao and Tao ( Chapter 10) reason that for research conducted in virtual contexts, by now so pervasive in our societies, the microethics of decision making poses new challenges that must be explored with an open mind and resolved always provisionally. Both Kirkham and Mackey (Chapter 6) and Copland and Creese ( Chapter 9) illuminate the extent to which the quality of knowledge is improved by ensuring that a close interpersonal relation between researcher and participant(s) either preexists or is built with sufficient time. Empathy, care, and shared experiences are staples of an ethics of care in qualitative research, but they might become coercive to participants or a liability to interpretations in some contexts or over time. These chapters explore difficult questions. How can a researcher know his or her identity positioning is ethical towards participants and study goals, and, conversely, how can the chosen positionalities of participants towards the researcher be taken into account in the research, rather than be taken for granted? How can a researcher prepare for the shifting sands of ethical and social responsibility when the research approach aims to coconstruct knowledge for and with the participants, rather than on and about them? How do the ideologies and privileges of members of a research team play out and mirror some of the same power struggles that are being studied “on” others? Perhaps because they have direct consequences for the claims made through interpretive-qualitative research, these questions have been extensively theorized in several key concepts—such a reflexivity, representation, or positionality—in the specialized qualitative research methods literature, including inside our field. For example, increasingly more applied linguists (e.g., Pavlenko, 2007; Talmy, 2011) are astute when it comes to issues of reflexivity, which demands being cognizant that there is no knowing independent from the knower and thus a researcher’s personal investment and values will shape her or his own study. While this “researcher effect” must be accounted for, reflexivity is unmet if we do so by just stating potential researcher effects as a limitation—as it would be done in any study across other epistemological leanings, in the traditional footsteps of the Labovian observer’s paradox. Instead, as Kirkham and Mackey ( Chapter 6) conclude, the ethical imperative of cognizant reflexivity demands precisely incorporating the researcher “effects” into the findings, and even making them into a substantial and relevant part of those findings. Issues of representation have been central to ethical responses to qualitative research as well. Once it is accepted that knowledge is always perspectival and unfinished, the single voice of the researcher ceases to have unquestioned privilege, and the multiple (often ambivalent) voices of participants must be added to the study, even when this means the inclusion of conflicting interpretations. Moreover, Lo Bianco ( Chapter 5) and Thorne, Siekmann, and Charles ( Chapter 8) directly

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attest to the complex ways in which a researcher represents participants’ voices, interests, and stories. These and many of the other chapters show that researcher representation of participants must be subject to ethical scrutiny: Never neutral or innocent, the representation we choose of our participants will have ethical consequences for how our research gets taken up and used by others, and whether it will revert into benefits for those researched participants and their communities. The issue of positionality more specifically forces researchers to confront the politics of knowledge construction, where the researcher’s position as an outsider expert can be often one of privilege and itself contribute to objectifying, deagentivizing, or dehumanizing participants, who are quickly unwittingly positioned in the research as “others.” Silberstein (Chapter 12) probes these power dynamics between the researchers and the researched to its limits. The ethical exploration of positioning also becomes part of the informed interpretations that give way to the findings in a study. More recently other theories of positioning have opened up the additional insight that all agents of research, including all participants and the researchers, are agentive and thus they deploy resources to produce a situated self (Harré, 1991) vis-à-vis the issues that matter or do not matter to them, including the phenomena being investigated, the methods they experience, and the interpersonal relations they get to develop with the researcher. These positionings, once again, will need to become part of what is studied, interpreted, and understood through the research, as Lo Bianco ( Chapter 5) models. Some of the most interesting insights in the book come from personal narratives that the authors offer to illustrate how microethical questions of the kind just discussed arose in the process of doing research, and how they personally went about answering them and acting upon those answers as ethically as they could. But it should go without saying that these kinds of questions are in and of themselves unanswerable: They are important sites for ethical action that can only proceed if guided by situated, emotionally sensed knowledges (Hubbard, Backett-Milburn, & Kemmer, 2001). Subjectivities and emotions are an asset for microethical decision making as much as they are for good interpretivequalitative research (Van Maanen, 2010; Whiteman, 2010). Without perhaps explicitly commenting on it, all authors in the present collection reveal indirectly in their writing the emotional dimension of research ethics. Bigelow and Pettitt (Chapter 4), Canagarajah ( Chapter 11), and Silberstein (Chapter 12) orient towards a third motivation for worrying about ethics in applied linguistics: interrogating the moral ends of our research activities; that is, evaluating purposes, outcomes, and objectives of applied linguistic research. These scholars also explicitly agonize in their recounts about the proper place of advocacy in applied linguistics, overtly acknowledging their struggles with the porous and ambivalent boundaries between advocacy and ethics. There is a distinguished and long tradition of applied linguistic scholars who are willing to advocate for the design, conduct, and reporting of research that explicitly supports what they judge to be desirable societal and educational

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Foreword

uses (e.g., Tucker, 2000). A subset of them, working from within critical applied linguistics, is of course explicitly concerned with supporting transformative purposes for research (Canagarajah, 2004; Pennycook, 2010). This is the kind of ethical thinking or moral lens that has always interested me the most (Ortega, 2005; Ortega & Zyzik, 2008), and I have always thought this kind of ethical thinking should not be the purview of some researchers only, but of all (Ortega, 2012). In a study of language teachers, Scarino (2005) usefully defines ethical thinking as “knowing about ways of acting and interacting with responsibility to others and ways of making knowledge (i.e., people’s knowing) of value to the world in which we live” (pp. 33–34). I believe, like teachers, applied linguistic researchers are guided, implicitly or explicitly, by ethical thinking about the moral ends of what they do in their daily praxis, including research—and also including their socialization of future generations of applied linguists and junior researchers, who must make it through the daunting worlds of journal publication and institutional tenure and promotion. From all corners of applied linguistic research, and regardless of epistemological affiliations, it behooves us researchers to interrogate the moral ends of our research. Ethics can be self-reflexive, including for researchers working from postpositivist perspectives, if we turn the critical questioning onto our researcher world and our activities: For what and for whom are different kinds of research good? What are valued ways to know about applied linguistic questions, by whom, and why? How do ideologies of language affect how people teach and learn languages, and how do they affect how we researchers investigate language? What will we do about it? These questions may seem large and modernist in flavor to some readers. But they can only be answered at the situated level of microethical decisions that must be rethought for each new study, and rationalized and defended (as all facts and values must; House & Howe, 1999) anew for each new project or research agenda. Engaging with the moral ends of research is a self-reflexive activity that clearly goes well beyond the purview of top-down regulatory research ethics movements and mandates. It also transcends the strictly microethical decision-making plane. It calls for ethical thinking that is agentive and relational, but also programmatic and long term. In the field of qualitative educational research, Cannella and Lincoln (2007) recognized that the construction and practice of research, at the micro level, is unavoidably enmeshed in moral and ethical dimensions, spanning macro and micro dimensions of academic life. The straddling of macro and micro ethics is greatly complicated in a field like applied linguistics, where the research we tend to carry out inevitably involves negotiating and illuminating transnational, translinguistic, and transcultural flows (Duff, 2015). Applied linguists can learn a great deal about how to negotiate ethical pressure points that straddle micro and macro decision making from the experiences of researchers in other fields, such as human geography (Darling, 2014), which regularly serve vulnerable populations and regularly investigate phenomena that are inseparable from transnationalism and mobility.

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And so, in the end, the invitation to attend to research ethics that the authors in this book offer to readers comes full circle: Although different authors may at times emphasize macroethical principles and microethical decision making, in reality most ethical acts in research end up drawing from both macro and micro levels. These levels are interconnected, and researchers must learn to straddle both as best as they can. We are often a complicit party in the work of ethics review boards and corporate aspirations of our institutions. All we can do is train ourselves to wade these treacherous landscapes successfully and ethically, while we continue developing sensitivities for responding to ethically important moments in our research and our professional lives. The very nature of being a researcher and doing research in today’s complex, contradictory world means that applied linguists will need to be able to garner humane and adaptive responses to the many challenges of ethical research. A very important skill to develop in this regard is constant attentiveness to context. This book and its contributions are a testament to these needs. It will also hopefully serve as a socializing instrument to present and future generations of researchers who are willing and eager to generate ever stronger, better applied linguistic research by learning how to attend to the ethical dimensions of their research. Lourdes Ortega

References Benson, P., Chik, A., Gao, X., Huang, J., & Wang, W. (2009). Qualitative research in language teaching and learning journals: 1997–2006. The Modern Language Journal, 93, 79–90. Canagarajah, A. S. (2004). Subversive identities, pedagogical safe houses, and critical learning. In B. Norton & K. Toohey (Eds.), Critical pedagogies and language learning (pp. 116–137). New York: Cambridge University Press. Cannella, G. S., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2007). Predatory vs. dialogic ethics: Constructing an illusion, or ethical practice as the core of research methods. Qualitative Inquiry, 13, 315–335. Darling, J. (2014). Emotions, encounters and expectations: The uncertain ethics of “the field.” Journal of Human Rights Practice, 7, 201–212. doi:10.1093/jhuman/huu011 Duff, P. A. (2015). Transnationalism, multilingualism, and identity. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35, 57–80. Guillemin, M., & Gillam, L. (2004). Ethics, reflexivity, and “ethically important moments” in research. Qualitative Inquiry, 10, 261–280. doi:10.1177/1077800403262360 Harré, R. (1991). The discursive production of selves. Theory & Psychology, 1, 51–63. doi: 10.1177/0959354391011004 House, E. R., & Howe, K. R. (1999). Values in evaluation and social research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Hubbard, G., Backett-Milburn, K., & Kemmer, D. (2001). Working with emotion: Issues for the researcher in fieldwork and teamwork. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 4, 119–137. Kubanyiova, M. (2008). Rethinking research ethics in contemporary applied linguistics: The tension between macro- and microethical perspectives in situated research. The Modern Language Journal, 92, 503–518.

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Kubanyiova, M. (2013). Ethical debates in research on language and interaction. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 2001–2008). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Ortega, L. (2005). For what and for whom is our research? The ethical as transformative lens in instructed SLA. The Modern Language Journal, 89, 427–443. doi:10.1111/j. 1540-4781.2005.00315.x Ortega, L. (2012). Epistemological diversity and moral ends of research in instructed SLA. Language Teaching Research, 16, 206–226. doi:10.1177/0267658311431373 Ortega, L., & Zyzik, E. (2008). Online interactions and L2 learning: Some ethical challenges for L2 researchers. In S. Magnan (Ed.), Mediating discourse online (pp. 331–355). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pavlenko, A. (2007). Autobiographic narratives as data in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 28, 163–188. Pennycook, A. D. (2010). Critical and alternative directions in applied linguistics. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 33(2), 1–18. Scarino, A. (2005). Introspection and retrospection as windows on teacher knowledge, values and ethical dispositions. In D. J. Tedick (Ed.), Second language teacher education: International perspectives (pp. 33–52). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Talmy, S. (2011). The interview as collaborative achievement: Interaction, identity, and ideology in a speech event. Applied Linguistics, 32, 25–42. Tucker, R. G. (2000). Concluding thoughts: Applied linguistics at the juncture of millennia. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 20, 241–249. Van Maanen, J. (2010). You gotta have a grievance: Locating heartbreak in ethnography. Journal of Management Inquiry, 19, 338–341. doi:10.1177/1056492610370284 Whiteman, G. (2010). Management studies that break your heart. Journal of Management Inquiry, 19, 328–337. doi:10.1177/1056492610370282

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CONTRIBUTORS

Klara Abdi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Language and Literacy

Education at the University of British Columbia. She has taught ESL, Spanish, and French in secondary schools in Canada and various courses related to applied linguistics at the postsecondary level in Canada and China. Her award-winning M.A. research examined the identity and positioning of heritage language students in regular high school Spanish classes. Martha Bigelow is a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction

at the University of Minnesota. She earned her Ph.D. at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on the language learning, social, and cultural experiences of immigrant youth in U.S. schools. Suresh Canagarajah is the Erle Sparks Professor at Pennsylvania State University.

He teaches World Englishes, Second Language Writing, and Postcolonial Studies in the departments of English and Applied Linguistics. He has taught before in the University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and the City University of New York. His book Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching (OUP, 1999) won the Modern Language Association’s Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize for the best research publication on the teaching of language and literacy. His most recent publication is Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations (Routledge, 2013), which won the best book award of the British Association of Applied Linguistics and the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize. He was formerly the editor of TESOL Quarterly and the president of the American Association of Applied Linguistics. Walkie Charles (Yup’ik) is an assistant professor in the Alaska Native Language Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). His research and teaching

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focus on dynamic assessment, sociocultural theory, and second language acquisition. Dr. Charles teaches the Yup’ik language—a baccalaureate degree program with UAF. He can be contacted at [email protected].

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Fiona Copland is Professor of TESOL, University of Stirling. She taught English

to speakers of other languages in Nigeria, Hong Kong, and Japan before returning to the U.K. Fiona researches in a number of areas, including teacher education and teaching English to young learners, and has published widely in these areas. Fiona is coauthor, with Angela Creese, of Linguistic Ethnography: Collecting, Analysing and Presenting Data (Sage, 2015) and coeditor of Linguistic Ethnography: Interdisciplinary Explorations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) with Sara Shaw and Julia Snell. Angela Creese is Professor of Educational Linguistics at the School of Educa-

tion, University of Birmingham, and principal investigator of the AHRC grant “Translation and translanguaging: Investigating linguistic and cultural transformations in superdiverse wards in four UK cities” (AH/L007096/1). Her research interests are in linguistic ethnography, language ecologies, multilingualism in society, and multilingual classroom pedagogy. Her publications include Linguistic Ethnography (with Fiona Copland, Sage, 2015); Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy (with Adrian Blackledge, Springer, 2014); The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism (with Marilyn Martin-Jones and Adrian Blackledge, 2012); Multilingualism: A Critical Perspective (with Adrian Blackledge, Continuum, 2010); Volume 9: Ecology of Language, Encyclopedia of Language and Education (2009); Teacher Collaboration and Talk in Multilingual Classrooms (2005); and Multilingual Classroom Ecologies (2003). Patricia (Patsy) Duff is a professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. Her research and publications examine language socialization and academic discourse socialization across a variety of multilingual and transnational learning contexts. She is also very interested in qualitative research in applied linguistics, and especially case study and ethnographic methods. Xuesong Gao is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at The Uni-

versity Hong Kong. His current research and teaching interests are in the areas of language learner autonomy, language teacher education, and sociolinguistics. Susan Gass is University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University

where she is chair of the Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages, director of the Second Language Studies Ph.D. Program, and director of the English Language Center. She has published widely in second language acquisition. Her most recent books are Second Language Acquisition: An Introductory Course (2013, Routledge) with Jennifer Behney and Luke Plonsky and Second Language Research: Methodology and Design (Routledge, 2015), coauthored

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with Alison Mackey. She is the recipient of the 1996 Paul Pimsleur Award for Outstanding Research (with E. Varonis), the 2012 ACTFL-MLJ Paul Pimsleur Award for Research in Foreign Language Education (with L. Plonsky), and the 2013 MLA Kenneth W. Mildenberger award for The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (with A. Mackey), among other awards at her university. She has served as president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and the president of the International Association of Applied Linguistics. Sam Kirkham is Lecturer in Sociophonetics at Lancaster University, U.K., and

codirector of the Lancaster University Phonetics Lab. His research interests include sociophonetics, language variation and change, and laboratory phonology. His current research investigates acoustic and articulatory phonetic variation in ethnically diverse communities and language contact contexts. Joseph Lo Bianco is Professor of Language and Literacy Education, Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Australia. His current work is focused on the relation between language policy and peace and conflict situations. He is UNICEF research director, Peacebuilding, Language, and Ethnicity in Malaysia, Myanmar/Burma, and Thailand. He has 130 publications on language, policy and planning, language education, literacy, culture, and identity. Lourdes Ortega is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her main area of research is in second language acquisition. She investigates questions that impact on adults’ cognitive, social, and educational well-being when they learn new languages later in life. In the last few years she has become interested in applying insights from bilingualism and from usage-based linguistics to the investigation of second language development. Among her recent books are Understanding Second Language Acquisition in 2009 (revised edition forthcoming with Routledge in 2016) and Technology-Mediated TBLT: Researching Technology and Tasks (John Benjamins, 2014, coedited with Marta González-Lloret). Alison Mackey investigates second language learning. She has researched younger

and older children, as well as college age, prime-of-life, and elderly adults. Her interests also include research methodology and second dialects. With Susan M. Gass, she is a winner of the Modern Language Association’s Mildenberger Prize. She is also editor-in-chief of Cambridge University Press’s Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, the official journal of the American Association for Applied Linguistics. Brian Paltridge is Professor of TESOL at the University of Sydney. His publications

include the Companion to Discourse Analysis, edited with Ken Hyland (Continuum, 2011); the second edition of Discourse Analysis (Bloomsbury, 2012); the Handbook of English for Specific Purposes, edited with Sue Starfield (Wiley-Blackwell,

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2013); Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, edited with Aek Phakiti (Bloomsbury, 2015); and, with Sue Starfield and Christine Tardy, Ethnographic Perspectives on Academic Writing (Oxford University Press, 2016). He is a current editor of TESOL Quarterly, an editor emeritus for the journal English for Specific Purposes, general editor for the University of Sydney Papers in TESOL, and member of the editorial board for Writing & Pedagogy, the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, the Chinese Journal of ESP, the Taiwan International ESP Journal, the English Australia Journal, and the International Journal for Researcher Development. Nicole Pettitt is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Applied Linguistics at Georgia State University. Her research centers on the language and literacy learning and practices of adult immigrants and refugees both in and outside of traditional schooling contexts. Sabine Siekmann is an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics and Foreign Languages at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Sandra Silberstein is a professor and MATESOL director in the Department of

English at the University of Washington. She is a former editor of the TESOL Quarterly and author of articles and textbooks in the areas of language learning and teaching. Her current research in discourse analysis focuses on media discourses in times of national crisis. She is author of War of Words: Language, Politics and 9/11 and a volume in process, Languaging War: Discourses of Terrorism and Occupation. Sue Starfield is an associate professor in the School of Education and director of The Learning Centre at the University of New South Wales. She is coauthor with Brian Paltridge of Thesis and Dissertation Writing in a Second Language: A Handbook for Supervisors and coeditor with Brian Paltridge of the Handbook of English for Specific Purposes. She is coeditor with Brian Paltridge of two new book series: Routledge Introductions to English for Specific Purposes and Routledge Research in English for Specific Purposes. She is currently coauthoring a book with Brian Paltridge and Christine Tardy titled Ethnographic Perspectives on Academic Writing to be published by Oxford University Press. Her research and publications cover tertiary academic literacies, doctoral writing, postgraduate pedagogy, academic discourse socialization, identity in academic writing, and access and equity in higher education. Scott Sterling is an assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Litera-

tures, and Linguistics at Indiana State University. His research interests include research ethics in applied linguistics and the usage of humor by L2 learners. His dissertation focuses on the informed consent process, with an emphasis on investigating how well ESL students’ understand the information presented on consent forms.

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Jian Tao is a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Education at The University Hong Kong. Her current research interest focuses on language teacher education.

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Steven L. Thorne is Associate Professor of Second Language Acquisition in the

Department of World Languages and Literatures at Portland State University, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). His research utilizes cultural-historical, usage-based, distributed, and critical approaches to language development, often with a focus on human interactivity in technology-culture contexts. In 2014, he was selected to receive the Faculty Research Excellence Award for Assistant and Associate Professors at Portland State University. Paula Winke is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages at Michigan State University, where she also directs the Master of Arts in Foreign Language Teaching Program. She teaches language testing and language teaching methods. Her research interests include language assessment, L2 aptitude, and task-based language teaching and testing. She is the president of the Midwest Association of Language Testers (MwALT) and is a member of the TOEFL Committee of Examiners, a standing committee of the TOEFL board. Jane Zuengler is professor emerita of the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has also been a core faculty member of the Ph.D. program in Second Language Acquisition. Professionally, she has served as president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and as coeditor of the journal Applied Linguistics. Professor Zuengler conducts research involving microanalyses of discourse in multilingual contexts, taking a critical ethnographic approach. She has published in such journals as TESOL Quarterly, Applied Linguistics, The Modern Language Journal, Linguistics and Education, and others.

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ETHICS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS RESEARCH An Introduction Peter I. De Costa

Ethics, according to Brown (2004) is “an area where all research methods and techniques come together and tend to agree” (p. 498). Indeed, most language researchers would not disagree with the core principles of (1) respect, (2) beneficence, and (3) justice. More recently, Brown (2011) speculated that the burgeoning interest in conducting ethical research, described as “ethics creep” by Haggerty (2004), would continue to expand into the future, especially in light of the pervasive formation of human subjects committees at universities. On a larger level, this growth of interest in conducting ethical research can also be traced to what Denzin (1997) sees as a societal transition into a culture of inclusiveness in terms of politics, gender, freedom, nation, and community. This shift, which is often accompanied by calls for greater advocacy for the communities whom researchers serve, highlights the increasingly porous relationships among the various constituencies involved in the research enterprise. The inception of this book derives from my own experience as a critical applied linguist and an ethnographer who has had to straddle various roles as teacher, researcher, and advocate while working with marginalized immigrant learners. I first recounted how I negotiated ethical dilemmas encountered during data collection at an American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) presentation in 2011. Three years later, my narrative was crystalized in an article that appeared in the Research Issues section of TESOL Quarterly (see De Costa, 2014; see also De Costa, 2015). Fortunately, along the way, my wish to consolidate the ethical dilemmas encountered by other applied linguists gained momentum and was subsequently realized through two colloquia—one at AAAL 2014 and the other at AILA 2014—which brought several of the contributors to this volume together. However, as book contributors, we are certainly not the first to have considered and discussed the significance of conducting ethical research.

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Such a practice has been in place for over three decades, and it is to a brief history of this topic that I turn.

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Ethics in Applied Linguistics: A Brief History The issue of ethical practices in applied linguistics was foregrounded in TESOL’s “Guidelines for Ethical Research in ESL,” which appeared in a 1980 issue of the TESOL Quarterly. The primary focus of this document and that of many other texts that came out in the 1980s (e.g., Brown, 1988; Seliger & Shohamy, 1989) and the early 1990s (e.g., Hatch & Lazaranton, 1991; Johnson, 1992; Nunan, 1992) was the logistical aspects of conducting research. In other words, the earlier literature sought to highlight the formal procedures associated with setting up a research project. This phenomenon was underscored by Dufon (1993), who pointed out that much of the methodology literature at the time emphasized “theoretical and methodological approaches, statistics, validity, replication, and so forth” (p. 158). By the mid-2000s, however, research methods books in applied linguistics started to address ethics more explicitly, due in part to the increase in institutional review board (IRB) involvement in the research process (Duff, 2008). This deepening interest in carrying out ethical research was exemplified in the coverage of ethics in Mackey and Gass (2005, 2015), McKay (2006), and Dörnyei (2007) and has become more prominently addressed in recent methodology volumes (e.g., Gass & Mackey, 2012; Paltridge & Phakiti, 2010, 2015; Richards, Ross, & Seedhouse, 2011) and special issues of several journals such as The Modern Language Journal (Ortega, 2005a), TESL Canada Journal (Kouritzin, 2011), and Diaspora, Indigenous and Migrant Education (Ngo, Bigelow, & Lee, 2014).

An Interdisciplinary and Reflexive Approach to Ethics Applied linguists have turned to adjacent disciplines such as education and the social sciences for direction when developing ethical guidelines. In his discussion of ethics, Dörnyei (2007), for example, drew on key principles embraced by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), while Brown (2004) invoked some of the ethical problems that arise in social science research by drawing on the work of Kimmel (1988). Within language assessment, Davies (2008) cited the work of the social scientist Homan (1991) in his call to create an “ethical milieu” through education. A probable reason why applied linguists have turned to education and the social sciences is that these disciplines have a head start in mapping out ethical guidelines. As a field, applied linguistics is relatively new, having come into existence only in the 1940s (Kaplan, 2010). One way in which applied linguistics has drawn on education and the social sciences is through dealing with issues related to the relational character of research, which, according to Kubaniyova (2008), is the concern with

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“particular decisions and how these affect the specific people being studied” (p. 507). Making such ethical decisions in response to evolving circumstances is aligned with a growing trend to practice reflexivity during the research process. Within second language acquisition (SLA), Kramsch and Whiteside (2007) emphasized that researcher positioning needs “to be explicitly and systematically accounted for and placed in its historical, political, and symbolic context” (p. 918). Relatedly, as observed by Harklau (2011), calls for a greater discussion of (1) researcher conduct, (2) the researcher role on the continuum from observer to full participant, and (3) how the researcher’s background and perspective potentially influences research questions, methods, and findings have grown stronger over the past decade.

Researching Ethics from a Continuum Perspective Building on the interdisciplinary and reflexive turn in applied linguistics, ethics in applied linguistics can be characterized as falling along two continua: (1) a paradigmatic quantitative/qualitative ethical continuum, and (2) a macro/microethical continuum.

Paradigmatic Quantitative/Qualitative Ethical Continuum Recognizing that ethics and morality are intertwined, King and Horrocks (2010) underscored the need “to consider the morality of not only research practice, but also the various practical, epistemological and ontological assumptions that surround and define the research” (p. 104). Researchers have “ethical responsibilities not only to those who participate” they add, “but also to those for whom the knowledge is produced” (pp. 104–105). In articulating this stance, King and Horrocks draw our attention to the importance of taking into account the constituencies that researchers need to be ethical toward. Importantly, such an understanding can be facilitated through a recognition that much of the ethics literature appears to have fallen alongside the quantitative/qualitative divide. For example, Harklau (2011), in her review of approaches and methods in recent qualitative research, called for a greater discussion of researcher conduct and how a researcher’s background and perspective could influence her study. By contrast, Porte (2010) pointed out that a key ethical concern of quantitative researchers is replication. Evidently, ethics is interpreted differently within the two paradigms. To some extent, ethical considerations are undeniably influenced by an applied linguist’s epistemology (Ortega 2005a; Bigelow & Pettit, this volume; Paltridge, this volume); that is, what constitutes knowledge from the applied linguist’s perspective. Equally important, however, is what applied linguists do with such knowledge as they negotiate ethical dilemmas that emerge at a macro and micro level (Canagarajah, this volume; Kirkham & Mackey, this volume).

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Macro/Microethical Continuum Following Guillemin and Gillam (2004), Kubanyiova (2008) made the distinction between macroethics and microethics. While the former refers to the “procedural ethics of IRB protocols and ethical principles articulated in professional codes of conduct”(p. 505), the latter refers to “everyday ethical dilemmas that arise from the specific roles and responsibilities that researchers and research participants adopt in specific research contexts” (p. 504). Macroethics. Much of the ethics literature to date seems to fall within the purview of macroethics in that it offers guidelines—often framed in the form of “best practices”—for researchers. While the guidelines from university ethics boards have been helpful starting points and have shepherded applied linguists through the research application process, they are often too generic in nature. Put simply, these guidelines often do not operationalize codes of practice on a practical level. Nor do they afford sufficient guidance on how to address specific ethical dilemmas that emerge before, during, and after the research process. By the same token, the theoretical guidance from professional applied linguistic organizations has not been able to bridge this gap in researcher needs because organizational guidelines generally focus on macroethical concerns. For example, the British Association for Applied Linguistics’ Recommendations on Good Practice in Applied Linguistics delineates the teaching, administrative, and research responsibilities applied linguists ought to manage in relation to the field of applied linguistics, sponsors, their own institutions, and the public (BAAL, 2006). More recently, a research agenda task force commissioned by the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) International Association (TESOL International Association, 2014) came up with a series of thought-provoking questions to promote ethical behavior among TESOL researchers. Like the documents put out by applied linguistics associations, this document articulates good practices that ought to be adopted. However, it does not provide applied linguists with specific advice on how to negotiate ethical problems that emerge across the different phases of the research process. Nor do they question, as observed by Guta, Nixon, and Wilson (2013), the powerful systems of control in which ethics boards sit and the ideologies imposed by these boards. Microethics. While applied linguists such as Ortega (2005b, 2012) have theorized the need for an ethically-oriented field that upholds social utility, methodological rigor, and epistemological soundness, microethical priorities (i.e., how ethical dilemmas are negotiated in the actual data collection process) remain underexplored. As noted by Kubaniyova (2008), applied linguists can only go so far in applying an a priori definition of “greater good” as mapped out in macroethical documents. The danger of relying solely on such guidelines is that it “overlooks the consequences of our choices on the particular individuals” (p. 511). Crucially, Kubaniyova’s (2008, 2013) call to exercise an ethics of care and

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examine everyday ethical dilemmas during the research process is duly noted by the contributors to this volume as they address both macro- and microethical concerns in their chapters.

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Language Researcher Narratives In response to Agar’s (1996) notion of “rich points,” Hornberger (2006) coined the term “methodological rich points” to underscore the need for ethnographers to adjust their research practices in order to advance their research and understandings. Consistent with Agar’s and Hornberger’s concept of “rich points,” and building on the ethical turn in applied linguistics, the contributors to this book were asked to identify “ethical critical incidents” and discuss how they wrestled with and overcame ethical dilemmas that they encountered throughout the research process (i.e., before, during, and after data collection). What stands out in this volume is how the authors exercised high levels flexibility when confronted with such dilemmas, thereby illustrating that ethics is more than procedural and that reflexivity extends beyond a set of mechanical actions (Copland & Creese, this volume).

Chapters in the Book The book is divided into four parts: (1) “Laying the Groundwork”; (2) “Applying Ethics to Different Linguistic Communities”; (3) “Ethics, Voice, and Multilingualism”; and (4) “Ethics and the Media.” The two chapters in Part I, “Laying the Groundwork,” emphasize the importance of becoming responsible citizenscholars and remind us that how applied linguists go about realizing ethical principles do differ, and that such differences are often influenced by the methodological paradigm they subscribe to, their training, and the area of research in which they work. In Chapter 1, Scott Sterling, Paula Winke, and Susan Gass point out a conspicuous gap in our field: Applied linguists have yet to investigate the level of ethical training given in graduate school, nor have they systematically investigated beliefs about research ethics in the field. To address this gap, Sterling et al. administered an online survey to 134 participants and found that while research ethics training provided information needed to obtain IRB approval, less commonly taught were matters related to being and becoming a responsible citizen within the academy. Their findings revealed that generally absent from graduate applied linguistics courses was instruction related to the development of “professional responsibility,” such as elements of mentorship, collaboration, authorship, and peer review. In Chapter 2, Brian Paltridge contends that data selection is an ethical issue because it has the potential to expand the boundaries of a discipline by interrogating what is deemed to be acceptable data. Defending his decision to include what seemed like outlier data—a nontraditional doctoral thesis in the visual and

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performing arts that he analyzed and included in a published qualitative study— Paltridge also highlights the difference between a quantitative and qualitative paradigm. While the former emphasizes the generalizability of research findings, the latter does not. Elaborating on this distinction, he underscores the need for applied linguists to include what is perceived to be “outlier” data, especially in the face of epistemological pressures to generalize research findings. The three chapters in Part II, “Applying Ethics to Different Linguistic Communities,” raise ethical concerns that arise when working in different research contexts and with distinct groups of participants. In Chapter 3, Sue Starfield describes the common plight of international students needing editing assistance but who find themselves being turned away by writing centers that lack the resources to support them. She raises the ethical issue of universities admitting students with lower IELTS scores only to shift the blame and responsibility to the student: The problem subsequently becomes the student’s to resolve. While Starfield does not specifically critique IELTS, she illustrates the fallout from a neoliberal education system that places too much emphasis on IELTS entry cutoff scores when determining university admission. In that respect, her discussion of the ethical issues concerning IELTS may be viewed as an extension of earlier work on ethics and language testing (e.g., McNamara, 2005; Spolsky, 1981), particularly since language tests are often used to sort and sieve students. In Chapter 4, Martha Bigelow and Nicole Pettitt draw our attention to an underrepresented group of learners in SLA—immigrant students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE). As explained by them, their research bears a strong advocacy component, with a strong commitment to work with and for SLIFE rather than about or on SLIFE (Ngo et al., 2014). Drawing on two studies, the first an ethnographic classroom study that focused on the acquisition of print literacy and the second a weekly tutoring relationship with an immigrant learner, they illustrate the need to adapt a range of methods and methodologies when working with members of the SLIFE community. Such adaptation includes obtaining informed consent orally, multilingually, and dialogically with their participants in order to take into consideration the participants’ low print literacy. In Chapter 5, Joseph Lo Bianco reports on the ethical dilemmas involved in expert language policy advising. He focuses on a series of facilitated dialogues in conflict-affected zones in Malaysia, Myanmar, and Thailand that were part of a project commissioned by UNICEF. Through his three narratives, readers gain a clear understanding of Lo Bianco’s precarious role as a language policy adviser and the host techniques he had to develop to prevent a collapse in talks between disputing factions. Given that many language problems are ideologically motivated and tap into the subjective worlds of different constituents, the complex identities of different social actors need to be considered when making language policy decisions. Such a form of applied linguistics in practice, Lo Bianco contends, demands ethical guidance beyond what official regulation can provide.

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Part III, “Ethics, Voice, and Multilingualism,” features three chapters. Building on earlier applied linguistic research that has emphasized the importance of investigating researcher subjectivity (e.g., Canagarajah, 1996; Holliday, 2015; Ramanathan, 2005), the three chapters in this section explore the notion of reflexivity in research contexts that span several countries. In Chapter 6, Sam Kirkham and Alison Mackey examine the relationship between researchers and their participants, focusing on the subsequent coproduction of data and illustrating how researcher–participant interactions can yield additional insights into social and linguistic phenomena. They present two case studies that focus on language variation and identity: The first is a sociophonetic ethnography of a multiethnic secondary school in Sheffield, England (Kirkham); the second is a study of second dialect acquisition among British women in the United States and North American women in the U.K. (Mackey). While Kirkham describes being torn between earning the trust of his male adolescent participants and risking isolation from the teachers, Mackey observes how working with two researcher collaborators with different accents—one American and the other British—generated different data from the British participants. In Chapter 7, Patricia Duff and Klara Abdi provide a behind-the-scenes account of having to set up a 2-year ethnographic multiple-case study of transnational children moving between Canada and China. Contrasting the evolving nature of Abdi’s ethnography with the fixed nature of the documentation expected by their university’s ethics board, they illustrate the hurdles researchers have to surmount when designing a study on internationally mobile child participants. Such complexities include negotiating approval for research conducted in different institutional sites and countries, working with acquaintances and family members to get access to these students, and trying to gain approval and consent to videotape children at daycare centers. In Chapter 8, Steven Thorne, Sabine Siekmann, and Walkie Charles discuss the complex ethical considerations in three grant-funded Indigenous language revitalization projects in Alaska. They focus on intervention efforts in Yup’ik– medium education and the professional and academic advancement of Native Alaskans enrolled in graduate degree programs. Three ethical issues that emerged in university–school and university–school–community partnerships are outlined, and the chapter closes with suggestions for self-governance in Indigenous Alaskan and other language-minority communities. While agreeing that ethical issues need to be resolved locally, Fiona Copland and Angela Creese’s chapter (Chapter 9) also takes into account the impact on ideology, discourse, and power on making microethical decisions while conducting a linguistic ethnography. Both authors use reflexivity to interrogate their decision-making processes. In the first narrative, Copland describes her decision to exclude a heated episode that occurred during her data collection process in order to protect the anonymity of a participant. In the second narrative, Creese examines the notion of voice in a team ethnography by analyzing the

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interactions that took place between senior and junior members of her research team. Arguing in favor for a greater transparency of interpretative team process, she underscores the importance of maintaining ethical relationships between researchers and not just between researchers and their participants. Continuing the conversation on the importance of reflexivity in the preceding chapters, the chapters in Part IV, “Ethics and the Media,” highlight the importance of rethinking and refining our ethical research and teaching practices in order to keep up with technological developments. In Chapter 10, Xuesong Gao and Jian Tao examine the ethical challenges in conducting text-based online applied linguistics research. They highlight possible repercussions of eliciting informed consent from online participants such as disrupting the flow of an online discussion, threatening the naturalistic element of the research setting, and over-surveying. These concerns are borne out in the three narratives drawn from Gao’s research on online Chinese netizens and learners of English. The third narrative, in particular, stands out because it (1) illustrates the risks faced by individuals who posted online comments on an antigovernment movement, and (2) highlights the need for applied linguists to maintain user privacy when analyzing online data. In Chapter 11, Suresh Canagarajah recounts a classroom ethnography on the literacy practices of African American students in a computer-mediated course whose data were saved on the local access network (LAN). Drawing on data from an email forum that the students themselves constructed, he found that these private forums produced a safe house effect in that the students felt free to engage in private conversations and vent their frustrations. Elaborating on his ethical dilemma, which entailed keeping a respectable distance from the interactions of his subjects while observing them, Canagarajah explains that one positive outcome of his study was having to be reflexive about and sensitive to how his participants used language; as a result of seeing firsthand how they meshed codes in their writing, he decided to change his pedagogical approach in order to honor their actual linguistic practices. In Chapter 12, Sandra Silberstein probes the ethics of activist scholarship by revisiting a joint media analysis project on the homeless from the perspective of ethical engagement. The objective of the project had been to create a porous flow of knowledge between the university and the community. While generally successful in highlighting the plight of the homeless, Silberstein troubles this earlier project by questioning (1) the strong advocacy leanings which may have undermined her research team’s scholarly ethics, and (2) their responsibilities to circulate the findings of their research within and beyond the academy. In raising uncomfortable questions about this work, she reminds us of the need for applied linguists to constantly interrogate their research practices. In closing, I would like to reiterate the compelling need for our field to produce applied linguists who not only minimize harm to their participants but also engage in work that would benefit participants as a consequence of their

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research collaboration. Emphasizing the importance of identifying ethical pressure points, Adger and Connor-Linton (1993) argued for the need to educate graduate applied linguistics students who are often shielded from having to confront ethical dilemmas in the research methodology classroom. To some extent, this trend has held steady since Adger and Connor-Linton put forward their call for more ethical training over 20 years ago. This volume represents an attempt to bridge this gap by bringing together the narratives of experienced applied linguists. It is my firm belief that through sharing our research experiences can we enfold ethics into our individual research repertoires and thereby advance applied linguistics.

References Adger, C. T., & Connor-Linton, J. (1993). Ethical issues for applying linguistics: Introduction and prologue. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 4 (2), 169–177. Agar, M. (1996). The professional stranger: An informal introduction to ethnography. (2nd ed.). San Diego: Academic Press. British Association for Applied Linguistics. (2006). Recommendations on good practice in applied linguistics. Retrieved from http://www.baal.org.uk/about_goodpractice_ full.pdf. Brown, J. D. (1988). Understanding research in second language learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, J. D. (2004). Research methods for applied linguistics: Scope, characteristics, and standards. In A. Davies & C. Elder (Eds.), The handbook of applied linguistics (pp. 476–500). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Brown, J. D. (2011). Quantitative research in second language studies. In E. Hinkel (Ed.), Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning, Volume II (pp. 190–206). New York: Routledge. Canagarajah, S. (1996). From critical research practice to critical research reporting. TESOL Quarterly, 30 (2), 321–331. Davies, A. (2008). Ethics, professionalism, rights and codes. In E. Shohamy & N. H. Hornberger (Eds.) (2nd ed.), Encyclopedia of language and education, Volume, 7: Language testing and assessment (pp. 429–443). New York: Springer. De Costa, P. I. (2014). Making ethical decisions in an ethnographic study. TESOL Quarterly, 48 (3), 413–422. De Costa, P. I. (2015). Ethics in applied linguistics research. In B. Paltridge & A. Phakiti (Eds.), Research methods in applied linguistics: A practical resource (pp. 245–257). London: Bloomsbury. Denzin, N. K. (1997). Interpretative ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Dörnyei, Z. (2007). Research methods in applied linguistics: Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methodologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duff, P. (2008). Case study research in applied linguistics. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Dufon, M. A., (1993). Ethics in TESOL research. TESOL Quarterly, 27(1), 157–160. Gass, S. M., & Mackey, A. (Eds.). (2012). The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition. New York: Routledge. Guillemin, M., & Gillam, L. (2004). Ethics, reflexivity, and “ethically important moments” in research. Qualitative Inquiry, 10 (2), 261–280.

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Guta, A., Nixon, S., & Wilson, M. G. (2013). Resisting the seduction of “ethics creep”: Using Foucault to surface complexity and contradiction in research ethics review. Social Science & Medicine, 98, 301–310. Haggerty, K. D. (2004). Ethics creep: Governing social science research in the name of ethics. Qualitative Sociology, 27, 391–414. Harklau, L. (2011). Approaches and methods in recent qualitative research. In E. Hinkel (Ed.), Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning, Volume II (pp. 175–189). New York: Routledge. Hatch, E., & Lazaranton, A. (1991). The research manual: Design and statistics for applied linguistics. Boston: Heinle and Heinle. Holliday, A. (2015). Qualitative research and analysis. In B. Paltridge & A. Phakiti (Eds.), Research methods in applied linguistics: A practical resource (pp. 49–62). London: Bloomsbury. Homan, R. (1991). The ethics of social research. London: Longman. Hornberger, N. H. (2006). Negotiating methodological rich points in applied linguistics research: An ethnographer’s view. In M. Chalhoub-Deville, C. A. Chapelle, & P. Duff (Eds.), Inference and generalizability in applied linguistics (pp. 221–240). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Johnson, D. M. (1992). Approaches to research in second language learning. New York: Longman. Kaplan, R. B. (Ed.) (2010). The Oxford handbook of applied linguistics. (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kimmel, A. J. (1988). Ethics and values in applied social research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. King, N., & Horrocks, C. (2010). Interviews in qualitative research. Los Angeles: Sage Publications. Kouritzin, S. (Ed.). (2011). Ethics in cross-cultural, cross-linguistic research [Special issue]. TESL Canada Journal, 28 (5). Kramsch, C., & Whiteside, A. (2007). Three fundamental concepts in second language acquisition and their relevance in multilingual contexts. The Modern Language Journal, 91, 907–922. Kubanyiova, M. (2008). Rethinking research ethics in contemporary applied linguistics: The tension between macroethical and microethical perspectives in situated research. The Modern Language Journal, 92 (4), 503–518. Kubanyiova, M. (2013). Ethical debates in research on language and interaction. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 2001–2008). Malden: Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0392 Mackey, A., & Gass, S. (2005). Second language research: Methodology and design. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Mackey, A., & Gass, S. (2015). Second language research: Methodology and design. (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. McKay, S. L. (2006). Researching second language classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. McNamara, T. (2005). 21st century shibboleth: Language tests, identity and intergroup conflict. Language Policy, 4 (4), 351–370. Ngo, B., Bigelow, M., & Lee, S. (Eds.) (2014). Introduction: What does it mean to do ethical and engaged research with immigrant communities? Special issue: Research with immigrant communities. Diaspora, Indigenous and Migrant Education, 8 (1), 1–6.

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Nunan, D. (1992). Research methods in language learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ortega, L. (Ed.). (2005a). Methodology, epistemology, and ethics in instructed SLA research [Special issue]. The Modern Language Journal, 89 (3), 315–488. Ortega, L. (2005b). For what and for whom is our research? The ethical as transformative lens in instructed SLA. The Modern Language Journal, 89 (3), 427–443. Ortega, L. (2012). Epistemological diversity and moral ends of research in instructed SLA. Language Teaching Research, 16 (2), 206–226. Paltridge, B., & Phakiti, A. (Eds.). (2010). Continuum companion to research methods in applied linguistics. London: Continuum. Paltridge, B., & Phakiti, A. (Eds.). (2015). Research methods in applied linguistics: A practical resource. London: Bloomsbury. Porte, G. (2010). Appraising research in second language learning: A practical approach to critical analysis of quantitative research. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ramanathan, V. (2005). Some impossibilities around researcher location: Tensions around divergent audiences, languages, social stratifications. In Situating the researcher in research texts: Dilemmas, questions, ethics, new directions [Forum]. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 4(4), 291–293. Richards, K., Ross, S., & Seedhouse, P. (2011). Research methods for applied language studies. New York: Routledge. Seliger, H. W., & Shohamy, E. (1989). Second language research methods. New York: Oxford University Press. Spolsky, B. (1981). Some ethical questions about language testing. In C. Klein-Braley & D. K. Stevenson (Eds.), Practice and problems in language testing (pp. 5–30). Frankfurt: Peter Lang. TESOL International Association. (2014). TESOL international association research agenda 2014. Alexandria, VA: Author. TESOL Research Committee. (1980). Guidelines for ethical research in ESL. TESOL Quarterly, 14 (3), 383–388.

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PART I

Laying the Groundwork

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1 TRAINING IN RESEARCH ETHICS AMONG APPLIED LINGUISTICS AND SLA RESEARCHERS Scott Sterling, Paula Winke, and Susan Gass

It is an understatement to claim that research ethics are important for any field of scientific inquiry. Yet, the fields of applied linguistics and second language acquisition (henceforth referred to as AL/SLA1) have not placed research ethics first and foremost in discussions of research methodology. In this chapter, we will review the sparse literature on ethics in AL/SLA and investigate common beliefs held by practitioners and address the level of ethical training. Researchers are generally thought of as authorities on the topics that they write about, and the topics they write about are considered important. However, researchers have almost no control over the ways that their findings are interpreted (or misinterpreted) by others. This is clearly significant in the case of AL/SLA, because as a field it deals with issues with real-world implications and applications. We assume that scientists conduct ethical research, but this assumption has been questioned (Steneck & Bulger, 2007; Van den Hoonaard, 2002). In the field of AL/SLA, scholars have yet to investigate the level of ethical training given in graduate school, nor have they systematically investigated beliefs about research ethics in the field. With this chapter we address both.

Literature Review The literature on ethics spans several millennia and has been discussed in almost every branch of science (Pimple, 2002). Our literature review is limited to three areas: (1) a small number of studies in SLA; (2) studies and reports from neighboring fields; and (3) studies geared toward the teaching of research ethics. Research ethics is a broad topic and can be approached in different ways. Emanuel, Wendler, and Grady (2013) suggested that research is ethical if it

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incorporates the following seven elements: (1) value to society or science, (2) scientific validity, (3) fair participant selection, (4) minimal risk to benefit ratio, (5) independent review, (6) informed consent, and (7) respect for participants. Pimple (2002) proposed that research be true, fair, and wise. Truth, he suggested, entails that data be accurately recorded and reproduced. Fairness ensures that researchers be properly credited for their work, and wisdom argues for only conducting research necessary for improving human lives. These and other systems of ensuring research ethics are helpful and valid ways of viewing a diverse and complex issue. With regard to training, the main concern of research ethics is in ensuring that researchers gain the knowledge to practice ethical research. As such, we investigate the view of research ethics from the stance of educating researchers, focusing primarily in context of the United States. In particular, we explore how components of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ responsible conduct of research (RCR) are conveyed and learned as part of AL/SLA degree programs, where students are educated, first and foremost, in how to conduct research in AL/SLA. Indeed, our main motivation for conducting this study ties in with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ recent calls for more ethical training in graduate programs that are research intensive. As AL/SLA researchers at different professional stages at Michigan State University (one Ph.D. candidate, one associate professor, and one professor), we have had various levels and amounts of training in research ethics and even have different views of what is covered under the rubric of “ethical behavior,” but we came together to fully understand research ethics in a more systematic way within the research environment that we find ourselves in. Research universities in the United States that allow research with humans must conform to such ethical oversight as defined by the federal government. In the United States, minimal oversight comes from institutional review boards (IRBs).2 IRBs provide ethical and legal oversight for research studies through a formal review process. While they were initially designed for the medical and natural sciences, they now oversee, and thus influence, almost all branches of science dealing with human subjects. Alongside the growth in ethical considerations and IRBs was the development of RCR, which constitutes a set of ideas, or values, designed to help researchers conduct responsible and ethical work. RCR training helps researchers develop an internal compass (National Research Council, 2009). The U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI)3 (see Steneck, 2004) has identified nine domains of RCR, as outlined in Table 1.1. While research ethics and RCR principles are scarce in the SLA literature, they have been discussed broadly in other social science fields, such as communication sciences and disorders (Minifie et al., 2011), anthropology (Bresler, 1996), linguistics (Eckert, 2013), and by the larger qualitative research community

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TABLE 1.1 RCR domains

Domain

Issues included

Human subject research

Obtaining and maintaining consent, confidentiality, and risk/benefit ratio for all data collection Meeting requirements of authorship, best publication practices in the discipline Plagiarism, fabrication of data, and falsification of data Reducing unnecessary pain and suffering, ensuring that inclusion in trials is necessary, maintaining ethical conditions for living Including the supervision of trainees, reviewing work, and giving authorship/credit for work completed (for trainees) Ensuring the ownership, collection, protection, and sharing of data Proper sharing or results, data, and credit among colleagues Disclosing financial, personal or intellectual stakes in the outcome of a project, and not being committed to too many projects Meeting deadlines, preserving confidentiality of intellectual property, and fairly judging the quality and importance of work

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Publication and authorship Research misconduct Animal resources

Mentorship Data management Collaborative science Conflicts of interest

Peer review

Note: Adapted from the Office of Research Integrity, 2013; Steneck, 2004.

(Burgess, 1989; Clark & Sharf, 2007; Guillemin & Gillam, 2004; Van den Hoonaard, 2002). Many of these fields have reviewed their ethical policies and the training their members receive. Minifie et al. (2011) surveyed the ethical beliefs of both faculty and students in communication sciences and disorders. They found that both faculty and students saw misconduct, authorship, peer review, protection of human participants, and accuracy of data management as important issues in RCR, whereas mentorship, research collaboration, conflicts of interest, and humane treatment of animals in research were found to be of low importance. Even though focused discussions on research ethics are limited in the AL/ SLA literature, they are not nonexistent. In fact, over the last decade the field of SLA has reflected on its research practices (Ortega, 2005a). This reflection has focused largely on the use of appropriate statistics (Plonsky & Gass, 2011) and sound research designs (Norris & Ortega, 2000). However, this reflection has overlooked the ethical side of AL/SLA research, which is surprising given that the majority of applied linguists’ work not only involves human participants, but includes populations that are sometimes considered vulnerable (Perry, 2011) (e.g., nonnative speakers [NNSs] of the language where different proficiency levels,

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cultural backgrounds, and norms are the object of inquiry). Thus, participants may not fully understand the research process or may hold culturally different views of scientists. Apart from special issues of The Modern Language Journal (Ortega, 2005c) and the TESL Canada Journal (Kouritzin, 2011), there exist various articles and training textbooks (e.g., Mackey & Gass, 2012) that include brief descriptions of ethical practices. Most articles on research ethics in SLA fall under ethics in practice, the “everyday ethical issues that arise in the doing of research” (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004, p. 263). These articles tend to be position papers where authors discuss ethical issues that occurred in their studies (Lee, 2011) or outline a position that they wish to see others take (Hobbs & Kubanyiova, 2008; Ortega, 2005b). Some authors address ethics in practice to supplement training materials (Hobbs & Kubanyiova, 2008; Kubanyiova, 2008) or to share their experiences. Few studies have addressed the effectiveness of RCR training, and little is known about its usefulness (Lynch & Shaw, 2005). The training material available for AL/SLA researchers addresses procedural ethics ; that is, it teaches “the means to obtain approval from a relevant ethics committee to undertake research involving humans” (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004, p. 263). Training materials in AL/SLA dedicate a very limited number of pages to the topic, from 0 to 32 pages (see Eckert, 2013; Mackey & Gass, 2015, 2012; McKay, 2006; Richards, 2003). Other than methodology textbooks, few SLA publications address the topic of research ethics. One exception is The Modern Language Journal, which published a special issue focusing on methodology, epistemology, and ethics in instructed SLA research (Ortega, 2005c). Ortega (2005b) argued for researchers to view their study designs through an ethical lens. For her “it is not the methods or the epistemologies that justify the legitimacy and quality of human research, but the moral-political purposes that guide sustained research efforts” (p. 438). She was primarily concerned with making research practical and useful and provided three guiding principles to help researchers incorporate this ethical lens: “the value of research is to be judged by its social utility; value-free research is impossible; and epistemological diversity is a good thing” (p. 430). Lee (2011) discussed an issue she encountered while investigating the development of teacher identity. While observing several teachers, one became of prime importance. She was a Canadian citizen of Japanese heritage who was systematically treated differently due to her racial background. The issue became so unmanageable, Lee described, that the teacher left the school. During the initial data collection process, Lee found herself in a difficult position. Should she have stood up to the administration for the teacher and risk losing access to the research site, or should she have done nothing while the instructor endured this hardship? Was it her place as an outside neutral observer to defend the teacher? Borrowing heavily from McNamee, Lee discussed the concept of guilty knowledge— the knowledge that an unethical act has occurred with the resulting insecurity of

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identifying the best method to handle the situation, especially if it means a loss of data. Lee’s experiences are a prime example of ethics in practice. The resolution to her hardship is not an easy one. From our perspective, we wonder if the scenario could have been rehearsed or explained by any existing training material. SLA researchers have largely been left to their own means when it comes to navigating the difficult world of research ethics.

Research Questions AL/SLA research provides the basis for arguments supporting early and bilingual education, informs the development of software and textbooks, and impacts various test design and language-teaching methods. This research matters to a larger community than just the fields of AL/SLA. Those who have a stake in the research assume that AL/SLA researchers are properly trained in research ethics and that they conduct research and report it in an ethical way. However, to date, no one has conducted a systematic review of ethical training in AL/SLA. The following research questions were designed to understand (1) ethical behavior and (2) the current training about research ethics in AL/SLA. 1.

How do AL/SLA researchers react to eight ethics scenarios designed to mimic real life events? a. b.

2.

How were the eight scenarios rated on ethical and occurrence scales? What are common responses in reaction to the scenarios?

How is RCR taught during graduate school training in AL/SLA? a. b.

Does training differ among the subfields of AL/SLA? How has training in research ethics changed over time?

Method Participants One hundred and thirty-five researchers participated in this study by taking a survey we created on research ethics and research ethics training (mean age = 42.5 years, SD = 12.0; 54% female). Most identified themselves as second language acquisition (SLA) researchers (n = 36), applied linguists (n = 35), or language testers (n = 28), our target populations. The majority of participants had obtained their highest degree from the United States (62%), with Iran (8%) and Canada (7%) coming in second. Additionally, most participants currently had academic appointments in either the United States (59%), Canada (9%), or Iran (8%). Participants were professors (n = 64), Ph.D. students (n = 44), or fell into an “other” category (n = 27).

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TABLE 1.2 Participant background data

Variable

Subcategory

Number of participants (n)

Percent (%)

Academic position

Professor Ph.D. Other M.A. Lecturer

64 44 13 6 6

47 32 9 4 4

Field of study

SLS Applied linguistics Education Language testing Language teaching Psychology Linguistics

36 35 8 28 24 3 1

26 25 5 20 17 2 0.7

Rating of ethics coverage in courses

Negligible Below average Average Above average

18 25 59 33

13 18 43 24

Country where highest degree was obtained

U.S. Iran Canada U.K. Australia Belgium Japan China Czech Republic Finland France Hungry India Italy Mexico New Zealand Sweden Turkey

84 11 10 9 3 3 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

62 8 7 7 2 2 2 2 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7

Location of current academic appointment

U.S. Canada Iran U.K. Australia Japan Mexico China

80 12 11 5 4 4 2 2

59 9 8 4 3 3 2 2 (Continued )

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TABLE 1.2 (Continued )

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Variable

Subcategory

Number of participants (n)

Percent (%)

Austria Belgium Czech Republic Finland France Hungry India Italy Malaysia Singapore Spain Sweden Turkey UAE Venezuela Did not specify

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7

Materials We employed an online survey with five different sections: (1) a background questionnaire (13 questions), (2) a set of eight scenarios from the RCR domains (24 questions), (3) a questionnaire on RCR training in graduate school (8 questions), (4) a series of statements on beliefs about best ethical practices (16 questions), and (5) an open-ended question. Parts 4 and 5 are not included in this analysis due to space limitations. In what follows we discuss parts 1–3 of the survey. Background questionnaire. The background questionnaire comprised 13 questions aimed at understanding the positioning of each of the participants. Participants answered questions on their nationality, research history, and type of research, as well as their academic position and year of obtaining their highest degree. Scenarios. The scenarios for this online survey were created by the authors using eight of the nine domains of RCR identified by the ORI (Steneck, 2004; we eliminated the animal resources category; see Table 1.1). For each of the eight domains, we created four to six scenarios using different subcategories of each domain. For example, in the category “conflict of interest,” we created items on conflicts of time, conflicts of financial contrasts, conflicts of personal interest, and so on. We pilot tested these scenarios with two graduate students who rated each of the scenarios for readability, likelihood of occurrence, and ethical validity. During informal discussions with these students, we also noted the level of quantity and type of language that each item generated. We felt that items that caused participants to stop and think or that caused controversy would

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result in richer comments. Using the pilot data, we narrowed the scenarios to eight, balanced them for gender as best as possible, and reworded any confusing elements. Thus, the eight scenarios may not represent the most prototypical cases of unethical practices, but were meant to stimulate discussion and thought among the participants. Ethical training. The last section consisted of the eight RCR domains with a brief description. We asked participants whether they believed the domain was covered in their formal education (workshops, coursework), informally (casual conversations, life experiences), or not at all. Participants could select multiple responses.

Procedure Participants were recruited for the online survey using the following method. First, we contacted over 1,000 individuals from a list of student and faculty email addresses from AL/SLA departmental websites collated in 2012.4 Next, we posted invitations to the survey on social media websites. Finally, we sent the invitation out to several listservs. We asked recipients to forward it to anyone they felt would be interested in taking the survey. Using these techniques, we believe we reached a wide range of potential participants. Each invitation contained a hyperlink to the online Web survey. The participants were asked to carefully read the various sections of the survey and reply with the response they felt appropriate. The order of the survey was (1) questionnaire, (2) scenarios (randomized presentation), (3) training, and then the two sections excluded here. Participants spent 20 minutes, on average, completing the survey.

Analysis In total, SurveyMonkey registered 148 opened surveys, although 13 either had no responses or stopped prior to finishing at least one section of the survey. Additionally, not every participant recorded responses to all questions. Thus, we removed incomplete data using a pairwise exclusion method when running statistical tests. The comments section contained varied feedback. We conducted a content analysis to develop themes from these responses. We first read through all the comments for a general sense of the dataset. Next, we reread every comment and assigned general themes to each one. Comments were relatively short, ranging from a few words up to around 200. Each comment was assigned one to four themes, although most were assigned only one or two themes due to the concise nature of the feedback. Themes were then recoded for each scenario so that closely matching macrocategories were counted and discussed together.

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Results

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Outcome of the Scenarios Seven of the eight scenarios display mean scores at or below 3 on a 6-point Likert-scale, indicating that each scenario was largely considered unethical; additionally, these seven had not been encountered frequently by the respondents (Table 1.3). The second scenario received an average rating of slightly above 3, indicating that of the eight it was the most ethical; it also had been the most frequently encountered. In other words, scenarios that were considered more ethical tended to occur more often and those that were considered more unethical were encountered less frequently. In fact, many comments (to be discussed below) included statements like, “It would be best to explain the delay but this happens all the time” (participant 115), indicating that some participants view unethical practices as being more acceptable if they occur more often.

Types of Training Received Figure 1.1 illustrates the responses for all participants together and shows the divide in the range of RCR topics discussed in graduate school training. On one side are the procedural ethics items (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004), the ones usually covered in IRB training: research misconduct, human protection, data management, and conflict of interests. On the other side are the research conduct items, or as some commenters said, “professional responsibility” items: mentorship, collaboration, authorship, and peer review.

TABLE 1.3 Rankings of RCR scenarios

Level of occurrence

Perceived ethicality

Category

n

Rank

M (SD)

Rank

M (SD)

Conflict of interest or time Research misconduct Mentorship Peer review Authorship Data acquisition Human protection Collaborative research

135 133 132 134 133 134 134 132

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

3.47 (1.84) 2.62 (1.61) 2.30 (1.52) 2.19 (1.37) 2.14 (1.31) 2.07 (1.35) 1.60 (1.18) 1.59 (1.19)

1 5 6 4 8 3 7 2

3.18 (1.47) 2.34 (1.36) 1.78 (1.14) 2.39 (1.51) 1.61 (1.03) 2.41 (1.41) 1.69 (1.12) 2.68 (1.41)

Note: Rankings are ordered from 1 as most likely/ethical to 8 being least likely/ethical.

which way

FIGURE 1.1

Graduate training in research ethics: Percentage of respondents who indicated they learned about the topic and in

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The final set of data shows responses for graduate training. Participants were broken into three groups, depending on the year they received their highest degree. Figure 1.2 shows an increased importance in research ethics training over time. Again, the four procedural ethics domains are covered more in formal training. However, the percentage of respondents per group increases throughout the years, meaning that students today are more likely to be trained in procedural components of RCR than in the past. However, this trend does not carry over to the remaining four domains where formal training has not changed over time.

Comments about Scenarios Participants optionally provided comments about the scenarios. Many gave feedback on the design of the scenario and survey, discussed personal experiences, or justified their responses. We focus on the last two types of comments below. Scenario 1: Authorship (n = 46). Scenario 1 deals with a student who generates an idea in class and a faculty member who uses this idea in a paper without crediting the student in any significant way. It read as follows: Professor Janis is teaching a graduate course on L2 phonology. During a classroom discussion, one of Janis’s students makes a really interesting point while criticizing a well-cited article. The next week, Janis decides to use this student’s idea as a central argument in a paper that she is writing, but does not give the student any credit. One recurring comment (n = 7) was that it is difficult to know from where ideas originate, and thus it is hard to know when or if a citation is necessary (Example 1). Example 1: “. . . an idea in a discussion is generated by the discussion [and] is coconstructed. Lots of ideas are generated in communities. [It is] hard to say who owns them. I often hear an idea I’ve had, or lectured about, or discussed come up elsewhere but close by-ideas move around.” (professor, language testing) Five individuals suggested that since it had come from a student, the issue is of less importance (Example 2). Example 2: “I have never seen this scenario. While students do often make good points in class, a student never makes a point [s]o remarkable that the professor has never heard of it and then uses it as a central argument. Professors are backed up in their writing obligations; at most a prof might think, hmm, I wish I had time to design a study around that idea.” (professor, psychology) Overall, a majority (n = 24) felt that the way to fix the issue was to either ask the student to coauthor the paper or to credit the student in some way (Example 3).

FIGURE 1.2 Graduate training in RCR over time: Percentage of respondents who indicated they learned about the topic and when they learned about the topic

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Example 3: “I would definitely add a footnote giving the student credit, but sometimes it’s difficult to pinpoint or recall where an idea came from.” (professor, SLA)

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Scenario 2: Conf lict of time (n = 64). In Scenario 2, a professor is overcommitted to too many projects: Professor Smith is working on a conference presentation, is advising five Ph.D. students’ research projects, and has a grant proposal due next week. Three months ago, an editor asked Dr. Smith to review a manuscript for publication, and Dr. Smith agreed. Dr. Smith has made a list of all of his priorities and listed the review as the least important. Even though the review is due now, Dr. Smith has decided to wait until after turning in the proposal (due next week) to do the review. In this scenario, the professor prioritizes his or her responsibilities and opts to submit a revised article after the deadline, an act that many (n = 11) believe occurs often in real life. Many (n = 17) noted that this activity, while not responsible, was not unethical. Several (n = 5) summarized why this is an RCR issue by stating something similar to Example 4. Example 4: “I think ethically, or simply out of respect, he should inform the editor that he will be late. I do think it’s typical for journal and book work to have some leeway in deadlines (until proofs are getting prepared!). I think there is a bigger issue of the professor’s lifestyle and work–life balance, though. I think faculty struggle with this a lot (OK, at least I do!), of taking on a lot of work that is all good and helpful but the quality of each work may suffer due to the overload; there is a bit of an ethical issue there, I suppose.” (professor, language testing) Many (n = 21) suggested that one way to fix the issue would be to simply contact the editor and ask for an extension (Example 5). Example 5: “It would be more ethical if Smith contacted the editor and explained the situation ahead of time.” (professor, SLA) Scenario 3: Mentorship (n = 64). In this scenario, a graduate student is pressured into doing unpaid and uncredited work: Wendy has been Dr. Shoe’s research assistant for the past school year. Dr. Shoe asked Wendy if she would be willing to analyze some data and write a first draft of a literature review over the summer. Wendy’s appointment ended in May, and so she is using her own free time to do this work. After the summer break, Dr. Shoe thanked Wendy for her extra work on the project and published the paper as the sole author. Dr. Shoe gave Wendy credit in the acknowledgment section. This scenario overlaps greatly with authorship issues, to the degree that many participants (n = 20) felt like it was the lack of credit that was the issue, not the

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(perceived) inability of the student to refuse the work, showing that the RCR domains are not rigid. Many (n = 16) felt that both the student and the faculty member were to blame for not establishing expectations prior to beginning work (Example 6). Example 6: “[It] depends on their initial agreement. At least Dr. Shoe gave her some credit.” (Ph.D. student, language testing) However, the scenario attempted to model the unequal power dynamic between the student and the mentor (Example 7). Example 7: “Refusing any request from a superior is extremely hard.” (Ph.D. student, applied linguistics) Scenario 4: Peer review (n = 48). In Scenario 4, a reviewer reads a study and returns comments to the editor, but first makes copies of the study: Dr. Kent’s specialization is L2 writing. A journal editor has just asked Dr. Kent to review a recent submission on that topic. Dr. Kent thinks that the article is brilliant and highly recommends that the journal publish it. A week later, Dr. Kent and two colleagues are finishing their own article on the same topic, and Dr. Kent prints out the article he reviewed and gives it to his coauthors to read. The comments from this scenario showed a wide range of acceptance to the practice. Many (n = 14) identified the peer review process as being confidential, whereas others (n = 6) found nothing wrong with the practice (Example 8). Example 8: “The purpose of publishing research is to share it with others who may find it useful. So the actions here are fine.” (Ph.D. student, ESL) Others noted that the author should have contacted the editor and asked for permission before he distributed the manuscript. Example 9: “Again, not unethical per se because he [is] praising the article. Nevertheless, this does not follow publishing protocol and should not be done. It’s more ‘illegal’ than unethical. He should ask the editor to notify the author and be identified, and then ask if he can share the article.” (professor, SLA) Scenario 5: Collaboration (n = 50). The fifth scenario involves two researchers who terminate their working relationship due to an unspecified problem: Dr. Jones and Dr. Miller are at two different universities and have been working together on a project for over a year. In the last two months their relationship has grown tense. Dr. Jones decided to terminate the working relationship and keep the data that she has

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collected and allow Dr. Miller to keep the data he has collected. Dr. Miller will not return any communication from Dr. Jones.

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Many (n = 9) indicated they needed more information before they could judge the scenario. Example 10: “I guess I think this depends on what the parties agreed to when they began working. It’s hard for me to judge without knowing all the relevant facts and context.” (professor, SLA) However, a few (n = 7) suggested that the collaborative data should be shared with coresearchers, echoing the remarks in Example 11. One professor seemed to indicate that not overtly committing to share data may render the data unusable. According to the professor, withholding data in this context, would be equal to “theft.” Example 11: “Data that have been collected jointly need to be shared!!!” (professor, applied linguistics) Example 12: “I think this is theft.” (professor, SLA) Scenario 6: Human protection ( n = 50). In this scenario, a researcher posts pictures and status updates to Facebook pertaining to the research participants, all of whom are minors: Graduate student Sam has been researching the usage of gestures with 13-year-old students at a bilingual middle school. Over the semester Sam has been posting updates on Facebook about where he is spending time and some pictures he took with the students. Many focused on the fact that the participants were children (n = 16) and saw this as a case of informed consent. Example 13: “This doesn’t really relate to the research, it’s just a life situation about posting photos of other people’s kids online.” (professor, applied linguistics) Others (n = 12) saw the issue similarly to Example 14: Example 14: “The participants in the study are probably not supposed to be identifiable, but by posting pictures of them on Facebook they run the risk of being identifiable to the public.” (Ph.D. student, SLA) Scenario 7: Data acquisition (n = 50). In this scenario, a researcher records voices from many participants, even though the researcher only has consent from two participants: Dr. Abijan wants to investigate how ESL learners interact with native English speakers while playing sports. Two ESL learners have volunteered for the study and will be given

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small recording devices that will capture all of their interaction during and after the game. Dr. Abijan only has the consent of the two participants and a handful of teammates. Most of the recordings are of unidentifiable voices. Dr. Abijan plans on analyzing the data without having the consent of the people who were recorded because he feels that they are unidentifiable. Most commenters (n = 24) noted that consent should be obtained prior to data collection. Example 15: “This lies on the borderline between public and private. There is little, if any, conceivable harm that could result to the people being recorded. Ideally, however, consent would be obtained from all recorded people. I have had comparable experience making video-recordings in public.” (specialist, foreign languages) One unexpected, recurring theme from comments (n = 10) was reliance on IRBs to provide ethical guidance. Example 16: “I’m not sure whether there are provisions for not only unidentifiable voices, but recordings made in a public situation, such as a sporting event. Still, this should have been included in the IRB application. It could still be included in an IRB application as ‘existing data,’ as the data was not elicited, but rather naturally occurring data. So, without IRB approval, it is unethical. If IRB approval is attained, then it is ethical.” (Ph.D. student, SLA) Scenario 8: Research misconduct (n = 71). Scenario 8 was the most divisive. Here, a researcher explores the end results of a study by considering the exclusion of certain participants: Graduate student Jackie is using an eye-tracker to investigate how often Russian students at two different proficiency levels look at a question prompt when writing essay tests. She has collected the data for 60 participants (30 in each group) and is looking at the results. The mean number of looks to the question is right around 13 for both groups. However, Jackie has found that if she removes three students from the low-proficiency group who looked at the question 24 or more times, she can find significant results. She searched the database of participants to find a justification for removing them, and found that those three participants were all between 29 and 33, when everyone else in the study was ages 21 to 28, so she used this as the justification for removing them from the study. Many (n = 22) saw the researcher’s actions as unethical because of a lack of justification for removing those particular cases. Example 17: “There is no theoretical justification for removing them. I have removed participants when there was a clear theoretical justification, NOT just to obtain significant results.” (Ph.D. student, applied linguistics)

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However, others (n = 25) felt as though the researcher was justified, especially if she included the exclusion in a publication. Example 18: “I don’t think this is unethical, as long as she clearly specifies this step in the write-up, so the audience can see what she has done and why she has done so, and then [the readers can] make up their own minds, based on the available information.” (Ph.D. student, applied linguistics)

Discussion This study was the first to investigate the training of RCR in the field of SLA and unearthed several interesting findings. One of the main results from our survey was that respondents believed that they understood what it means to be ethical. In terms of training, 68% stated they received average or above average training as graduate students. Similarly, participants considered all eight scenarios to be mostly unethical. Most data were at ceiling levels, much like Minifie et al. (2011), meaning that we had little variation in the dataset. This lack of variation was possibly due to the fact that participants wanted to please the researchers by putting on the best face possible. One commenter even stated that she would have used different language had she been positive that the data were anonymous. Research question 1 asked about the participants’ research behavior and the occurrence of such behavior. All eight scenarios were deemed unethical, as they all received scores of around 3 or less on the Likert scale. Additionally, the ratings for all scenarios suggested that these situations had not been encountered by most researchers. Interestingly, Table 1.3 hints at a connection between the rate of occurrence and the perceived ethicality of each scenario. This claim is further evidenced in the comments, where many stated that particular scenarios were more ethical because they occur more often. The second part of research question 1 investigated participants’ responses to the scenarios. Only about one-third of participants responded to any scenario, yet the comments were rich in detail. For the scenario on authorship, best practices stipulate that ideas be credited to whomever generated them (Nichols-Casebolt, 2012), and the American Psychological Association (APA) reported among its guidelines for inclusion as an author individuals who help with “formulating the problem or hypothesis” (APA, 2010, p. 18). There are many ways to address this issue, such as asking the student to be a coauthor or providing a personal communication citation, as discussed in the comments. Many did not perceive an ethical violation in the conflict of interest, peer review, collaboration, or mentorship scenarios. This may have been because they did not view anything outside of data manipulation or harmful practices as unethical. In other words, they had a narrow scope of what is included under the rubric of research ethics. Thus, the argument of whether something is an

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ethical issue relies on one’s definition of research ethics. In fact, many participants regarded research ethics as only research misconduct or manipulation of data. However, viewed through an RCR lens or categorizations such as Pimple (2002) or Emanuel, Wendler, and Grady (2013), all eight RCR domains become important. Conflicts of interest, including conflicts of time, are considered RCR issues because being overcommitted can reduce work quality (National Research Council, 2009). Mentorship is an issue because power of advisors over students can negatively impact research. Advisors giving too much work to students, and thus causing conflicts in students’ time, might result in poorer work (see Broad & Wade, 1983, for a discussion on this topic). The scenario about human protection, where a researcher posts comments and photos on a social media site, received wildly different comments. Our intention in designing this scenario was to compromise the fictional characters’ anonymity. Many participants viewed the issue in this light; however, some saw this as an issue broader than just research ethics and instead saw it in the light of ethics in general. Even among the participants who stated that it was unethical to post photos of participants, some responded that simply posting about research experiences was not an issue. By posting updates about one’s current location, frustration levels, and planned activities, the researcher is potentially exposing the school or community of interest. Lee (2011) waited several years before publishing her research due to fear that comments made in it would be linked to participants. Information that researchers place online might harm the reputation, standing, or personal relationships of participants, yet this view was not shared in the comments. The scenario on research misconduct, in which the character removes certain data points, contained the highest number of comments (n = 71). There are two different issues at stake here: (1) should data ever be removed? and (2) was the reason for data removal justified? Many (n = 22) did not think removing participants was justified. Others (n = 25) felt that if the removed cases were noted in the final manuscript, everything was fine. It should be noted that the fictitious researcher removed a 29-year-old because of age, but retained a 28-year-old to achieve the desired statistical results. This action seems to us to be a clear case of data manipulation without justification. Research Question 2 pertained to RCR training during graduate school. We found two groups of RCR domains. The first consisted of four domains addressed in formal training: (1) research misconduct, (2) human subjects, (3) conflicts of interest, and (4) data management. These topics were reportedly covered in IRB training and are required elements on an IRB form (National Research Council, 2009; Steneck, 2004). Thus, it makes sense they would be addressed in formal training. However, the second group consisted of the other four domains that were reportedly neglected: (1) mentorship, (2) collaboration, (3) authorship, and (4) peer review. These four were reported to only be discussed informally, if at all. The first three of these have become much more common in recent years within

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AL/SLA. In fact, the number of Ph.D. programs and their sizes have recently increased. Hence, mentoring, collaboration, and co-authoring guidelines are all the more important. The APA guidelines first discussed authorship responsibilities in the second edition (APA, 1974, p. 103), but the more nuanced ethics surrounding larger, related issues are nebulous. It is therefore not surprising that there has been a lack of formal emphasis on precisely these issues. RCR training in AL/SLA programs seems to be teaching to the test. In other words, most of the materials covered are items needed for IRB approval or certification. This focus on procedural ethics as the definition of ethical research aligns with Haggerty’s (2004, p. 392) warning of the “creeping” influence of IRBs. There has been growing concern over the last decade that a focus on training for IRB issues will train researchers to believe that IRB approval is equated with ethical research (Van den Hoonaard, 2011), even though IRB standards are the minimal levels of ethics coverage required (Steneck, 2004). This concern was borne out in our data, with several participants apparently equating IRB approval with ethical behavior. Throughout three time frames, we see a focus on teaching procedural ethics for RCR. Even though the focus has not changed, the amount of formal ethics training has increased ( Figure 1.2). Unfortunately, there has been no change in instructional time on nonprocedural ethics domains, as advocated by Ortega (2005b), with broader ethical perspectives remaining largely in the background. Although many researchers may receive training on these four topics through informal means, many others, it seems, receive no training in them at all.

Conclusion We conducted this study to better understand the ethical issues researchers within the broad field of second language studies are faced with or potentially encounter when they conduct research within the field. By surveying 134 individuals from various subdisciplines within AL/SLA, we believe we were able to capture a snapshot of where the field is at in terms of ethical training and ethical practices. We believe a critical and close look at research ethics within the field is warranted because, as Brown (2004) noted, ethics are where research methods, data collection techniques, and human interests intersect. Researchers need to do more than make sure their research methods are reliable, replicable, valid, and generalizable; they also need to ensure that their research is sound in its ethical practices. As Brown pointed out, we found that ethical problems often involve personal and professional elements, and that judgments about research ethics and research misconduct have a gray zone. That is, ethics in research are not clearly right versus wrong, but “lie on a continuum ranging from the clearly unethical to the clearly ethical” (p. 497). It is this grey area that interests us the most, and one that we believe can be explored in greater detail in discussions within the AL/SLA community. In terms of training, the findings in our study show a split between the eight RCR domains tested and the degree to which each is taught during graduate

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school. This split between the four domains that cover procedural ethics and those that cover professional responsibility domains was of particular interest. This same pattern holds when viewed across time. Researchers who received graduate degrees 30 or more years ago reported similar trends in their instruction to those who completed their degrees in the past 10 years or are currently completing degrees. While more recent students claimed to have received more procedural ethics training, there were almost no differences between the levels of training for the other domains. Thus, we conclude that researchers in AL/SLA must continue to grow in terms of ethical training to better serve the field. All researchers should strive for openness and clarity in terms of reporting research methods, data collection, and analysis techniques. And while more recent training in research methods appears to be better at addressing the nuances of ethics within the gray zone, more time and energy could be spent on that training to ensure that novice researchers are exposed to a larger depth of ethical issues in AL/SLA early on in their careers.

Limitations One limitation to this study was the small sample size. A second limitation was the size and scope of the survey. For practical reasons, we wanted to keep the survey as short as possible while allowing for the most data to be collected. This meant that we limited ourselves to a small number of questions to be asked and the number of scenarios we could construct. The study is also based on discourse on research ethics in the United States, in particular because the ethical domains we investigated are based on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ RCR. We recognize that research ethics guidelines exist in many areas of the world other than the United States, but because this was the area we have experience with, and because this was an exploratory study, we limited the study to a manageable domain. In the future, AL/SLA researchers may want to take a larger, more global perspective on investigating research ethics in AL/SLA, because by nature the field is international in scope. Our results are further limited in that we focused on eight of the RCR domains; we additionally zeroed in on just one scenario per domain. Thus, our findings must be interpreted with caution as they may be U.S. centric. Additionally, a different selection of subcategories or different scenarios might have impacted the participants’ responses. Finally, our respondents work in many different countries, and those contexts may have influenced their responses.

Recommendations for the Field of SLA We will focus our recommendations on the field of SLA, as it is our main area of academic interest. Based on our survey we suggest there is clearly a need for more thorough training in ethics, beyond those topics related to IRB approval.

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Research ethics are a vital part of any branch of science, and SLA is no different. As a growing field, we will likely see more questionable research as more researchers join the community. Ensuring that researchers follow ethical and responsible procedures is best assured by providing early and comprehensive training. Moreover, research ethics training materials need to be developed and evaluated for the specific needs of SLA research. Our research often deals with language learners, immigrants, refugees, students, minors, and other populations that have been labeled vulnerable. While many situations we find ourselves in are similar to those of other branches of science, we also face challenges unique to our research. Discussing these topics is made easier when training materials specifically address the field. Finally, similar to calls from Ortega (2005a, 2005b), we feel reflection on the ethical practices of SLA researchers is in order. Given ongoing growth of globalization and increased demand for cross-linguistic communication, SLA research will likely feature more prominently in the future. Now is the appropriate time to ensure that best practices are implemented and to prepare scholars to face the ethical demands of research in our field.

Notes 1. For reasons of expediency, we refer to the body of research we discuss as applied linguistics and second language acquisition, although we acknowledge the debate among researchers as to what the field fully encompasses and whether and how much applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and other field areas (such as linguistics, language testing, second language studies, etc.) overlap. In this chapter, we thus use the term AL/SLA to represent the field or fields in general. 2. In the United States, ethical review boards are commonly referred to as institutional review boards (IRB). We will use that term throughout this article as a cover term for all ethical review boards. 3. The ORI is a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services. 4. Email addresses were originally collected for a research project in Loewen et al. (2014).

References American Psychological Association. (1974). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association. (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. American Psychological Association. (2010). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association. (6th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Bresler, L. (1996). Ethical issues in the conduct and communication of ethnographic classroom research. Studies in Art Education, 37(3), 133–144. Broad, W., & Wade, N. (1983), Betrayers of the truth: Fraud and deceit in the halls of science. London: Century Publishing. Brown, J. D. (2004). Research methods for applied linguistics: Scope, characteristics, and standards. In A. Davies & C. Elder (Eds.), The handbook of applied linguistics (pp. 476–500). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Burgess, R. G. (Ed.). (1989). The ethics of educational research (Vol. 8). New York: Psychology Press.

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Clark, M. C., & Sharf, B. F. (2007). The dark side of truth(s): Ethical dilemmas in researching the personal. Qualitative Inquiry, 13(3), 399–416. doi:10.1177/1077800406297662 Eckert, P. (2013). Ethics in linguistic research. In R. Podesva & D. Sharma (Eds.), Research methods in linguistics (pp. 11–26). New York: Cambridge University Press. Emanuel, E. J., Wendler, D., & Grady, C. (2013). What makes clinical research ethical? JAMA: the Journal of the American Medical Association, 283(20), 2701–2711. Guillemin, M., & Gillam, L. (2004). Ethics, reflexivity, and “ethically important moments” in research. Qualitative Inquiry, 10 (2), 261–280. doi:10.1177/1077800403262360 Haggerty, K. D. (2004). Ethics creep: Governing social science research in the name of ethics. Qualitative Sociology, 27(4), 391–414. doi:10.1023/B:QUAS.0000049239. 15922.a3 Hobbs, V., & Kubanyiova, M. (2008). The challenges of researching language teachers: What research manuals don’t tell us. Language Teaching Research, 12 (4), 495–513. doi:10. 1177/1362168808097162 Kouritzin, S. (Ed.). (2011). Ethics in cross-cultural, cross-linguistic research [Special issue]. TESL Canada Journal, 28 (5). Kubanyiova, M. (2008). Rethinking research ethics in contemporary applied linguistics: The tension between macroethical and microethical perspectives in situated research. The Modern Language Journal, 92 (4), 503–518. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4781.2008.00784.x Lee, E. (2011). Ethical issues in addressing inequity in/through ESL research. TESL Canada Journal, 28 (5), 31–52. Loewen, S., Lavolette, E., Spino, L. A., Papi, M., Schmidtke, J., Sterling, S., & Wolff, D. (2014), Statistical literacy among applied linguists and second language acquisition researchers. TESOL Quarterly, 48 (2), 360–388. Lynch, B., & Shaw, P. (2005). Portfolios, power, and ethics. TESOL Quarterly, 39(2), 263–297. Mackey, A., & Gass, S. M. (2015). Second language research: Methodology and design. (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Mackey, A., & Gass, S. M. (Eds.). (2012) Research methods in second language acquisition: A Practical Guide. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. McKay P. (2006). Assessing young language learners. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Minifie, F., Robey, R., Horner, J., Ingham, J., Lansing, C., McCartney, J., Alldredge, E.-E., . . . Moss, S. E. (2011). Responsible conduct of research in communication sciences and disorders: Faculty and student perceptions. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 54, 363–393. National Research Council. (2009). On being a scientist: A guide to responsible conduct in research: Third Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Nichols-Casebolt, A. (2012). Research integrity and responsible conduct of research. New York: Oxford University Press. Norris, J. M., & Ortega, L. (2000). Effectiveness of L2 instruction: A research synthesis and quantitative meta-analysis. Language Learning, 50 (3), 417–528. doi:10.1111/00238333.00136 Ortega, L. (2005a). Methodology, epistemology, and ethics in instructed SLA research: An introduction. The Modern Language Journal, 89(3), 317–327. Ortega, L. (2005b). For what and for whom is our research? The ethical as transformative lens in instructed SLA. The Modern Language Journal, 89 (3), 427–443. Ortega, L. (Ed.). (2005c). Methodology, epistemology, and ethics in instructed SLA research [Special issue]. The Modern Language Journal, 89 (3), 315–488. Perry, K. H. (2011). Ethics, vulnerability, and speakers of other languages: How university IRBs (do not) speak to research involving refugee participants. Qualitative Inquiry, 17(10), 899–912. doi:10.1177/1077800411425006

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Pimple, K. D. (2002). Six domains of research ethics: A heuristic framework for the responsible conduct of research. Science and Engineering Ethics, 8 (2), 191–205. Plonsky, L., & Gass, S. (2011). Quantitative research methods, study quality, and outcomes: The case of interaction research. Language Learning, 61(2), 325–366. doi:10.1111/ j.1467-9922.2011.00640.x Richards, K. (2003). Qualitative inquiry in TESOL . New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Steneck, N. H. (2004). Introduction to the responsible conduct of research. Washington, DC: Health and Human Services Dept., Office of Research Integrity. Retrieved from http:// ori.hhs.gov/ori-intro. Steneck, N., & Bulger, R. (2007). The history, purpose, and future of instruction in the responsible conduct of research. Academic Medicine, 82 (9), 829–834. Van den Hoonaard, W. C. (Ed.). (2002). Walking the tightrope: Ethical issues for qualitative researchers. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Van den Hoonaard, W. C. (2011). The seduction of ethics: Transforming the social sciences. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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2 DATA SELECTION AS AN ETHICAL ISSUE Dealing with Outliers in Telling a Research Story Brian Paltridge

Data selection is an important issue both in terms of what is included and what is excluded from a study. Often “outlier” data that does not fit the general picture of other data or that deviates markedly from other data in a sample (Hammond & Wellington, 2013) is excluded from a study as the argument is made that the results of the study will be distorted by the inclusion of this data. While there is a sense in which this is true for large-scale quantitative studies, and for some statistical measures (Field, 2013; Porte, 2010), the picture is more complex when this rationale is applied to smaller-scale qualitative studies. Even though qualitative researchers do not typically aim for generalizability in the way that quantitative researchers may, the notions of comparability and transferability (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) that are frequently applied in qualitative research often encourage a similar approach to data inclusion. The issue of outliers is often not addressed in published reports on research. For example, outliers are only reported on in two of the articles published in TESOL Quarterly from January 2010 to June 2014 (when this chapter was written), once in a quantitative study (Huang & Huang, 2013) and once in a mixed methods study (Chang, 2010), with N sizes of 352 and 152, respectively. In Studies in Second Language Acquisition there were three mentions of outliers, all quantitative studies (Andringa, 2014; Marsden, Williams, & Liu, 2013; Révész & Brumfaut, 2013), over this time. The N sizes of these studies were 242, 36, and 68, respectively. Five papers published in Language Learning during this period that report on empirical research (Elgort, 2011; Granena, 2013; Hanson & Carlson, 2014; Li, 2012; Tight, 2010) mention outliers, with N ranging from 36 to 137. This, however, is out of a total of 136 research articles that were published in regular issues of the journal during this time. If a decision is made to take out outlier data, there needs, as Mackey and Gass (2005) point out, to be “a principled reason for not including them beyond that

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fact that they ‘don’t fit right’ ” (p. 257). The following extract from Andringa’s (2014) paper in Studies in Second Language Acquisition on the use of native speaker norms in critical hypothesis research is an example of this. The first step in the analyses, then, was to inspect the scores for outliers. For the segmentation task, one NS was removed because he or she scored more than 40% incorrect on the fully articulated items. This was taken to mean that this person had not understood the task. Nonnative speakers were also removed occasionally because of clearly outlying responses or because their data were not correctly logged. . . . For the speed tasks . . . outliers on individual trials were identified. Responses were considered outliers if they fell outside the range of 2.5 standard deviations from the group mean for that item . . . , in which case they were coded as missing. . . . Additionally, latencies of inaccurate responses were considered invalid and were also set to missing for segmentation speed, grammatical processing speed, and semantic processing speed. All missing data points were then newly estimated by imputation in SPSS by means of the full information maximum likelihood estimation procedure, and mean scores per participant were calculated. (p. 19) Equally, if a decision is made to keep outlier data in, it is important to explain why it has been retained and what its inclusion says about the results of the study. The following extract from Hanson and Carlson’s (2014) study of second language Spanish published in Language Learning illustrates this. (Hanson and Carlson examined the role of first and second language proficiency in the processing of preverbal clitics—where an object is placed before the verb as in Lo besa la niña, which translates literally into English as Him kisses the girl rather than The girl kisses him, which is its intended meaning.) One L1 English participant had spent 7 years abroad. We did not eliminate this participant from the study, however, because her proficiency data matched that of a L1 Romanian participant, who was not an outlier in accuracy. Refitting the model without this participant yielded identical results. (p. 27) A further reason for keeping an outlier in a dataset may be that the case is information rich and might lead to a rival explanation (Perry, 2011) that would not have been possible had it been excluded. It is important, then, in the search for tidiness and credibility in research that outlier data not be excluded if it can lead to an alternate, although not so uniform, answer to a research question. Hammersley and Traianou (2012) discuss ethics in qualitative research and different ways of determining what is good and “right” in relation to qualitative

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research ethics. They argue against a consequentialist view of ethics where decisions are made to produce the best outcome. This is similar, they argue, to a cost-benefit analysis where one action is weighed against another to determine whether something should go ahead. This approach is complicated and potentially unethical if applied to matters such as data inclusion and exclusion. It is not always possible (or indeed ethical) to exclude data because it does not fit with other data or if it is simply uncomfortable. Julia Chaitin (2003) discusses this issue in a paper titled “ ‘I wish he hadn’t told me that’: Methodological and ethical issues in social trauma and conflict research.” Chaitin (2009) discusses issues that have arisen for her in carrying out research in conflict zones, in her case a Jewish woman researcher living in Israel researching the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Her case is especially difficult she acknowledges, when she and her research team hear and face hate from the people they are researching. In her words: When we ask people to be open with us, and to tell us about their lives and about their thoughts, we run the risk that what we have to say may lead not only to further deterioration of the relationships between the two conflict sides but also to uneasiness on the part of the researchers from the same side. Such openness and honesty might lead the researchers to being too hurt, frightened, or emotionally overwhelmed to want to continue. (Chaitin, 2003, p. 1152) In relation to data exclusion, she says: it is not our task to edit out statements that we find unpleasant or, worse, that offend our sense of morality. As part of a research team, it is my job to be honest with my partners about my findings. . . . Although I work hard at remaining true to these requirements and ethical standards, I raise the point to show that, when working in such a conflictual context, the decision to stay true to these golden rules can never be taken for granted. The decision is made consciously each time. (p. 1152) In terms of dealing with outliers, Jones (2011) gives the following advice: Be alert for outliers and think what may be causing them (original emphasis) . . . We may learn about the normal by considering the abnormal, and treating the outlier as a critical case. (p. 206) More broadly, issues of data inclusion and exclusion relate to the internal validity, or trustworthiness (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) of the research; that is, whether all the data that were collected are reported on or just the data that support the

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research hypothesis or claim that the researcher wishes to make (Brown & Rodgers, 2002). All of this impacts on the accuracy of the inferences, interpretations, and actions that can be made on the basis of the research. This, in turn, impacts on the external validity or transferability (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) of the results of the study: in the case of quantitative research, whether the results of the study can be generalized to other situations (external validity), or with qualitative research, whether the interpretations made might apply to another context with which the reader is familiar (transferability). In this chapter I report on two different examples where data inclusion and exclusion became an issue for me: one where the inclusion of atypical data changed, in a significant way, the insights that were gained from the research, and another where outlier data was initially included but later excluded, even though the results remained essentially the same.

Study 1: Doctoral Writing in the Visual and Performing Arts The first study I report on is a project that I carried out with colleagues that examined doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts (Paltridge, Starfield, Ravelli, Nicholson, & Tuckwell, 2012; Paltridge, Starfield, Ravelli, & Tuckwell, 2012; Paltridge, Starfield, Ravelli, Tuckwell, & Nicholson, 2014; Ravelli, Paltridge, & Starfield, 2013, 2014; Starfield, Paltridge, & Rivelli, 2012, 2014). The data we collected for the study included 36 students’ doctoral submissions that had all passed their university’s doctoral examination process. We also conducted a nationwide survey to find out the extent to which universities were offering doctoral studies in this area (in our case in Australia). Thirty-six supervisors completed a questionnaire in which we asked about their experience in doctoral supervision, their view of “high-quality” submissions in their area of research, and the issues students faced in writing their texts. We interviewed 15 students and 15 supervisors, as well as collected university prospectuses, information given to students in relation to their candidature, published research into visual arts Ph.D. examinations, in-house art school publications, and discussion papers on the topic. We also attended roundtable discussions and Ph.D. students’ exhibition openings. Through the data that we collected, we learned about the influence of key figures in particular institutions in terms of how students might present their texts, which in a number of cases was extremely strong. For example, one text we examined seemed like an outlier in relation to the other texts in that it was quite different from many of the other texts that we had collected in terms of how it was written and the relationship it had to the visual project the student had created for the purposes of his study. The project in question was titled “Mirror as metasign: Contemporary culture as mirror world” (Haley, 2005). There were two components to this student’s submission, as there were with all the theses we

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examined: a creative and a written component. The creative component was an exhibition titled “After Reflection,” which was made up of oil paintings, light jet photographs on Perspex, and two projected works, including a large threedimensional animation that was projected onto two walls. The animation was located in a corner of the exhibition space and was intended to be viewed while wearing a set of headphones and listening to an instrumental performance of “The Girl from Ipanema.” The written component of the submission, described as a “multiperspectival mirror ball,” was broken into six chapters, or “shards,” that were, in turn, broken up into sections titled “rays.” The text was largely a separate entity from the creative component, exploring the same research phenomenon in its own way, in this case, an analysis and critique of the mirror in western visual arts practice. This was different for all of the other doctoral texts that we examined and, in this sense, was unique. The student, Stephen Haley, discussed the separation of the creative and written components in his interview, saying the work and the written component “should both be aspects of a thesis” and that “the theory wouldn’t just simply be an exegesis”; that is, an explanation of the creative work. Haley felt that while each of the components was related to the same overarching question, each must, at the same time, have its own presence and reason for being, with neither one being simply dependent on or reflective of the other. There were no references to the exhibition in his text and no images of his own work. The images that were in the text were of other artists’ work, and ones that helped support the argument he was making in his text. All of this was in contrast to the other theses that we examined where there was a clear link between the student’s creative project and the written text, which, in some cases, was both a documentation and explanation of the creative work. Haley’s submission, we found, was at the outer limits of a continuum of relations between the creative and written components in these submissions. We could have easily made a decision to exclude his work from our dataset. Keeping it in, however, forced us to change how we viewed the students’ texts and the choices that are available to them in their area of study, as well as to search for a rival explanation for why the text had been written as it had (and been accepted for the degree). In this particular case, we found that the text was an example of what was possible in one particular institution, as well as possible reasons for this, even though it may not have been possible in other institutions. We found, for example, that Haley’s doctorate had been supervised by a key person in the institution where it was submitted who was, at that time, the associate dean for research and an artist of very high standing in her field. She later went on to become director of her institution and was a person of some influence. We also learned that Haley had since become a faculty member at that institution. It is thus very likely that texts of this kind, which by some might be considered an exception, will continue to be produced at that institution and, in time, could become one of students’ favored options.

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When we gave a presentation on this project at an applied linguistics conference we were asked by several very senior people in the field why we had left this data in our study or, more precisely, if we were teaching writing to doctoral students in the visual and performing arts whether we would include this thesis in the texts that we chose to show to students. Our response was that we would, because it represents one of the possibilities they might choose for how they write their thesis. Their response though, strongly put, was that we should not, because it was not a typical or “best example” of how to write a thesis for these students. This thesis, however, had come to us as an example of a “high-quality thesis” when we asked supervisors for recommendations for sample texts that we could include in the study. In thinking about this further, we came to see that that diversity of this kind is a key feature of these areas of study and that we should make students aware of this diversity. There were, we found, multiple ways in which students could present their texts, even though these were very much influenced by local views of what is “good research,” as is the case in all fields of study. So while we cannot claim to have provided an account of all possible relations between students’ projects and their texts, it was clear to us that there is no one “correct” way of presenting a doctoral thesis in the visual and performing arts (Ravelli et al., 2013). We felt, then, that as teachers it was our responsibility to tell the students what these possibilities might be, but also to advise them of the constraints that might surround the choices that they make in relation to this (Devitt, 2004). And we wondered if the idea of “best example” (Rosch, 1973, 1975) was the way we should be looking at these texts, rather than “family resemblances” (Rosch & Mervis, 1975; Wittgenstein, 1963), which, for us, better captured the relation between this text and the other texts in our dataset and the possibilities for writing these kinds of texts. The dissertation, after all, had met the requirements for a doctoral submission in its institution and so had met the “social agreement” (Miller & Bazerman, 2011) of the field of study about ways of doing things in the particular genre in its particular academic, social, and cultural setting.

Study 2: Reviewers’ Comments on Submissions to Peer-Reviewed Journals The second study I discuss examined the language of reports written on submissions to the peer-reviewed journal English for Specific Purposes and, specifically, the ways in which reviewers asked for changes to be made to these submissions (Paltridge, 2013, 2015). One hundred and twenty people who had done reviews for the journal over the period of a year were invited to take part in the study. Fifty-seven of these reviewers agreed, just under half of the total number of reviewers for that year. Ninety-seven reviewers’ reports were collected, and 45 reviewers completed a questionnaire that asked about their experience in

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doing peer review, how they had learned to conduct them, and the issues they faced in doing these reviews. Follow-up emails were sent to reviewers in order to seek further elaboration on answers they had provided in the questionnaires. A speech act analysis (see Austin, 1962; Sbisà, 2009; Searle, 1969) was carried out of the reports in order to identity the ways in which the reviewers had asked for changes to be made to the submissions. These recommendations were then classified into kinds of speech act (such as a direction or suggestion), whether they were direct or indirect, and the relation between the occurrence of these speech acts and the category of recommendation made by the reviewers. The experience of the reviewers who had written the reviews was also considered, as this is an issue that has been suggested may have an influence on reviewing style (Belcher, 2007). The language background of the reviewers, whether they were native or nonnative speakers of English, in relation to their speech act use was also examined, as this has also been raised in the previous literature on peer review (Burrough-Boenisch, 2003). The study found that requests for changes were largely made as directions, suggestions, clarification requests, and recommendations. While a good number of these changes were requested directly, a large number of them were not. The frequency of each of these speech acts in each category of recommendation, in the original version of the paper, is shown in Table 2.1. These frequencies are normed per 500 words so as to make the frequencies comparable across all the texts, and not be affected by the different lengths of the texts (Biber, Conrad, & Reppen, 1998). The highest frequency of directions (25.8 per 500 words) in the original version of the paper occurred in the reports that recommended “accept.” This result was partly due to one longer 713-word review among the “accept” reviews that asked for 33 changes to be made to a submission. The paper was a revised submission that had previously been given minor revisions by the same reviewer, the earlier report also having contained a high number of requested, or “suggested,” changes (10 directions, 21 suggestions, and 8 clarification requests). Interestingly, while 28 of the requests for changes occurred as direct speech acts in the reviewers’ reports (e.g., “Comma needed after ‘formulaic’ in the first line of the second paragraph and p. 9 1st full para. ‘fulfill’ needs another ‘l’ at the end”), the reviewer had prefaced these requested changes with “My remaining suggestions are few

TABLE 2.1 Frequency of directions, suggestions, recommendations, and clarification

requests in the original version of the paper (per 500 words)

Directions Suggestions Clarification requests Recommendations

Accept

Minor revisions

Major revisions

Reject

All reports

25.8 3.3 0.5 —

3.8 3.8 1.8 0.1

5.0 1.6 2.3 0.1

0.8 1.5 1.2 1.5

4.2 2.0 2.0 0.4

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and editorial in nature.” Her suggestions, however, were not suggestions. They were directions, as was the case with many of the other reviews that were part of the study. Equally, while most of the changes requested by the reviewer were ones that the author could have dealt with very easily, they were not really “few” in number, as was also the case with other accept reviews in the data. One of the reviewers for my paper when I submitted it to an academic journal commented on the skewing influence of the 713 word “accept” report referred to above that may have affected the results, not only due to its length, but also due to it being a second report on the submission. Other reports in this category of recommendation were an average of 124 words, so in this sense the longer report was atypical when related to the other reports. I was aware the affect this report had had on the overall outcome of the research while I was analyzing the data and wondered at the time if should include it or not. I took the reviewer’s comment on board, however, removed this review from the dataset, and reanalysed the data without the longer report in the data. Table 2.2 shows the results of the reanalyzed data. What I found was that, although I had excluded this report, the results were still similar, although not as marked (8.5 directions rather than 25.8 per 500 words). The highest proportion of directions still appeared in the “accept” reports, however, and the fewest in the “reject” reports. This is how I responded to the reviewer when I resubmitted my paper to the journal: I have removed this review from the dataset as it was skewing the results. This has meant recalculating the data for Table 4 and revising the text that accompanies it. I have also changed the other tables and calculations accordingly. The journal editor accepted this change, and the paper was subsequently published. In the revised version of the paper the exclusion of the outlier review did not change the overall findings of the study. It just made the results less dramatic. In the doctoral study, however, the exclusion of the outlier data would have changed the results significantly and, in turn, the claims that could have been made on the basis of them.

TABLE 2.2 Frequency of directions, suggestions, recommendations, and clarification

requests in the revised paper (per 500 words) ( Paltridge, 2015, p. 112)

Directions Suggestions Clarification requests Recommendations

Accept

Minor revisions

Major revisions

Reject

All reports

8.5 3.3 0.5 —

3.8 3.8 1.8 0.1

5.0 1.6 2.3 0.1

0.8 1.5 1.2 0.08

3.8 2.0 2.0 0.04

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Conclusion It is important, then, when looking at what might seem to be outliers to go beyond the obvious and to look for alternate factors and explanations that may have led to things being as they are, as well as to consider whether what seems to be an outlier really is one. Haley’s doctoral thesis, for example, was really not an outlier. It had met his university’s requirements for the award of the Ph.D. and was considered by his peers to be a work of very high quality. His thesis, further, contributed to our understanding of the role of people of influence in determining what is considered “good” research in the visual and performing arts and what good doctoral writing is in these areas. Similarly, the longer reviewer’s report in the peer-review project was still typical of all the other “accept” reviews in the study in that it contained many more directions than reports that were written that had made other recommendations. The small size of the subset of “accept” reviews (9) in the corpus made its presence more noticeable in relation to other reviews in that group, but it was only atypical in terms of its length and the number of changes the reviewer had asked for, not in relation to the overall pattern of comments that had been made across all of the reviews. For each of the cases I have described it could be, then, that these extreme cases, or outliers, are not in fact outliers. Perhaps I should have resisted the reviewer’s reaction to my paper, as we did the comments made at the conference where we presented Haley’s thesis as an example of doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts. And perhaps the unequal power relations between me as an author, the reviewer, and the editor made me give in to the reviewer’s objection a little more easily than I should have. Had I left this review in the data, the implications of the research would have still been the same; that is, “don’t be surprised if you are asked to make changes to your submission, even if the reviewers recommend accept.” Requests for changes at this point are extremely common, and, indeed, more frequent than with other reviewer recommendations (Paltridge, 2015). And reviewers can ask for many more changes to a submission than one might expect at this stage of the peer-review process. The data that I excluded showed the extent to which this can be the case. So the question remains as to whether I should have excluded this data from the study, even though it was skewing the results when, in effect, it showed how extreme these cases might be. What seems to have happened, then, in both of the cases I have reported on in this chapter, is the result of a clash of epistemologies and related assumptions that led to the arguments being made about what data to include (or in these two cases, exclude) from the studies. Both of the studies were qualitative in orientation and although the N size for both studies were within the range of N sizes of the quantitative studies referred to earlier in this chapter, their orientation was quite different. We were not trying to generalize from our studies and were aware of this. We said, for the doctoral project: Our study, of course, has many of the same limitations as ethnographic approaches in general. One of these is the size of the sample on which our

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claims are based. Our aim, however, is not to provide a generalised statement about doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts but, rather, observations that further research might build on, and add to. Hopefully, in our fuller descriptions of this project (Paltridge et al., 2011, 2012a, 2012b; Ravelli et al., 2013; Starfield et al., 2012), we have provided sufficient details on the nature and source of our sample texts and our analyses of them, so that readers can consider the extent to which our findings can be transferred or compared to what might be found in another, similar set of texts in similar academic settings. By doing this, we hope we have been able to provide credibility, dependability and transferability (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) to our study via the “audit trail” we have left so that other people reading our research can see what we did it and how we reached the conclusions that we did. (Starfield et al., 2014, pp. 115–116) For the reviewers’ reports study I said: It needs to be pointed out that the data I examined was only from a single journal so cannot be generalized beyond this to other journals, although comparisons could be made, perhaps, to other similar journals in the same general field of study. And, of course, the frequencies referred to earlier in the paper need to be treated with caution . . . (Paltridge, 2015, p. 118) Wittgenstein (1958) discusses the issue of generalizability thus: Our craving for generality has another main source: our preoccupation with science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws. . . . Instead of “craving for generality” I could have said “contemptuous attitudes towards the particular case” . . . The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases. (pp. 18, 19) It seems, then, that both of the projects were being matched against expectations and assumptions (Hulstijn, 2014) that did not match what we were doing, our view of reality, and our beliefs about what we can know. The reviewer of my article on reviewers’ reports and the audience for our presentation were coming, it seems, from different views on what research is and what it can claim. We, rather, take the view that we should avoid looking for certainty and premature closure (Larsen-Freeman,

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2011) in these kinds of studies and leave ourselves open to what further investigations reveal about patterns of stability and variability (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008). We, thus, see decisions about data inclusion and exclusion as ethical ones, including what to do with unusual or divergent cases, as they have an important impact on what we see through our research, the understandings and explanations it might reveal, and, importantly, what we say to people about it.

References Andringa, S. (2014). The use of native speaker norms in critical period hypothesis research. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32 (3), 565–596. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Belcher, D. D. (2007). Seeking acceptance in an English-only research world. Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (1), 1–22. Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Reppen, S. (1998). Corpus linguistics: Investigating language structure and use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, J. D., & Rodgers, T. S. (2002). Doing second language research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burrough-Boenisch, J. (2003). Shapers of published NNS research articles. Journal of Second Language Writing, 12 (3), 223–243. Chaitin, J. (2003). “I wish he hadn’t told me that”: Methodological and ethical issues in social trauma and conflict research. Qualitative Health Research, 13(8), 1145–1154. Chaitin, J. (2009). Methodological quandaries in joint Israeli-Palestinian peace research. Journal of Research Practice, 5(1). Article M2. Chang, L. Y. (2010). Group processes and EFL learners’ motivation: A study of group dynamics in EFL classrooms. TESOL Quarterly, 44 (1), 129–154. Devitt, A. (2004). Writing genres. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Elgort, I. (2011). Deliberate learning and vocabulary acquisition in a second language. Language Learning, 61(2), 367–412. Field, A. (2013). Discovering statistics using SPSS. (4th ed.). Los Angeles: Sage Publications. Granena, G. (2013). Individual differences in sequence learning ability and second language acquisition in early childhood and adulthood. Language Learning, 63(4), 665–703. Haley, S. (2005). Mirror as metasign: Contemporary culture as mirror world. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Melbourne, Melbourne. Hammersley, M., & Traianou, A. (2012). Ethics in qualitative research. London: Sage Publications. Hammond, M., & Wellington, J. (2013). Research methods: The key concepts. London: Routledge. Hanson, A.E.S., & Carlson, M. T. (2014). The roles of first language and proficiency in L2 processing of Spanish clitics: Global effects. Language Learning, 64 (2), 310–342. Huang, H-T. D., & Huang, S-T. A. (2013). Comparing the effects of test anxiety on independent and integrated speaking test performance, TESOL Quarterly, 47(2), 244–269. Hulstijn, J. H. (2014). Epistemological remarks on a social-cognitive gap in the study of second language learning and teaching. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 36 (3), 361–421. Jones, K. (2011). The practice of quantitative methods. In B. Somekh & C. Lewin (Eds.), Theory and methods in social research (pp. 201–211). Los Angeles: Sage Publications. Larsen-Freeman, D. (2011). A complexity theory approach to second language development/ acquisition. In D. Atkinson (Ed.), Alternative approaches to second language acquisition (pp. 48–72). London: Routledge.

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Larsen-Freeman, D., & Cameron, L. (2008). Complex systems and applied linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Li, S. (2012). The effects of input-based practice on pragmatic development of requests in L2 Chinese. Language Learning, 62 (2), 403–438. Lincoln, Y., & Guba, E. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. Mackey, A., & Gass, S. (2005). Second language research: Methodology and design. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Marsden, E., Williams, J., & Liu, X. (2013). Learning novel morphology: The role of meaning and orientation of attention at initial exposure. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 35(4), 619–654. Miller, C. R., & Bazerman, C. (2011). Gêneros textuais (Genres). Retrieved from http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Szv6l-Il4fE. Paltridge, B. (2013). Learning to review submissions to peer reviewed journals: How do they do it? International Journal for Researcher Development, 4 (1), 6–18. Paltridge, B. (2015). Referees’ comments on submissions to peer-reviewed journals: When is a suggestion not a suggestion? Studies in Higher Education, 40 (1), 106–122. Paltridge, B., Starfield, S., Ravelli, L., & Nicholson, S. (2011). Doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts: Issues and debates. The International Journal of Art and Design Education, 30 (2), 242–255. Paltridge, B., Starfield, S., Ravelli, L., & Tuckwell, K. (2012). Change and stability: Examining the macrostructures of doctoral theses in the visual and performing arts. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 11(4), 332–334. Paltridge, B., Starfield, S., Ravelli, L., Nicholson, S., & Tuckwell, K. (2012). Doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts: Two ends of a continuum. Studies in Higher Education 37(8), 989–1003. Paltridge, B., Starfield, S., Ravelli, L., Tuckwell, K., & Nicholson, S. (2014). Genre in the creative-practice doctoral thesis: Diversity and unity. In G. Garzone & C. Ilie (Eds.) Evolving genres and genre theory: Specialised communication across contexts and media (pp. 89–105). Boca Raton, FL: BrownWalker Press. Perry, F. L. (2011). Research in applied linguistics. Becoming a discerning consumer. (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Porte, G. K. (2010). Appraising research in second language learning: A practical approach to critical analysis of quantitative research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ravelli, L., Paltridge, B., & Starfield, S. (2013). Extending the notion of text: The creative arts doctoral thesis. Visual Communication 12 (4), 395–422. Ravelli, L., Paltridge, B., & Starfield, S. (2014). Diversity in creative and performing arts doctoral writing: A way forward. In L. Ravelli, B. Paltridge, & S. Starfield (Eds.), Doctoral writing in the creative and performing arts: The researcher/practitioner nexus (pp. 389–406). Faringdon, U.K.: Libri. Révész, A., & Brumfaut, T. (2013). Task characteristics of task input and difficulty in second language listening comprehension, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 35(1), 31–65. Rosch, E. (1973). Natural categories. Cognitive Psychology, 4 (3), 328–350. Rosch, E. (1975). Cognitive representations of semantic categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 104 (3), 192–233. Rosch, E., & Mervis, C. B. (1975). Family resemblances: Studies in the internal structure of categories. Cognitive Psychology, 7(4), 573–6. Sbisà, M. (2009). Speech act theory. In J. Verschueren & J-O. Östman (Eds.), Key notions for pragmatics (pp. 229–244). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts. London: Cambridge University Press. Starfield, S., Paltridge, B., & Ravelli, L. (2012). “Why do we have to write?”: Practice-based theses in the visual and performing arts and the place of writing. In V. K. Bhatia, C. Berkenkotter, & M. Gotti (Eds.), Insights into academic genres (pp. 169–190). Bern: Peter Lang. Starfield, S., Paltridge, B., & Ravelli, L. (2014). Researching academic writing: What textography affords. In J. Huisman & M. Tight (Eds.), Theory and method in higher education research (pp. 103–120). Oxford: Emerald. Tight, D. G. (2010). Perceptual learning style matching and L2 vocabulary acquisition. Language Learning, 60 (4), 792–833. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). The blue and brown books. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1963). Philosophical investigations. (G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). (2nd ed.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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PART II

Applying Ethics to Different Linguistic Communities

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3 QUOTIDIAN ETHICS IN THE NEOLIBERAL UNIVERSITY Research and Practice Collide Sue Starfield

I would like to set the scene for this chapter by referring to two recent news articles that report on the spread of English-medium instruction in higher education and the strong desire for education abroad in English-speaking countries among Asian parents. These are but two of many recent similar news reports on related themes. In October 2013, the British newspaper, The Telegraph, published an article titled, “More European universities teaching students in English” (Paton, 2013). Based on a study carried out by the New York–based Institute of International Education, the article claims that the number of English-medium courses on offer at the postgraduate level in countries such as Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Sweden had “soared” by 38% over the preceding year. Paton comments that not only might this development have the effect of encouraging British students to choose to study abroad where the fees are cheaper than in the U.K., but can be seen as “an attempt to lure potentially lucrative international students away from the U.K. in favour of mainland Europe.” As the article points out, all these countries are “competing” to “attract high-quality international students.” In its conclusion, the article warns that “traditional destinations” to study English such as the United States, the U.K., and Australia, may lose out as the newer, cheaper competitors move in to the marketplace. Furthermore, the article tells us that recent European Union research has confirmed that English is the most popular foreign language in all but five nations. The overall tone of this brief article is uncritical and largely positive about these new developments. Its discourse, however, highlights some of the themes that this chapter will pursue: Higher education is described as a competitive marketplace; English as a highly desirable commodity in this (buyers’) marketplace; international students as “lucrative” consumers; and universities as entrepreneurial sites offering access to this good. Clearly for the journalist these themes are givens—part of everyday ways of thinking and talking about higher education.

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At about the same time, BBC News published an article with the title “Asia’s parents suffering ‘education fever’ ” (Sharma, 2013). Much less sanguine in tone, this article depicts the enormous personal and financial costs to families and individuals of the drive to educate children overseas. Many families throughout Asia are accumulating high levels of debt in order to fund their children’s education. The article claims that over 85% of Chinese parents are willing to fund study abroad: “in the past an overseas education was confined to the most privileged. Now many more want foreign degrees to give them a shortcut to success.” In 2012, for example, an estimated 40,000 Chinese students travelled to Hong Kong to take the SAT (an admissions test required by the majority of U.S. colleges). A company charged US$1,000 for the trip, and parents spent about $8,000 on tutoring. In both articles, higher education is uncritically presented as a market. The BBC article, with its slightly more analytical tone, concludes by asking whether, given the value of an overseas degree obtained at an English-medium university, parents may in fact be acting rationally in sacrificing their savings and often their health for the education of their children. Against this backdrop, the chapter now discusses the wider economic and social forces at play globally and locally within Australian universities that shape access to higher education for international students. Recounting an encounter with an international Ph.D. student in the academic skills support center where I work, I reflect on an everyday ethical dilemma shaped by many of these larger forces in which daily practices are not informed by the knowledge offered by applied linguistics research.

Neoliberalism and Higher Education We hear more and more about the “neoliberal university,” or the “university under neoliberalism.” I briefly now want to explore what neoliberalism is, and how it has reshaped/is still reshaping the university. Many of us will in fact have experienced the impact of neoliberalism on our daily lives and practices in the institutions we work in, perhaps not always consciously associating our experiences with these broader forces at play in the economic, political, and social spheres. I would like to briefly discuss my understanding of what neoliberalism is and then, more specifically, consider how the forces of neoliberalism are reshaping universities. Following that, I will describe an incident that has occurred more than once in the center where I work at a university in Australia that I see as being brought about through this reshaping. Neoliberalism refers to changes that have been occurring in advanced economies, and more recently at a global level, since the 1970s in regard to the relationship between states and their citizens (Harvey, 2007). Proponents of neoliberalism claim that the ambit of government should be minimized and wherever possible market forces should prevail. This view has led to the privatization of many services previously provided by the state. The central tenet is that if market

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mechanisms are allowed to operate freely without government interference, the economy will grow and flourish. In areas such as education, health care, or social security where markets may not exist, they must be created, by state action if necessary (Harvey, 2007). Former government agencies are corporatized under the assumption that the capitalist model of profit making is desirable and more efficient. Regulation is frowned upon. Neoliberalism does not like organized labor; trade unions are seen as antithetical to the functioning of the free market: hence in part the rise of outsourcing in organizations. The way neoliberalism works at an ideological level is that these changes appear normalized and naturalized such that they become unchallengeable (Harvey, 2007). Hamann (2009) points out that a key neoliberal strategy is to infuse “market values into every aspect of social life and shift responsibility onto individuals” (p. 41). The discursive transformation (Harvey, 2007) wrought by neoliberalism has thus extended into our everyday experience, including the reconstruction of the subject. Hamann (2009) explains that the “neoliberal subject is an individual who is morally responsible for navigating the social realm using rational choice and cost-benefit calculations grounded on market-based principles to the exclusion of all other ethical values and social interests” (p. 37). The neoliberal ethos “strives to ensure that individuals are compelled to assume market-based values in all of their judgments and practices in order to amass sufficient quantities of ‘human capital’ and thereby become ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’” (p. 38; emphasis in original). As entrepreneurs of the self we assume full responsibility for all decisions and investments in our own self-development, and consequently all failures in this realm can only be blamed on our own personal failings. Universities are a key site that has been fundamentally restructured under neoliberalism, particularly in Australia. In everyday discourse, higher education is frequently referred to as an “industry” or an “export industry.” According to most sources, education is Australia’s third largest export, just after coal and iron ore (Marginson, Nyland, Sawir, & Forbes-Mewett, 2010). In Australia, virtually all universities are public institutions. From 1974 to 1989, higher education was free to all local students, and the universities received the bulk of their funding from the federal government. In 1987, 83% of university funding came from the federal government; by 2009 that contribution was 44% (National Tertiary Education Union, 2013). From the 1990s onwards, successive governments in Australia have progressively reduced their contribution to universities’ funding, with about 40% of funding now coming from the central government (Marginson et al., 2010). Universities have been forced to look elsewhere to replace this funding. One of the key sources of funding has been the “lucrative” international student market, particularly students from Asia. International students now constitute, on average, 20% of the student body at most Australian universities (Australian Universities Guide, 2014). At a large number of universities close to 30% of the students are international. International students pay very high fees both for tuition and

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accommodation. An undergraduate degree in 2013 could cost about $32,000 per annum for tuition and a Ph.D. a minimum of $26,000 per annum over at least 3 years for fees alone. Some international Ph.D. students receive scholarships, but many do not. Many international students also take part-time jobs in order to support themselves during their studies—often in service-sector employment such as fast food outlets, supermarkets, restaurants, cafes, etc. Australian universities’ fee income from international students in 2011 was around $4.1 billion (Norton, 2013). International students also spend money on accommodation and other living expenses while in Australia, although the amount is difficult to quantify (Norton, 2013). The Grattan Institute, an Australian public policy think tank, reports that “direct fee and student contribution payments by students, mainly from international students, were 13% of total university revenue in 1997 (then $12.5 billion), but 23% in 2011, out of a total of $23.7 billion” (Norton, 2013, p. 47). According to the Grattan Institute, “the need for international student revenue has meant that universities have become ‘recruiting’ institutions, competing for highly mobile students who could choose not only among Australian universities, but between universities in several different countries” (Norton, 2013, p. 50). The Institute further points out that “there is no legal ceiling on the fees universities can charge international students. Only market forces regulate maximum fees” (Norton, 2013, p. 54). Complex legislative requirements govern international higher education in Australia. The Education Services for Overseas Students (ESOS) Act includes a national code of practice for registration of authorities and providers of education and training for overseas students (Australian Education International, 2007). Standard 1 of the code states, inter alia: “Marketing information and practices must be professional and ethical” and that “Information or advice given to students must not be false or misleading” (Australian Education International, 2007). We can see the impact of neoliberalism in the globalization of higher education where league tables1 pit universities in competition with one another. Those of us who work in universities are subject to intensive regimes of measurement and audit in which our outputs are measured and our hours accounted for. League tables of course become important marketing and recruitment tools for universities in the competition for the “top” students. English, too, it has been argued, has become associated with neoliberalism (see Block, Gray, & Holborow, 2012), which proposes that English is the new world language or the language of globalization (see also Singh & Doherty, 2004). English then simply becomes “an indispensable asset in terms of gaining access to higher education or the ranks of professionals, a mastery of English helps one gain upward or outward mobility” (Li, 2013, p. 78). Again, this discourse has become almost commonsensical, and as the two newspaper articles I discussed earlier show clearly, English is a highly desired commodity in the global education market, as it appears to provide a competitive advantage to those who speak it.

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International Students at the Learning Centre It is against this backdrop that I wish to now describe an incident that took place last year in the Learning Centre where I work. The Learning Centre is an academic skills support center where any enrolled student may seek support for their academic study. I shall say a bit more about its work below. This small incident that “disturbed the familiar” of my everyday world (Sullivan, 1996) is the springboard for the reflection that constitutes the remainder of this chapter as I first describe the Learning Centre and its offerings to students, the position of international students in the university, and go on to consider aspects of the space between research and practice that we daily navigate. On the day in question, an international doctoral student came into the Learning Centre seeking help because her supervisor (in Australia students mostly have one advisor with a cosupervisor who does not necessarily get closely involved) was refusing to read her draft chapters unless she had them proofread prior to submitting them. At first I thought the student had got it wrong. Surely this couldn’t be a requirement for a draft chapter? Could the student have misunderstood perhaps? The student explained that the supervisor did not want to spend time correcting her English but wanted to be able to focus on the content of the chapter. None of the services that we provided was going to be able to help the student “proofread” her chapter to the level of detail required. She left with our proofreader list. I wondered if the supervisor had thought about what the cost to the student was going to be. I thought about the high tuition fees that the student was already paying, her accommodation costs, and her living costs and wondered how on earth she was going to pay a proofreader at least $30 per page to proof each successive draft chapter of the thesis. In the course of last year, we had several more requests of this nature with fairly stressed students seeking assistance on the chapter drafts so that the supervisor would be prepared to read and comment on them. Of course, as many here present would know, university campuses these days tend to have advertisements for proofreading services pinned to noticeboards around the campus and online services offering proofreading proliferate on the Web—all for a fee. Think about the cost for a Ph.D. thesis—for the final draft alone the cost would be substantial, and if each draft chapter is proofed at least once before the supervisor reads it, the costs escalate. The Learning Centre is fully funded by the university to provide academic skills support to all enrolled students. There is no charge for any of the services. Students can take a presessional 10-week English for Academic Purposes course through the commercial arm of the university, but this will cost them about $5,000. The Learning Centre, serving a university population of over 40,000 students, with a ratio of one full-time equivalent staff member to 6,443 students and one full-time equivalent staff member to every 1,746 international students (based on 2011 data) does not have the resources to provide this level of English

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language support. The Learning Centre functions much like how I imagine a North American writing center functions, with individual consultations and workshops as well as extensive online resources. Students can book up to five individual consultations per semester to see a peer writing consultant—these are doctoral students who are trained to provide feedback to students on their writing. As these sessions are very popular, not all students will be able to access their entitlement of five sessions. In addition, we offer a 10-week, 20-hour course each semester on advanced academic writing specifically for international students from a non-English-speaking background. There are also thesis writing support groups on offer in which a small group of students (four to five) meets with a facilitator for five sessions. We also offer semester-long courses in thesis writing in some faculties for all students, not only international students. So there is quite a bit of support available for doctoral students. I should add that I also offer workshops throughout the year for supervisors on how to assist their students with their thesis writing. We also explicitly state that we do not offer proofreading. What do we mean when we say this? We state that we don’t “correct or check grammar and spelling, or offer a proof-reading or editing service. It is not our role to ‘proof-read’ or correct grammar or other errors in an assignment. It’s important to develop your own editing strategies. Try attending a workshop in editing skills or grammar. Use a computer spell-check, find a competent friend and a good dictionary.” We do, however, have a list that we make available to students of people, often retired academics or teachers, who do “proofreading” for a fee. We have typically made this list available to doctoral students who are nearing completion and want to have their dissertation proofread before final submission for examination. We make it clear on the list itself that we cannot vouch for the quality of any of the people on the list or recommend a specific person; we advise students to either ask for references from previous clients of the proofreader or to ask the proofreader to proof a small number of pages first to see if they meet the students’ standards. So it was this list that I offered to the Ph.D. student whose supervisor wanted her to have her draft chapters proofread. We have no idea of what the proofreaders do in practice. As shown in the work of Nigel Harwood and colleagues (Harwood, Austin, & Macaulay, 2009; Scott & Turner, 2008), proofreading in the contemporary university covers a wide range of activities. It may reference the final polishing of a manuscript before it is sent for examination or publication (perhaps the more commonly accepted sense of the term); it may mean correction of grammatical errors, spelling, typos and referencing mistakes, copy editing, and improving written English expression or more significant editorial work. I should acknowledge here that we are acting as brokers of a sort—in a minimarket. Former students, retired academics, and unemployed Ph.D. graduates have set themselves up in business and having heard about our list contact us to ask to have their names added to the list. There is not just the list we offer but

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individuals and businesses are advertising their proofreading/editing services all over the university and online. In line with neoliberal thinking, a completely unregulated “market” of proofreaders and student customers has developed. Some of the work that universities could be doing to support the students they accept (if, for example, centers like my own were better funded) is effectively being “outsourced” to private providers. As Harwood et al. (2009) point out, research indicates that nonnative speakers of English lack networks to turn to for assistance, relying on their supervisors and tutors for editorial assistance. Yet, as the incident I’ve described indicates, supervisors are for many different reasons either reluctant or unable to provide this assistance. Hence the student (and others, subsequently, in the course of the year) who came seeking help.

High-Stakes Language Proficiency Testing and the Ethical Dilemma Currently, international students wishing to enroll in a doctoral program at my university (and the bulk of Australian universities) require an IELTS score (the main international English language proficiency test in use, published by the International English Language Testing System [IELTS], though there are other tests and pathways) of 6.5 overall and 6.0 in all four subtests of writing, reading, speaking, and listening. It is commonly known that IELTS itself has long recommended that the minimum “acceptable” level, indicating that no further English support is required, is an overall band score of 7.5—a whole band higher than current entry at the majority of Australian universities (IELTS, 2013a, p. 13). Students with a 6.5 are, however, considered by IELTS to be in need of additional English support, particularly for courses deemed linguistically demanding. O’Loughlin (2011) comments, with reference to the university at which he works, that “like other English medium educational institutions around the world, this university seems to have decided to ignore this guideline because of intense competition with other universities for full-fee paying students” (p. 151). There are no specific IELTS or other proficiency tests for doctoral students— undergraduate and postgraduate students take the same test, although writing a doctoral thesis would be considerably more demanding than completing an undergraduate degree. If decisions about preparedness for doctoral study were being made on the basis of English language proficiency, then it would seem that many of the students would be deemed not adequately prepared for academic study (I am of course aware that English language proficiency is one factor among many in student success in their academic studies). Research into raising IELTS entry cut-off scores carried out at an Australian university found that raising international postgraduate students score from 6.0 to 6.5 with a minimum of 6.0 in reading and writing would result in loss of almost 70% of the enrolled students (Feast, 2002). Universities’ reluctance to raise entry scores to what IELTS considers “acceptable” is thus understandable.

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Some of the research supported by IELTS itself has shown that it takes a minimum of 200 hours of language instruction for students to advance by 0.5 of a band in IELTS. Elder and O’Loughlin’s (2003) study showed that 10–12 weeks of intensive English language instruction (minimum 200 hours) resulted in an average gain of about half a band overall, and greater gains were made in the lower rather than the higher bands. So for a student with a band score of 6.5 to progress to the “acceptable” level of 7.5, at least 400 hours of English language instruction would be needed. Because 6.5 is considered a higher band score, the likelihood of achieving the gains seen by Elder and O’Loughlin would be less. A recent study carried out at another Australian university found that of 40 undergraduate students admitted with an IELTS score of 6.5 a relatively small number (six)—“the exception rather than the rule” (Craven, 2012, p. 43)—were able to achieve an overall band score of 7.0 with 7.0 in all four subtests when tested on nearing completion of their studies several years later. There is what Craven has called an “unwritten assumption” (p. 5) that once the student is enrolled in an English-medium environment the student’s language will improve through a sort of immersion effect. Unfortunately, this appears not to be the case. Craven comments: “Those who promote study in Australia and other English-speaking countries have a responsibility to raise students’ awareness of this” (p. 44). We also know through research that the kinds of writing assessed in an IELTS test are very different to the kinds of writing students will need to participate in at university (Moore & Morton, 1999). Specifically, no components of the test resemble the type of extended, argumentative writing required at the doctoral level. It is important to note that I am not specifically critiquing IELTS here. I am describing a system that works to provide “consumers” of the “products” that universities now market often via large-scale, high-stakes tests. IELTS as an organization in my view acts as ethically as a large commercial organization is able to, funding research into its tests and their consequences as well as making information widely available to those who take the tests and the users of the tests results. I specifically refer to IELTS here because it is “the most heavily marketed and accepted test for prospective international students in Australian universities” (O’Loughlin, 2011, p. 20). IELTS, for example, is careful to provide the following caveats on its website, providing a more nuanced approach than those adopted by most universities that simply decide on a band score that will provide a sufficient number of students without overly diminishing quality: The level of English needed for a non-native speaker student to perform effectively varies by situation and institution. That is why each individual institution should set its own minimum IELTS score for applicants, depending on specific institutional and programme requirements. (IELTS, 2013a, p. 13)

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Setting IELTS requirements for academic entry: Universities and other academic institutions are responsible for setting their own IELTS band score requirements. It is vital that these institutions have a clear understanding of the contribution that IELTS scores can make in determining an applicant’s suitability for entry, including the relative importance of scores in the four skills for particular academic courses. (IELTS, 2013b, p. 13) Furthermore, research, much of it funded by IELTS, has investigated relationships and correlations between IELTS scores and subsequent academic performance. As reported by Hyatt and Brooks (2009), the outcomes of these projects have generated variable conclusions; some studies have found a weak positive association between academic performance and IELTS scores, whereas other studies have found no statistically significant relationship between IELTS and academic performance or have had inconclusive results. They found only one study that suggested a moderate association between the two variables. There might therefore be some justification in asking on what basis test users, in particular university decision makers, are making decisions based on test results. A growing body of research into stakeholder perceptions of language proficiency tests, again funded in the main by the IELTS organization, is suggesting that those within universities who have responsibility for making admission decisions based on the test scores presented by potential students are operating with limited information and understanding of the meaning of the scores. O’Loughin (2011), for example, found that there were a number of serious flaws in the interpretation and use of test scores at a large Australian university during the selection of international ESL students by administrators and academics. He argues that reliance on a single test score for making high-stakes decisions about student admission should be replaced by “multi-judgement systems” (p. 147) that involve the collection of other data, including “language aptitude, references from their home university or language study institution, an additional discipline related written proficiency assessment, and self-assessment” (p. 147). He concluded that at the university where he carried out his study administrators and academics involved in student selection tended to attribute predictive powers to a specific language proficiency test but that “there was no principled basis for originally establishing IELTS minimum entry scores in this context, including use of the test guidelines” (O’Loughlin, 2011, p. 158). This is the ethical dilemma my colleagues and I confront almost on a daily basis: Research data tells us that the English language levels required by universities are lower than the minimum level that would enable students to successfully engage in higher education in Australia (and other English medium universities), that their likelihood of significant improvement during the course of their studies is limited, and that admissions’ decisions are frequently being made by test

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users who have limited understandings of the basis on which they are making their decisions. Students come seeking assistance with their thesis writing, yet we are not adequately resourced to provide it. Supervisors of doctoral students are subject to complex workload formulas that attempt to regulate the amount of time they can allocate per week to their doctoral students. As this varies from school to school it is difficult to come up with an exact figure, but 2 hours per student per week seems about average. This is not a lot of time to read through a draft chapter and provide detailed feedback. Moreover, supervisors receive little formal training in how to provide feedback to students, particularly nonnative English speakers. One response to the situation I have been describing has been the institution of post-entry diagnostic academic literacy/English language assessment at a number of Australian universities (Read, 2013). Students who have been offered a place at the university are told on arrival that they must take a diagnostic assessment of their English language abilities that typically identifies key areas of weakness across the areas of writing, reading, and sometimes listening. The federal government regulator of universities or auditor, largely in response to public concern about the English proficiency of international students, now appears to be requiring that universities take a level of responsibility for developing the English levels of the students they take in. Ironically, these diagnostic assessments tend to resemble IELTS and other well-known proficiency tests. Their consequences are different because their outcomes do not mean the difference between gaining a place at a university and not gaining one. They are, however, a response to the universities taking little cognizance of the knowledge about language proficiency and academic success and the kinds of knowledges needed to make informed decisions about students who are likely to succeed. Given the points made above about the limited resources of centers like my own, even when “diagnosed,” it is clear that it will be difficult to meet the needs.

Conclusion It could be argued that, as in the case of the Chinese parents described in the BBC News article I referred to at the beginning of this chapter, hiring a proofreader is in fact a rational response to being admitted to a Ph.D. program without adequate language skills. I do not wish to be seen as portraying students as passive victims of an oppressive system, and many are savvy consumers in the complex higher education markets that have been created. A cost-benefit analysis might argue that such a large investment is being made already in the Ph.D. program that the relatively much smaller investment more than justifies the eventual returns to be made; that is, graduating with a Ph.D. from a prestigious (high on league tables) English-medium university. Consistent with neoliberalism as outlined earlier in this chapter, the “problem,” however defined, has

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become the student’s alone to solve. As David Harvey (2007) points out, in the neoliberal universe, failure such as failing to successfully complete a doctoral thesis becomes attributable to the person’s own weakness, lack of drive, and poor work ethic. This micro issue for me encapsulates a number of issues that bear ethical implications. How responsible is the university to support students it accepts? Who within the university bears this responsibility? The supervisor who agreed to supervise the student, centers like mine, the graduate research school that admitted the student, the committees that set the entry requirements? The federal government that is responsible for funding cuts to universities pushing them into charging high fees to international students? The forces of global capitalism that have embraced neoliberal economic theories? What about the role of the test developers and marketers, now a lucrative global industry? What might it mean to act in ways that are ethical in the current conjuncture? I am daily challenged by these questions as I encounter students seeking “proofreading” in all its guises, and I hear students burst into tears as they sit outside my office with a writing consultant who suggests that a useful strategy is to “ask a friend to read through your assignment before you submit it.” Why are they crying? They have no friends to ask I hear them say. Within this context and constraints, how do applied linguists act ethically and responsibly to enable students to achieve their full potential and support faculty in their endeavors, in theoretically informed ways? Barbara Kroll has written about what she called the “promised land” of support for students from non-English-speaking backgrounds. Her vision is one that I find ethically most satisfying. Promised lands, unfortunately, are almost by definition unattainable: The promised land . . . is one in which each and every NNES [nonnative English-speaking] student at an English-medium campus would have access to programs of study and support systems that are designed to promote mastery and excellence in academic English in ways that most address the local and specific needs of those students, whoever they may be and at whichever campus they are studying. (Kroll, 2006, p. 298) How, within these complex contexts in which our knowledge and experience of research come into collision with everyday practices that take little cognizance of the research, do we enact what Pennycook (2001) has called “an ethical vision of responsibility to others” (p. 137)?

Note 1. In some contexts, league tables are also referred to as university rankings.

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References Australian Education International. (2007). The national code of practice for registration authorities and providers of education and training to overseas students 2007. Retrieved from https://aei.gov.au/Regulatory-Information/Education-Services-forOverseas-Students-ESOS-Legislative-Framework/National-Code/Pages/default. aspx. Australian Universities Guide. (2014). Student numbers at Australian universities. Retrieved from http://www.australianuniversities.com.au/directory/student-numbers/. Block, D., Gray, J., & Holborow, M. (2012). Neoliberalism and applied linguistics. London & New York: Routledge. Craven, E. (2012). The quest for IELTS band 7.0: Investigating English language proficiency development of international students. IELTS Research Reports, 13, 1–61. Elder, C., & O’Loughlin, K. (2003). Investigating the relationship between intensive language study and band score gain on IELTS. IELTS Research Reports, 4, 208–254. Feast, V. (2002). The impact of IELTS scores on performance at university. International Education Journal, Special Conference Issue, 3(4), 70–85. Hamann, T. H. (2009). Neoliberalism, governmentality, and ethics. Foucault Studies, 6, 37–59. Harvey, D. (2007). Neoliberalism as creative destruction. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 610 (1), 21–44. Harwood, N., Austin, L., & Macaulay, R. (2009). Proofreading in a UK university: Proofreaders’ beliefs, practices, and experiences. Journal of Second Language Writing, 18(3), 166–190. Hyatt, D., & Brooks, G. (2009). Investigating stakeholders’ perceptions of IELTS as an entry requirement for higher education in the UK. IELTS Research Reports, 10, 17–68. International English Language Testing System. (2013a). Guide for educational institutions, governments, professional bodies and commercial organisations. Retrieved from http:// www.ielts.org/institutions.aspx. International English Language Testing System. (2013b). Ensuring quality and fairness in international language testing. Retrieved from http://www.ielts.org/institutions.aspx. Kroll, B. (2006). Toward a promised land of writing: At the intersection of hope and reality. In P. K. Matsuda, C. Ortmeier-Hooper, & X. You (Eds.), The politics of second language writing: In search of the promised land (pp. 297–305). Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Li, D.C.S. (2013). Linguistic hegemony or linguistic capital: Internationalization and English-medium instruction at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In A. Doiz, D. Lasagabaster, & J. M. Sierra, English-medium instruction at universities: Global challenges (pp. 65–83). Bristol, U.K.: Multilingual Matters. Marginson, S., Nyland, C., Sawir, E., & Forbes-Mewett, H. (2010). International student security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore, T., & Morton, J. (1999). Authenticity in the IELTS academic module writing test: A comparative study of Task 2 items and university assignments. IELTS Research Reports, 2, 74–116. National Union of Tertiary Educators. (2013). Historical perspective of university funding. Retrieved from http://www.investinuniversities.org.au/resources/links_background/ historical_perspective_of_university_funding. Norton, A. (2013). Mapping Australian higher education. Grattan Institute. Retrieved from http:// grattan.edu.au/publications/reports/post/mapping-australian-higher-education-2013. O’Loughlin, K. (2011). The interpretation and use of proficiency test scores in university education: How valid and ethical are they? Language Assessment Quarterly, 8 (2), 146–160.

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Paton, G. (2013, October 10). More European universities teaching students in English. The Telegraph. Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/ 10369467/More-European-universities-teaching-students-in-English.html. Pennycook, A. (2001). Critical applied linguistics. New York: Routledge. Read, J. (2013). Issues in post-entry language assessment in English-medium universities. Language Teaching, 47(1), 1–18. Scott, M., & Turner, J. (2008). Problematising proofreading. Zeitschrift Schreiben. Retrieved from www.zeitschrift-schreiben.eu. Sharma, Y. (2013, October 22). Asia’s parents suffering “education fever.” BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24537487. Singh, P., & Doherty, C. (2004). Global cultural flows and pedagogic dilemmas: Teaching in the global university contact zone. TESOL Quarterly, 38 (1), 9–42. Sullivan, P. (1996). Ethnography and the problem of the “other.” In P. Mortenson, & G. Kirsch (Eds.), Ethics and representation in qualitative studies of literacy (pp. 97–114). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

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4 NARRATIVE OF ETHICAL DILEMMAS IN RESEARCH WITH IMMIGRANTS WITH LIMITED FORMAL SCHOOLING1 Martha Bigelow and Nicole Pettitt

This chapter will explore some of the unique ethical issues we have confronted in our research with immigrants in Minnesota who have limited experience with formal schooling. These ethical issues, we find, often intersect with methodological and theoretical issues, therefore raising the importance of this discussion for researchers in the field of applied linguistics. Here, our approach is to turn to our own narratives as a way of making sense of our past experiences, as well as a means of inviting other researchers into dialogue (Riessman, 2008). Furthermore, by sharing narratives of the research process, we believe that researchers can demystify the process of doing ethically grounded research and, in the process, mentor others. Most of our research involves immigrant language learners with limited formal schooling (e.g., Bigelow, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011; Bigelow & King, 2014, in press; King & Bigelow, 2012; Pettitt, 2013; Pettitt & Dillard-Paltrineri, 2014; Pettitt & Tarone, 2015; Tarone, Bigelow, & Hansen, 2009). We have moved among doing second language acquisition (SLA) research, community-based research, and classroom-based ethnographic research—and this paper draws on all of these experiences. The population of learners we focus on has been referred to as limited formal schooling (LFS) students, students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE), or low-educated second language and literacy acquisition (LESLLA). In this paper, we will use SIFE, a term that is used in many states and often in federal documents, albeit more frequently in K–12 settings than in adult settings. Nonetheless, we recognize that it is still constraining, as it defines a group of learners by what they lack—formal education. We admit that researching SIFE in the United States is in many ways similar, but in other ways unlike doing research with other immigrants or on language learning among other types of learners. While we recognize that there are many studies that

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include immigrant learners with interrupted formal schooling (e.g., De Costa, 2010; Oliver, Haig, & Grote, 2009; Perry, 2008; Warriner, 2004; Wood, 2011), the main challenge is that there is not a deep tradition of SIFE-focused research in general, and even less scholarship about doing this research within engaged, reciprocal, feminist, and activist frames. Therefore, with few exceptions (e.g., Perry & Mallozzi, 2014), we do not have a roadmap for questions we have about the research process with SIFE as researchers with highly literate learners do. We look to meta-level scholarly work with minoritized populations for insights. For example, Aleixo, Hansen, Horii, and Un (2014) discuss dilemmas with their research with immigrant communities; namely, the ongoing nature of informed consent in ethnographic research, challenges with representing participants, and insider–outsider dilemmas. Likewise, Thorstensson Dávila (2014) offers reflections on what it feels like to bring Vietnamese youth participants with limited formal schooling into her research process and share with them her field notes and findings. She explores critical ethical questions surrounding voice, language, authenticity, and ownership of research data or texts rarely discussed in journal articles but central to qualitative epistemologies. In general, SIFE learners are likely to be very new to the sort of relationship that they would encounter with a researcher and to the idea of educational, anthropological, or SLA research. Is it ethical to carry out research with participants who may not reach the point of being fully informed participants? If so, what does ethical research look like? Research approaches that work well with other groups may not necessarily work well with SIFE, and it is important for the research community to broaden our ways of understanding SIFE by turning to a range of methods and methodologies that could be adapted with this population and then rigorously examine and critique how they unfold in practice. Even with in-depth training in a wide range of research methodologies and epistemologies, many researchers find that they are surprised by what they learn when carrying out their work with SIFE. We were. The contexts and individuals we and our colleagues work with and in are often unique (e.g., in nontraditional classrooms, in communities rather than institutions), and there is a frequent feeling of not knowing exactly how the research process will unfold and what emotional, intellectual, and logistical skills we will need to develop to be able to produce knowledge that is relevant to SIFE and teachers of SIFE. SIFE researchers working within institutions must be careful not to exploit the implicit trust many refugees or immigrants have in their teachers and those their teachers signal to them as trustworthy. While researchers want to be useful to stakeholders (and we are all ultimately stakeholders when it comes to SIFE), we also want to contribute to academic research programs in teacher education, language learning pedagogy/curriculum theory, and SLA, among others. As SIFE researchers take, with some trepidation, untried or adapted methods into SIFE contexts, knowing they have blind spots and that they are continually developing intercultural understanding, their ability to conduct socially and ethically responsible

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research is constantly at risk. We risk losing relationships we have worked hard to cultivate, and we risk the chance that SIFE will become suspicious of teachers or researchers or those in charge of the contexts in which data were collected (e.g., librarians, community center supervisors, literacy council workers). We aim to argue here that the nature of a SIFE researcher’s social and ethical responsibility in SIFE contexts is understood through exploring in-the-moment decisions (Cameron, Frazer, Harvey, Rampton, & Richardson, 1993) rather than, for example, by embracing guidelines for ethical research set forth by universities or school districts. We hope that our examples illustrate that the process of doing ethically and socially responsible research is much more interpersonal, intercultural, and in-the-moment than research in mainstream SLA/education contexts. At the same time, we recognize that our discussion may apply to researchers across disciplines, working under institutional assumptions that research standards can be applied uniformly.

Ethically Important Moments If we begin with issues of access and ethics, SIFE present unique challenges. Many SIFE researchers worldwide have been instrumental in helping institutional review boards (IRBs) understand our populations of learners. A simple example is the fact that many IRBs have refined rigid practices of obtaining assent or consent to participate in research—from a signature on a consent form to confirmation in the oral modes. It is essential to be able to do informed consent orally, multilingually, and dialogically with SIFE. Nevertheless, it is important to point out that this sort of principle of obtaining informed consent in any modality suitable to the participant does not necessarily guarantee that consent is obtained ethically. Obtaining informed consent in ways that account for low levels of print literacy (e.g., consent is done orally) is what Kubanyiova (2008) terms a “macroethical” principle of respect for individuals. However, accounting for low print literacy does not take into account the complexities of consent with respect to the context and the relationships with the researcher, in the same way highly literate participants can be coerced into giving consent. Even the most careful dialogue and multilingual conversation around consent can result in coercion because a participant may feel obliged to cooperate and does not want to disappoint the researcher. A person outside the world of academia may not feel entirely free to decline participation or to drop out of a study in the way those with insider perspectives do. This may happen because the participant feels personally grateful or indebted to the researcher or might fear that the research project is somehow connected to school or social services and does not want to jeopardize opportunities or benefits. The research process of consent, in this example, creates or intensifies an unequal relationship between researcher and participants (Cameron et al., 1993). Therefore, many research scenarios call for on-the-spot research decisions about the ethics of informed consent. Kubanyiova (2008) calls these microethical moments. Rather

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than solely aiming to meet the macroethical, or overarching, principles of consent as imagined and required by institutional and ethics review boards, we argue that these ambiguous moments are what make up the microethics of our work; that is, those layers of small, in-the-moment decisions about how to engage with participants and others in the research context, as well as issues of representation and dissemination of findings. In other words, the macro- and the microethical levels are important to all research, but can be particularly complicated when doing research with SIFE. What SIFE researchers often encounter in their work, despite following macroethical principles of research, are what Kubanyiova (2008) calls ethically important moments in which the principles of ethical research may prove to be ambiguous or contradictory. Kubanyiova (2008) turns to ethics of care (similar to Noddings, 1996) to understand the premise that research is a relational activity demanding researcher sensitivity to, and emotional identification and solidarity with, participants (p. 506). This premise can be seen in the narratives that follow. It is essential to attend to the relational nature of research with SIFE in order to carefully bring this unique population into what we know about language learning. SIFE are crucial to the development of strong theories of second language learning that include a broader range of lived experiences (Ortega, 2005) and multilinguals without formal schooling or print literacy (Bigelow & Tarone, 2004). Likewise, the scholarship on cultural adaptation and teacher learning will benefit greatly by considering populations that fall outside the majority of immigrant language learners. To do this, however, means to rethink macroethical principles in the moment, as well as in the analysis, and that caring for participants includes a process of backing off from certain procedures, questions, or even research methods if they seem to compromise participants’ comfort, trust, or dignity.

Advocacy and Engaged Research Most SIFE researchers have, or acquire, a strong advocacy component to their work. The way we have seen this play out strongly aligns with the way feminist theorists (e.g., Sullivan, 1992) have pushed the boundaries of research, calling for reciprocal, collaborative, and mutually beneficial relationships among researchers and their participants (Powell & Takayoshi, 2003). This may occur as researchers learn how SIFE populations are so often underserved and how frequent it is for teachers to lack the required training to teach them. Reciprocity most likely occurs through close, personal relationships, which often lead to mutual learning/humanizing of all involved (e.g., Bigelow, 2010; Ibrahim, 2014; Watson, 2010). In this paradigm, researchers and participants both have the potential to experience empowerment, and research processes can lead to action or advocacy as a product. Other times, advocacy informs research, turning research into new directions with new purposes (see Bigelow, 2010, for an example). For us, research is an engaged experience, meaning it is with and for

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SIFE rather than about or on SIFE (Ngo, Bigelow, & Lee, 2014). This stance, or positionality, in our work brings with it certain commitments. For example, we reject framing SIFE as passive or incapable, as superheroes or naïve. We reject essentializing individuals into ethnic categories and reject the notion that SIFE are a monolithic group with predictable goals and needs. We also concur with Cushman (1998) who rejects “missionary activism,” as an often uninvited and paternalistic way of being in a relationship with an individual or a community. In this humanizing process, with individuals rather than with populations, the experience of carrying out research is a constant inquiry into self and the limits of our own professional and personal assets. Engaged research is not unproblematic. In Mogadishu on the Mississippi (2010) I (Bigelow) give accounts of how my research with Somali teens led me to collaborating with community members on issues related to interactions with the police force—an arena far beyond my academic area expertise. I also served in an expert witness role in a lawsuit against a school district on behalf of SIFE, an uncomfortable role given my university role as a teacher educator and an ally to public schools serving immigrant students. My conclusion is that it is important for researchers to engage as advocates, despite risks, as long as this is done in collaboration with community members and as long as the (symbolic) power differences are named and discussed. Awad Ibrahim, in his recent call for “I-thou research ethics” (2014), discusses how a new relationship and a new language is required when it comes to conducting research with immigrant communities. In this new paradigm, “research” becomes “dialogue”—a genuine conversation in which the “insider” and “outsider” distinction is problematized. We understand Ibrahim’s call to recognize research as a dialogic process in which researchers can be community insiders and participants can be theorists, as “strong poets who need to write vigilant, critical and visionary verses that we have not heard yet” (emphasis in original, p. 8). Ibrahim is proposing a human exchange in the research process with immigrant communities, one in which communication and understanding is achieved through a total release of power, through an almost sacred exchange of genuine dialogue (Buber, 2002), by truly being present, and through a living mutual relationship. This vision for how to be with others is daunting, perhaps paralyzing, but it sends a clear message for taking great care of relationships in research with immigrants/SIFE, for spending time with people, for letting go of assumptions for continually suspending judgment, and for continually examining issues of positionality.

Informed Consent and Data Sources in Research with SIFE In this section we will outline how our research methods in two different studies played out with SIFE and in SIFE contexts. The first study was an ethnographic classroom study focusing on SIFE strategies for acquiring print literacy in which

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Bigelow and her coresearcher, Kendall King, chose data sources that are typical for classroom-based research—class observation notes, interviews, copies of student work, video, and literacy assessments. The second study, carried out by Pettitt, consisted of traditional SLA tasks as well as qualitative, descriptive data collection during a weekly tutoring relationship with the participant over the course of several months. We begin this section with Bigelow and King’s process of gaining access, which is often a barrier to doing research in public school settings in general, and different when hoping to gather data from SIFE. (For specific examples of the results of the ethnographic classroom study, see Bigelow and King, 2014, in press, and King and Bigelow, 2012.)

IRB and Access in a Classroom Study The context for Bigelow and King’s research consisted of two sections of a beginning reading class in an all-immigrant alternative high school in a large urban school district in Minnesota. We were granted permission early in the academic year to sit in on classes and the school’s weekly Professional Learning Community (PLC) time in which teachers worked together on curriculum, instruction, and assessment data. However, obtaining permission to begin data collection took about 5 months due to the need to work through the district permission process, which was much more difficult than our University of Minnesota IRB process. The first thing the district justifiably asked us to address was how our research would line up with district initiatives and how it would benefit students. Because of the engaged nature of our study, these questions were easy to answer. Our presence would give students more help with their English language skills through one-on-one interaction during class time and after school. The teacher in whose class we conducted the research often said she was glad for our presence in the classroom because we served as aides during instructional moments when students were working alone, in groups, or to give accommodations during a quiz. The district IRB, however, conf lated the role of teacher as a mandatory reporter with our role as researchers. In other words, in our assent/consent process we needed to promise the district that we would report anything the students told us that suggested that they may be in danger of abuse, just like any educator or counselor. This language was very difficult to navigate in the consent process because we were very concerned that this topic, framed in legalistic ways, would needlessly worry participants. It would also take them away from considering participating in the study based on activities we would be doing in class (videotaping) and that we would ask them to do (take a literacy test, participate in interviews, share their work). In the end, we were allowed to eliminate this topic from our consent process, and the negotiation helped clarify for the district what the purpose of our study was and what our role as researchers was in

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the project. That said, we did end up having a situation where we needed to contact the school social worker because one of our participants told us about abuse she was experiencing in her home. We did this with her permission after explaining that a social worker would contact her. In the end, we are unsure whether she would have felt comfortable refusing this referral, but we needed to act as mandatory reporters because she was in an unsafe situation. This event illustrates one instance where the consent process becomes murky and researchers need to work very hard to represent themselves and their roles as clearly as possible to participants, but at the same time act in what they feel are the best interests of the participants, if a situation arises. Our experiences with consent continued after finally obtaining official access from the school district and the teacher, but the real work of consent was yet to begin—that which involves negotiating consent with SIFE. The teacher gave us the opportunity to present our project to the class with the help of educational assistants (EAs) from the school, who together spoke Swahili, Oromo, Amharic, and Somali. Because we spoke Spanish, most students in the two classes we approached had the opportunity to ask questions in their home language(s) and we could answer questions collectively and multilingually with the help of the EAs. The Lao students seemed to understand the conversation in English based on their nonverbal responses, questions, and subsequent willingness to participate. We used simple, colloquial language to talk about consent. For example, we said things such as the following: “Remember, this is up to you, and no one will be mad at you if you don’t want to do it. You can change your mind later. You can say yes today and no tomorrow if you want.” Most of the students in the class were 18 or over and could give their own consent. Those who were minors needed to get permission from a parent or guardian, again with the offer of school interpreters to help with questions. There was a memorable question one of the Somali students asked: Nadifa wondered, “What will you do for us?” Clearly, she had a high level of awareness that we were asking for a favor and she was in a position to ask for something in return. (We offered after-school tutoring and the chance to practice English.) Not all of the students in both classes agreed to participate, and they expressed this decision explicitly or by their actions. We felt that the immigration/legal status of some of the participants was a factor in participation, although they did not say so (e.g., once they found out about the video, they were unwilling to participate). Others who agreed, but would not show up for scheduled interviews, were implicitly telling us they were not in the study, and we removed their data from the corpus. There were also instances when a participant would move the video recorder such that it would not focus on them that day, but other days verified continued consent by participating in interviews, sharing schoolwork, etc. All of these examples are illustrations of how informed consent (as a macroethical principle) is an ongoing process that is highly relational and contextual involving

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microethical decisions. These examples also illustrate how SIFE participants are agentic, like participants with high levels of education, but their means of refusal may be less direct.

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Data Sources and Lessons Learned Roba’s SLA: Beyond Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency In fall 2011, I (Pettitt) carried out a small research study for a graduate-level course in SLA at the University of Minnesota. A former coworker connected me with “Roba” as a potential participant, and we first met on a chilly, gray day in late November 2011 in the dining room of the church where his classes met. We began by chatting about the research project, and then negotiated how our relationship might become reciprocal. I suggested 1 hour a week of one-on-one reading tutoring in exchange for SLA research data collection; Roba excitedly agreed to tutoring, but advocated for meeting more frequently or for longer than 1 hour at each meeting. My schedule did not allow that, but I promised to meet at least twice a week during my school breaks, which we did. Roba shared that he was in his late 20s, had been in the United States for about 7 years, and had begun English classes for the first time approximately 2 months prior to our meeting. His school had placed him in English 1 (i.e., National Reporting System level “Low Beginning ESL”) due to his score on the CASAS reading test. However, his listening and speaking abilities were far higher, as he had learned a great deal of English naturalistically in community contexts—on the job, with friends, by watching movies, and “listening and trying things out” (Pettitt & Tarone, 2015); he expressed frustration with attending an English class that was not a match for his abilities, yet recognized that there were no classes in the community that focused solely on reading and writing—the areas where he needed the most support. He reported that he had not learned to read in any of the seven languages he spoke, and had begun English classes a few months earlier, specifically to learn how to read. Thus, Roba and I began to meet once or twice each week for an hour of reading tutoring. At the same time, I began collecting data for my SLA class project, which was a study of complexity and accuracy in learner language (Tarone & Swierzbin, 2009); ultimately, I continued to collect data throughout the remainder of the school year, because Roba was open to the research project and I had institutional permission to extend the study. Overall, our tutoring relationship lasted for 9 months, and during 6 of these months I also collected research data. For this study, I conducted a number of pre- and post-tasks in English with Roba in November 2011 and May 2012: interviews, question tasks, retell tasks, narrative tasks, comparison tasks, and “reverse interviews”—that is, with Roba in role of interviewer, instead of interviewee. (See Pettitt and Tarone, 2015, for a full description of data collection strategies utilized.) As I began analyzing

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Roba’s oral language for markers of accuracy and complexity (i.e., past-tense marking, negation, question formation, syntactic complexity), a few dilemmas emerged. First, I encountered a disconnect between the traditional SLA analyses I was employing and my perception of Roba’s communicative competence. The data indicated that Roba’s spoken language was marked by low morphosyntactic complexity and accuracy—yet, from my weekly tutoring sessions with Roba, I knew him to be a skilled communicator. He was adept at initiating and continuing conversations, expressing sympathy, and making jokes and comments that drew on knowledge of historical figures and pop culture. For example, during a conversation surrounding immigration in the United States, he referenced the movie Scarface, as well as historical relations between the United States and Cuba, to discuss legal differences between asylee status and refugee status in the United States. The fact that we successfully engaged in complex conversations in English surrounding historical, social, political, and cultural concerns was evidence of Roba’s communicative competence, I thought. Similarly, at many points in my data analysis I could not tell which of Roba’s speech forms might be coded as “errors” and which might be considered fluent, informal speech. For example, as reported in Pettitt and Tarone (2015), Roba asked the following questions of his interlocutors during data collection, “So, what kinda car you drive?” and, “Oh, what kinda language you speak?” According to traditional conventions of English question formation, the operator “do” is missing in these utterances. However, as stated earlier, up until the 2 months prior to the beginning of our research relationship Roba had learned English in community contexts, and the naturalistic nature of his initial language learning was not to be overlooked: If his questions were produced in social contexts that privilege informal speech, the forms he used would be considered appropriate. Further, I did not know what Roba’s target language varieties might be; perhaps these question forms were “evidence of (Roba’s) success in acquiring a form in the English dialect that provides the bulk of the input” (Bayley & Tarone, 2011, p. 60). So, was I to code Roba’s questions as reflective of a language learner in early developmental stages of question formation (Pienemann, Johnston, & Brindley, 1988)? Or rather, as the speech of a sociolinguistically sophisticated language user who had learned English mostly in naturalistic settings? I also wondered: If Roba had been using English since childhood, how might researchers code his questions? This might appear to simply be an issue of data interpretation, but in actuality it carries greater ethical implications (Ortega, 2005). I had the opportunity to disrupt monolingual norms (Cook, 2002), which required putting aside singular notions of “accuracy” and “complexity,” and considering what CAF measures (i.e., complexity, accuracy, and fluency) reveal—and do not reveal— about linguistic and communicative competencies with different learners. Since these analyses, I have moved into examining Roba’s language use and learning through the lenses of conversation analysis (Pettitt & Dillard-Paltrineri, 2014) and narrative analysis. I would encourage SLA researchers working with

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SIFE—especially SIFE who have engaged in naturalistic language learning—to carefully examine the fit between measures and methods used and the nature of participants’ previous language learning experiences and trajectories. Logically, this implies that we “come to theoretical terms with the challenges and contradictions faced by so many language learners” (Menard-Warwick, 2005, p. 181), which includes considering the contributions of learners’ naturalistic language learning experiences and broadening our notions of “communicative competence” as indicated by our participant data.

Video Data, Being a Participant Observer, and Literacy Assessments Turning again to Bigelow and King’s classroom-based research, the main data source ended up being our video recordings of normal classroom activities. We would recommend using video with this age group, in this context, despite the additional hurdles necessary to obtain permission. While we anticipated some opposition to the cameras for religious reasons, we learned that the video recorders were unproblematic for most students, most of the time. They quickly became acclimated to the cameras—at first playing with them by filming themselves or their friends and later just ignoring them. It was impossible to avoid capturing video recordings of some of the students who did not consent to participate because we typically set the camera in a single location through the class period and went about our business taking field notes and working with students while the camera recorded. Our solution was simply not to transcribe or analyze recordings from students who did not agree to participate. Surprisingly, one challenge in this collaborative research, carried out in 2011, was figuring out a way to share video data. We chose an internal system built by the University of Minnesota, and through this system we were able to give only each other and our graduate assistants access to the videos. We believe that our data are safe here, but still feel cautious about having data anywhere beyond our own computers and backup drives. Being a participant observer is a constant negotiation of roles and has been explored extensively in books about classroom research (e.g., Hammersley, 1986; Nunan & Bailey, 2008; Schachter & Gass, 1996). We knew that participating was nonnegotiable for us due to the fact that the class was large and multileveled, with new students arriving weekly. It was best when we were both present in the classroom, because we could share roles of field note gatherer and class helper. But sometimes we were alone and had to make field notes after the class was over or move between our computer and working with students. In this process of deciding where and how to be in the class we found that we encountered many microethical decisions. Do we act like teachers by helping with, checking, and praising work? It was important to us to assist, and this was both a way we could get physically closer to students’ learning as well as give back to the students and

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the teacher for allowing us to do our research with them. With SIFE populations, it seems that observing from a distance is not a luxury we have, unless we can bring more collaborators into the class to afford some the opportunity to only observe. Large high school classes with vast differences in literacy level are far different from, for example, a university-level Japanese class, where an additional educator in the room may not be needed or may be an unwelcome distraction. In the class we were working in there were countless times when we could be useful to the teacher or the students (e.g., offering a student specific accommodations during a quiz, doing partner work with a student who had just arrived). Plus, it is important to interact one-on-one with participants to understand and document what is occurring as they learn. It is very difficult to track individual microlevel language and literacy learning over time in a classroom setting, even with numerous examples of student work and interactions with them. Artifacts from the classroom are often produced collaboratively, and quality is often determined by the students’ engagement and how much time they were allotted for the task. Classroom SLA research, carried out naturalistically (without intervention), is extremely challenging. In order to attempt to capture rough data on the participants’ native language literacy, we asked them to complete the Native Language Screening Device (New York State Education Department, n.d.) in their most dominant home language as well as in English. We felt that it was essential to do these assessments with the participants in addition to talking with them about their prior schooling because we wanted to have evidence, albeit limited, of their skills. The reality of what occurred was not so cut-and-dried. We administered these literacy assessments wherever we could, and this meant doing them in the library after school during homework help. There were multiple times when a participant was working on the test and other students would wander over to see what was going on and inevitably assisting. Because we were present, we could still see what the student could do in both languages, roughly. We know that learning among SIFE is usually a collaborative and communal enterprise, and we want other researchers to consider including, in a systematic way, assessments carried out collaboratively. The decision to permit the seeming sabotage of the validity of this instrument was another microethical decision we made. Researchers often need to modify their tasks, but the way in which this measurement activity occurred was particular to SIFE. There was no point in asking a participant to struggle alone given the very broad and still exploratory nature of the Native Language Screening Device. In fact, we learned more about the literacy level of the participant in this collaborative context than if we had strictly adhered to an individual administration protocol (e.g., that the learner performed better when she understood the instructions via an explanation in Somali, that the learner performed better after getting used to seeing Somali text, or that the person assisting had more skills than she showed when she did the assessment before knowing us). We would recommend, however, more and different literacy instruments to learn more

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about what participants can do in their home language(s) and in English. We would also suggest devising more and better ways to monitor literacy development among participants. Perhaps some should be completed independently and others cooperatively and multilingually. There is much to know about carrying out classroom-based and SLA research with SIFE from a methodological standpoint. It is important for SIFE researchers to share their experiences and strategies for gathering data with SIFE, regardless of context. Microethical decisions are likely only made when contextual information (including relational information) is used.

Researcher Positionalities and Limits of Subjectivity: What We Think We Know Occasionally during tutoring with Roba critical incidents occurred that caused me (Pettitt) to (re)examine what I thought I knew, and to consider the limitations of what may be available for me to know, both as a researcher and a teacher. The following excerpt describes one of those incidents; it is drawn from a researcher reflection I wrote at the beginning of April 2012. On another note, last week, I discovered that Roba actually speaks seven languages, not six. I ran down to make a copy at the end of our tutoring, and when I came back, he was on his cell phone, speaking a language I didn’t recognize. I asked him what it was and he said, “Harari.” He explained that his mother is/was half Harari-half Oromo, and his father is/was Harari. (I don’t know if they are alive. He never talks about them and I haven’t asked.) He said he spoke Harari and Oromo at home growing up, and still uses Harari with his uncle who lives in town and other family members. . . . I went so far to subtly ask why he had originally told me he was Oromo. He said that he identifies as Harari-Oromo ethnically, and that he had told me he was Oromo because he knew I would know what that was. He said he thought that saying he was Harari to me would be like asking an African person to distinguish between Ecuador and Mexico—if they’ve never heard of those places, how are they going to know? (I have some slight disagreement about his chosen analogy, but that’s not relevant here . . . ) That morning, I discovered part of myself through Roba’s explanation. He assessed one of my limitations correctly: I had not heard of the Harari language or people prior to that morning of tutoring. It is uncommon for SLA researchers to encounter the linguistic diversity common, even unremarkable, among SIFE. Their international migration paths often result in multilingualism that expands far beyond the regions of their birth. The educated learners that populate Intensive English Programs across the United States are frequently monolingual and

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learning English as their only other language. I thought back to the day Roba and I met, and began to ponder the internal decision making Roba may have engaged in when I asked about his background, as well as how it mirrors and differs from my own self-identification(s). Like Roba, I (re)present myself differently according to audience and circumstance; for example, in circles that I perceive are skeptical about the value of higher education, I avoid mentioning my career path and Ph.D. studies when introducing myself. I wondered: What is gained and what is lost when Roba, I, and others identify according to how (we perceive) an interlocutor will comprehend the identities we present? How might my answers to that question change if I had ever faced the dilemma Roba faced when he met me, and upon meeting others who are limited in the ways that I am (and was)—specifically, the dilemma that an interlocutor (or many different interlocutors over the course of several years) had not heard of my home country, of my ethnic identities, or of the languages that I speak? The privilege I experience as a white, fourth-generation U.S., middle-class woman protects and prohibits me from knowing the answers to that question. Roba revealed his Harari identity to me over 4 months after our tutoring and research relationship began—and then, only because I heard him speaking a language I did not recognize and asked what it was. I will never know if Roba would have (re)presented himself to me as Harari as he came to know me more. Was it by chance that I was allowed this window into Roba’s identity? If not for the somewhat unremarkable events of that morning of tutoring in March 2012, I might now be representing Roba in academic journals as an English learner who ethnically identifies as Oromo (not Harari-Oromo) and speaks six (not seven) languages. This incident underscored for me the importance of interrogating the representations I craft of myself, as well as those of my students and participants—a reminder that applies across research contexts, and echoes calls for reflexivity and awareness of researcher subjectivity. However, I also wonder what is accomplished through ongoing “monitoring” of my researcher subjectivity (Peshkin, 1991, pp. 293–294). Pillow (2003) argues that reflexivity (and by extension, subjectivity) should not be considered as a form of catharsis, nor a measure of validity or legitimacy in qualitative research (p. 179), aligning with Patai’s (1994) position that “we do not escape our positions by writing about them endlessly” (p. 70). Since these concerns are relevant regardless of research context, how, then, are we to proceed? Pillow (2003) encourages researchers to set aside narcissistic or simplistic reflexivities and subject positions for “reflexivities of discomfort,” which she describes as “practices of confounding disruptions—at times even a failure of our language and practices” (p. 192). She further cautions against uncomplicated “success-in-failure” narratives: “What I am advocating is the necessity of an ongoing critique of all of our research attempts, a recognition that none of our attempts can claim the innocence of success (even in failure) . . .” (p. 192).

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With this in mind, I offer the following uncomfortable reflexive note: Neither Roba nor I are fully knowable subjects. Thus, there are limitations surrounding what is available for me to know about myself: No matter how much I reflect on my subjectivity, I may never know the ways participants and students know me and position me, and how this is affecting my research and representations of it. Yet, this does not absolve me from interrogating my subjectivity and problematizing my performances as researcher. Similarly, what is available for me to know about others is bounded; even my reports of participant age, ethnicity, country of origin, years of education, language(s) spoken, etc. are not mundane and should acknowledge the fluidity and permeability of the personal histories and identities that inform the reports.

Conclusion We hope that these narratives are useful to other researchers as they explore their overlapping roles of researcher, teacher, and advocate. Our intention is to urge researchers to be critical of research that is presumed ethical by IRBs without careful reflection on in-the-moment microethical decisions mediated by researchers with a high level of reflexivity in their research process. We also hope to welcome researchers of many different paradigms into research related to SIFE. This is especially important when exploring learning and education with individuals with vastly different backgrounds than our own. There is not one way of knowing, and different epistemologies may help counterbalance a heavily western way of understanding phenomena related to SIFE. There is a serious need to guarantee reciprocity in the research process because SIFE need allies like us. We have entailments to SIFE concerns ranging from the personal (e.g., “I need a ride to the doctor”), to the practical (e.g., “We need ideas for how to teach our students”), to the political (e.g., “Our state needs legislation so SIFE don’t ‘age out’ of high school when they reach the age of 21”). Finally, our research community needs to continue to increase our repertoire about how to do research with SIFE. We do not always know what best practices are in many cases, and when using common research methods such as interviews, classroom observations, focus groups, or even traditional SLA data collection, it is not always obvious if or how these methods should be adjusted for SIFE. Similarly, throughout our research processes, questions of representation are continually present. As researchers, we must decide how we will represent in print and in oral presentations those who participate in our research and, by extension, ourselves; the representation decisions we ultimately face have their roots in numerous prior choices and encounters in the research process—both expected and unexpected. Thorstensson Dávila (2014) reminds researchers that we are limited, especially when we do not share similar histories with our students and research participants, and she encourages us to pursue “representations that have meaning, albeit temporary, or partial to those that use them” and to

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engage in “representation as an act of caring” (p. 30). At this juncture in research with SIFE, the ethics of that path may still be somewhat fuzzy; for that reason, we again encourage more SIFE researchers from a variety of research traditions to continue this dialogue, shedding light on those aspects of our research that are frequently hidden, so that we may constructively question ourselves and one another in our efforts to coassemble a more robust base of SIFE research ethics.

Note 1. We are very grateful to Jill Watson and Patsy Vinogradov for discussions and for copresenting with us on this topic in a symposium at LESLLA in San Francisco in 2013. We are indebted to Suhanthie Motha for extremely helpful comments on this manuscript.

References Aleixo, M., Hansen, S., Horii, S., & Un, S. (2014). Theory ain’t practice: Four novice researchers navigate dilemmas of representation within immigrant populations. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 8 (1), 32–43. Bayley, R., & Tarone, E. (2011). Variationist perspectives. In S. Gass & A. Mackey (Eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 41–56). New York: Routledge. Bigelow, M. (2007). Social and cultural capital at school: The case of a Somali teenage girl with limited formal schooling. In N. R. Faux (Ed.), Low-educated adult second language and literacy acquisition proceedings of symposium (pp. 7–22). Richmond, VA: Literacy Institute at Virginia Commonwealth University. Bigelow, M. (2008). Somali adolescents’ negotiation of religious and racial bias in and out of school. Theory into Practice, 47(1), 27–34. Bigelow, M. (2010). Mogadishu on the Mississippi: Language, racialized identity, and education in a new land. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Bigelow, M. (2011). (Con)texts for cultural and linguistic hybridity among Somali Diaspora youth. The New Educator, 7(1), 27–43. Bigelow, M., & King, K. (2014). Somali immigrant youths and the power of print literacy. Writing Systems Research, 6 (2), 1–16. Bigelow, M., & King, K. (in press). Peer interaction while learning to read in a new language. In M. Sato & S. G. Ballinger (Eds.), Peer interaction and SLA. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bigelow, M., & Tarone, E. (2004). The role of literacy level in SLA: Doesn’t who we study determine what we know? TESOL Quarterly, 39 (1), 689–700. Buber, M. (2002). Between man and man. London & New York: Routledge. Cameron, D., Frazer, E., Harvey, P., Rampton, B., & Richardson, K. (1993). Ethics, advocacy and empowerment: Issues of methods in researching language. Language and Communication, 13(2), 81–94. Cook, V. J. (2002). Background to the L2 user. In V. J. Cook (Ed.), Portraits of the L2 user (pp. 1–31). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Cushman, E. (1998). The struggle and the tools: Oral and literate strategies in an inner city community. New York: SUNY Press. De Costa, P. I. (2010). From refugee to transformer: A Bourdieusian take on a Hmong learner’s trajectory. TESOL Quarterly, 44 (3), 517–541.

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Hammersley, M. (Ed.). (1986). Controversies in classroom research. Philadelphia: Open University Press. Ibrahim, A. (2014). Research as an act of love: Ethics, émigrés, and the praxis of becoming human. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 8 (1), 7–20. King, K. A., & Bigelow, M. (2012). Acquiring English and literacy while learning to do school: Resistance and accommodation. In P. Vinogradov & M. Bigelow (Eds.), Low educated second language and literacy acquisition, proceedings of the 7th symposium (pp. 157–182). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kubanyiova, M. (2008). Rethinking research ethics in contemporary applied linguistics: The tension between macroethical and microethical perspectives in situated research. The Modern Language Journal, 92 (4), 503–518. Menard-Warwick, J. (2005). Intergenerational trajectories and sociopolitical context: Latina immigrants in adult ESL. TESOL Quarterly, 39 (2), 165–185. New York State Education Department. (n.d.). Native language screening device. Albany, NY: Author. Ngo, B., Bigelow, M., & Lee, S. J. (2014). Introduction to the special issue: What does it mean to do ethical and engaged research with immigrant communities? Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 8 (1), 1–6. Noddings, N. (1996). The caring professional. In S. Gordon, P. Benner, & N. Noddings (Eds.), Caregiving: Readings in knowledge, practice, ethics, and politics (pp. 160–172). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nunan, D., & Bailey, K. M. (2008). Exploring second language classroom research: A comprehensive guide. Boston: Heinle ELT. Oliver, R., Haig, Y., & Grote, E. (2009). Addressing the educational challenges faced by African refugee background students: Perceptions of West Australian Stakeholders. TESOL in Context, 19 (1), 23–38. Ortega, L. (2005). For what and for whom is our research? The ethical as transformative lens in instructed SLA. Modern Language Journal, 3, 427–443. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4781. 2005.00315.x Patai, D. (1994). (Response) When method becomes power. In A. Gitlen (Ed.), Power and method (pp. 61–73). New York: Routledge. Perry, K. H. (2008). From storytelling to writing: Transforming literacy practices among Sudanese refugees. Journal of Literacy Research, 40 (3), 317–358. Perry, K. H., & Mallozzi, C. A. (2014). Who gets to say?: Political and ethical dilemmas for researchers in educational linguistics. In M. Bigelow & J. Ennser-Kananen (Eds.), Handbook of educational linguistics (pp. 397–413). New York: John Wiley. Peshkin, R. (1991). The color of strangers, the color of friends: The play of ethnicity in school and community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pettitt, N. (2013, March). A LESLLA learner’s oral language development. In E. Tarone & A. DeCapua (Chairs), Call for research: Low-literate adolescent and adult L2 learners. Invited colloquium conducted at the meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics, Dallas, TX. Pettitt, N., & Dillard-Paltrineri, B. (2014, March). Discourse coherence in the oral language of an adult SIFE: A conversation analytic approach to measuring L2 acquisition. In A. DeCapua (Chair), Understanding language learning among students with limited or interrupted formal education. Colloquium conducted at the meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics, Portland, OR. Pettitt, N., & Tarone, E. (2015). Following Roba: What happens when a low-educated multilingual adult learns to read? Writing Systems Research, 6 (2), 1–21.

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Pienemann, M., Johnston, M., & Brindley, G. (1988). Constructing an acquisition-based procedure for second language assessment. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 10 (2), 217–243. Pillow, W. S. (2003). Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as a methodological power in qualitative research. Qualitative Studies in Education, 16 (2), 175–196. Powell, K. M., & Takayoshi, P. (2003). Accepting roles created for us: The ethics of reciprocity. College Composition and Communication, 54 (3), 394–422. Riessman, C. K. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Schachter, J., & Gass, S. (Eds.). (1996). Second language classroom research: Issues and opportunities. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Sullivan, P. (1992). Feminism and methodology in composition studies. In G. Kirsch & P. A. Sullivan (Eds.), Methods and methodology in composition research (pp. 37–61). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Tarone, E., Bigelow, M., & Hansen, K. (2009). Literacy and second language oracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tarone, E., & Swierzbin, B. (2009). Exploring learner language: A workbook for teachers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thorstensson Dávila, L. (2014). Representing refugee youth in qualitative research: Questions of ethics, language, and authenticity. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 8 (1), 21–31. Warriner, D. (2004). “The days now is very hard for my family”: The negotiation and construction of gendered work identities among newly arrived women refugees. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 3(4), 279–294. Watson, J. (2010). Interpreting across the abyss: A hermeneutic study of initial literacy development by high school English language learners with limited formal schooling (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. Wood, K. (2011). Writing together: Building community through learner stories in adult ESL. TESOL Journal, 2 (2), 239–248.

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5 ETHICAL DILEMMAS AND LANGUAGE POLICY (LP) ADVISING Joseph Lo Bianco

The Horkos The paradigmatic case of ethical professional practice is the horkos (Ὅ), commonly known as the Hippocratic Oath (Edelstein, 1943). Essentially, this involves invoking a curse on violators of commitments made in swearing an oath (or on those who swear insincerely). Originating in Ancient Greece, the Hippocratic Oath is associated with physicians swearing to practice medicine honestly and is the historical source of many formal procedures for ethical practice in western, and a variety of other, cultural traditions. The horkos originally required novice physicians to swear to healing gods that they would comply with high ethical standards in their professional dealings. The gods, usually the Olympian deity Apollo, son of Zeus and Leto, and three medicinal deities, the healer Asclepius, principal god of Medicine in Greek and Roman mythology; his daughter Hygeia (personification of sanitation and therefore of good health); and the deity of remedy, Panacea. Swearing to this mini-pantheon required the presence of witnesses, who functioned as external checks on the essentially internal process of ethical regulation. The overarching goal was to “never do harm to anyone,” to find motivation solely in the “good of my patients,” to keep “far from all intentional ill-doing and all seduction, especially from the pleasures of love with women or men, be they free or slaves.” The World Medical Association (WMA) adopted a version of the oath at its 1948 General Assembly and through five modifications adjusted its language, tone, and character to produce the Declaration of Geneva, converting it into a secular and socially inclusive public declaration (WMA, 2014).1 The modernization of the ancient horkos was also a response to gross violations of professional practice during the 20th century, especially the mass complicity

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of medical professionals under the Third Reich, though abuse of medical practice was far more widespread than Nazi medicine (Harris, 2002). Far less conceptually developed or historically grounded is the ethical regulation of academic life in general (Sikes & Piper, 2011), and specifically applied linguistics and language policy (LP) research and advising. When undertaken as university-based research, LP is ethically institutionalized in diverse ways. In my institution, the University of Melbourne, ethical regulation is coordinated (though its administration is distributed across faculties and schools) by a university-wide Office of Research Ethics and Integrity (OREI; see http://orei. unimelb.edu.au/). Stressing the importance of “research integrity” the current director informs visitors to the website that the OREI: is a clearly identifiable home for . . . activities that relate to the responsible conduct of research and research ethics. . . . help[s] researchers navigate the sometimes confusing realm of governance and compliance. . . . [and that] . . . discussing principles of research integrity amongst your research colleagues and especially with students is a very important part of being a researcher. (http://orei.unimelb.edu.au/content/director-oreis-welcome) We can see here an elaboration of the two modes of ethical regulation imagined in the horkos, those of internal-personal regulation and its check by external witnesses. The elaboration involves the addition of collegial discussion, supplementing the internal and external regulation with horizontal conversation with peers. In the work I describe here, this kind of locally debated ethical practice has proved to be critically important. University ethics procedures cover the range of epistemological assumptions and methodological approaches for scholarly research conducted domestically. These procedures are less clearly defined for research activities conducted internationally, though such international projects are usually governed by formal contracts that stipulate the required personal conduct of academics working as consultants beyond their national jurisdictions. While ethical quandaries and challenges occur in most applied linguistics activities, LP is particularly prone to ethical concerns because it deals with professional decisions about the prestige, standing, and corpus of other people’s forms of communication. These decisions are often influenced by the research of applied linguists and, in the cases discussed in the present chapter, are directly shaped by professional advising. Despite the elaborate machinery of ethical regulation that modern universities deploy, many sensitive and important practices in LP advising escape any form of ethical guidance or regulation. This chapter discusses ethical dilemmas in LP in high-stakes settings where I have been commissioned as an external advisor to facilitate writing of language policies. The “external” procedures in university protocols and contractual obligations are

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generally adequate for research components of such work, but as forms of regulation they are inadequate for the complex fieldwork setting, the often unusual practice of deliberation, the main methodology used, and the sensitive nature of the work.

Ethical Quandaries in LP Advising The focus of the work here is a series of facilitated dialogues, also known as deliberation conferencing, deliberation, or mediated dialogues (Lo Bianco, 2012), conducted with key stakeholders. The aim is to write problem-solving language policies and propose these to the relevant authorities for implementation. I have been commissioned to facilitate these dialogues in three conflict-affected zones in Southeast Asia: Malaysia, Myanmar, and Thailand (Heijmans, Simmonds, & Van de Veen, 2004; McCargo, 2008; South, 2008, 2011; Storey, 2007), as part of a wider UNICEF project on language education, democracy, and peacebuilding as means for social cohesion. The chapter touches only briefly on the general nature of LP, since its focus is professional advising and policy drafting, rather than research directed at new theory, program evaluation, or general analysis of language policies. A host of concentrated ethical dilemmas arise in the project remit that calls for research and analysis into language conflicts, not for academic purposes, but for intervention in problem-solving activity. The facilitated dialogues are formal discussions convened to tackle contentious issues around language problems mostly, but not exclusively, in education. The dialogues bring together three groups of stakeholders: public officials, citizens or civil society organizations (activists or community representatives), and various kinds of experts. The role of facilitator is to guide discussion, aiming maximally to resolve disputes around contested language problems, or minimally, to foster greater understanding of the nature of the issues being debated, as well as acceptance and understanding of the views of different groups and individuals in relation to these problems. Some of these “contested language problems” are extremely contentious, associated with chronic discontent, and occasionally with violence and civil unrest, whereas others are more technical or specialist in nature. In the course of the deliberations there is frequent need to cite research evidence and to generate research studies to support longer-term solutions to the problems, but the main activity is structured debate and participation activities. I conducted 14 such dialogues and deliberation conferences between June 2013 and October 2014. Ethical challenges, dilemmas, and problems surface at any stage of a dialogue, and it has proved necessary to anticipate, negotiate, and confront questions of ethics as a central component of their planning and implementation. What follows is a reflection on ethical quandaries that I have extracted post hoc from these dialogues, drawing on my journal entries and notes written during and immediately following the dialogues; notes, correspondence, and discussions

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with participants, interpreters, and assistants; evaluation sheets designed, gathered, and collated by UNICEF officials from several of these dialogues; and, finally, outcome reports, press releases, promotion material, and official documents related to the dialogues. In keeping with the more elaborated ethical notion required by the university, I discuss ways in which my academic background and professional/researcher perspectives influence interpretation of ethics and enactment of ethical practices. Some aspects of the normal ethical requirements of applied linguistics and university-based research clearances apply more than others. For example, procedures for securing access to participants are unproblematic, because most are adult activists, public figures, or officials, and their participation is inherent in the contracts that have secured my involvement. Other procedures of research and practice are more salient; clearest is the disclosure of interests, priorities, views, and perceptions of various roles—those of expert/researcher/facilitator/ mediator. Occasionally, there is tension concerning the identity and public role of participants in dialogues. This can be acute when public acknowledgment of contributions made by participants is needed, as with press statements, signing of accords, lists of attendees, organizational affiliations, and provision of contact details. In two cases what was particularly problematic was the formal declaration of outcomes achieved through deliberation, especially when issued publicly. Contentious points revolved around “ownership” of texts written collectively in dialogue sessions and attribution of views or opinions to individuals and organizations. Participant anonymity is sometimes needed, especially when individuals who participate in publicly advertised deliberation work are associated with groups engaged in dispute or even open conflict with authorities. At times there is concern about the physical and reputational safety and security of participants given that tensions around the questions being discussed are the direct cause or are implicated in violent conflict between antagonist parties.

The Settings The present account concerns ethical dimensions of practice in settings in which I am, culturally and in terms of political citizenship, an outsider. My presence is framed as a LP academic expert, commissioned by and working for an international multilateral agency, UNICEF, invited by the host countries concerned to undertake the work in question. The scope and limits of the work are negotiated in response to the requests by the host country for support in resolving language problems that are the cause of social conflict. In the discussion that follows it is clear that ethical questions arise not only because of the complexity and tensions inherent in the settings of the work, but because of ambiguity and the shifting nature of roles. The role of “advising” in such contexts carries significantly more ethical ambiguities than normal research assignments because of important practical consequences of the activity. This is

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exacerbated because participants often include marginalized populations, usually ethnic or indigenous minorities, and part of the role involves facilitating collaborative relations between such groups and public officials. In the best of circumstances, officials seek efficient cost-effective solutions to problems, and see their responsibility to political authorities, and through them, to citizentaxpayers. However, in practice some are ill informed or hostile to the needs and demands of constituent populations such as minorities, who, in turn, are sometimes untrusting of the intentions, probity, and neutrality of officials. The third category of participant is the expert, interpreted broadly to include teachers, principals, local historians, researchers, writers, and others who are neither in official decision-making positions nor are representatives or delegates of local citizen or community groups.

Deliberation Conferencing Various kinds of mediated encounters or conversations, especially deliberation conferences, emerge from theories of deliberative democracy and have become an important feature on the agenda of research into collective problem solving and democratic practice in several social science disciplines. Approaches to practical problem solving inspired by principles of “discursive democracy” (Dryzek & Niemeyer, 2008) have expanded exponentially to encompass insights from activity theory, communicative theory, argument mapping, critical thinking, applied epistemology, intelligence augmentation, collective wisdom, hive minds, deliberative democracy, and so on (Blackler, 2011; Engeström & Glăveanu, 2012). This outpouring of activity is part of an effort to devise new modes of discursive policy making concerned to overcome communication barriers between the citizens and public or corporate administration with their impenetrable managerialism. In real-world language problem solving, as Fishman (1994) has observed, “very little language planning practice has actually been informed by language planning theory” (p. 97). In the two decades since this observation, with the intensification of globalization and the greater mobility of populations, the need for language planning to resolve communication difficulties in society has become acute. Yet Fishman’s observation remains broadly true today. As such, few trained professional language planners and little of the body of knowledge of language-planning theory is utilized in LP practice. In this context deliberation conferences are a promising addition to the tools and methods of LP because they fuse together research, aimed at discovery, and decision making, aimed at action. Dryzek and Niemeyer (2008) point out that the goal of deliberation should generally be to achieve a “meta-consensus” on the range and structure of beliefs, values, and preferences, as opposed to simple agreement on a course of action, the ranking of policy options, or the content of values. The facilitated dialogues discussed form part of a Language Education and Social Cohesion (LESC) project commissioned by UNICEF in Malaysia,

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Myanmar, and Thailand under that organization’s Peacebuilding, Education and Advocacy Programme. In each case the aims of LESC are adapted to accommodate the political priorities of the national setting and the basis on which it has negotiated its participation with UNICEF. Accordingly, in Malaysia the focus is to make a contribution to “national unity,” in Myanmar to “peacebuilding,” and in Thailand, specifically in the restive southern provinces, the aim is to contribute to “conflict resolution” (Lo Bianco, 2013). Each facilitated dialogue focuses on a distinctive “problem issue,” and when run in a sequence, the focus is on sequential aspects of the selected problem issue. Most dialogues involve 25–35 stakeholders, as indicated above, selected from the categories of community representative, public official (or politician), and expert (teachers, researchers, consultants). All involve multiple languages; the Mae Sot dialogue (Michaels, 2014), for example, was run in six languages. The following nine dialogues have informed the writing of this chapter: 1. Indigenous and Ethnic Rights in Myanmar Education, Yangon, June 27–29, 2013. This was funded by the Australian aid agency, which hosted the activity. It was conducted within a wider ethnic education seminar, and comprised 2 days of work on principles and practices for ethnic language rights in education, in English, Burmese, Karen, and Mon languages, with smaller group work in several others. 2. High-Level Policymakers Forum, Bangkok, November 9, 2013. This dialogue comprised 35 participants from 14 countries, all senior government officials. It was conducted in English, with two tables working in Vietnamese and Khmer. 3. Language and Peace in South Thailand, Hat Yai, Thailand, February 5–7, 2014. Violence immediately preceding this dialogue reduced the participant numbers to 23 from the original acceptance list of 35; it was conducted in English with translated materials, activities, and workshops in Thai and Malay. 4. Language Policy Forum, Eastern Burma Community Schools, Mae Sot, Thailand, February 12–14, 2014. The focus of this dialogue was Myanmar, but to involve displaced and refugee populations it was held in a small border town in Thailand. The dialogue comprised 68 participants from 12 ethnic groups and 22 organizations working in six languages. 5. National and Vernacular Schools, Kuala Lumpur, April 9–10, 2014. Conducted in English and Malay, this involved 34 participants, with two groups of participants working in Chinese and Tamil (KL). 6. Indigenous Communities, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, May 7–8, 2014. This was conducted in English, Malay, and Kadazandusun languages, involving 32 participants. 7. Education and Social Cohesion, Mawlamyine, Myanmar, May 27–28, 2014. This dialogue was held in Mon State and comprised 35–40 participants, in three languages, English, Burmese, and Mon, with occasional interpretation into Pa’oh and Karen.

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8. Language Planning and Peacebuilding, Naypyidaw, Myanmar 29–30 July, 2014. This comprised 38 participants and was held in the capital city of Myanmar; it was conducted in English and Burmese. 9. Education and Social Cohesion, Kuching, Sarawak, August 27–28, 2014. This was conducted in English and Malay, with some use of Chinese and Iban languages, involving 35 participants. Prior to most dialogues, research was conducted into current issues, human rights reports, and government policies and plans, as well as meetings with intending participants to ascertain their priority concerns, with visits to workplaces arranged to discuss such issues directly with participants, and to ascertain the relationships of participants to each other and their purposes in participation. The dialogue itself is an intensive process of “discussion organizing.” To support this I have designed some new techniques and adapted classical meeting facilitation methods so that the following activities and exercises comprise a “tool kit” available to me as facilitator. •

Child, nation, “I wish,” and “The problem is . . . I have designed these and similar exercises partly as ice breakers and partly as “data gathering” from participants. I have used all of them at some of the nine dialogues discussed here, according to the particular audience involved and the specific focus of the dialogue. The child exercise requires each participant to identify and name (confidentially or publicly, as they choose) a child and to fill out a diagram of that child’s language abilities as a 5-year-old; this is often done in the first session, and is later elaborated with a depiction of that child’s likely language abilities as a 15-year-old, and occasionally a further one with that child’s language abilities in an idealization should the dialogue’s LP work be adopted and implemented. The nation activity is similar, but the focus is shifted from a named person to the national setting of the dialogue (this can be modified to make the focus a school, a district, or an ethnic group), with adaptations according to different but realistic scenarios. “I wish” and “The problem is . . .” are exercises that can be done on paper, on flip charts, online, or publicly with a rotating microphone. The duration and focus of the elicited comments are decided by the facilitator, collected by assistants, aggregated into a single document, and can form the agenda for a session or whole day of the dialogue. Small groups organize the statements according to criteria the facilitator sets out at the beginning (e.g., problems for which we have/need information, problems that are tame/wicked, problems that are accepted/denied by a relevant agency or by the government, problems that are contradictory/complementary, etc.). These and similar exercises ensure that the naming of problems and the focus of the dialogues are not determined by concepts or issues the facilitator imposes, but are inductively generated in the dialogue itself, and form the basis for a “bottom up,” elicited agenda and set of arguments.

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Zomia. In this activity I describe a fictitious national state replete with language problems and challenges, demography, economy, and politics, all broadly recognizable but different from the actual setting of the deliberation. Participants then write a policy preamble, aims, a research plan, and implementation protocols, distinguishing between “principles,” “values,” and “facts” (available or needed), and then responding to statements from the minister of education, local ethnic groups, local and international experts, and assorted pressure groups as reported in fictitious newspaper articles. Since devising the Zomia exercise I have refined it several times, varying content and activities and adapting it to levels of official formality required in different settings and the willingness of senior officials to participate in this kind of simulation. The exercise has always functioned well, being sufficiently removed from the specific setting to make safe discussion of controversial topics possible, while being sufficiently familiar and recognizable to resonate and provoke, sometimes very passionate, engagement with the real meaning of the activity. Constitution. This is a facilitator-led activity to set the rules of talk and participation for the dialogue; it sometimes remains on public display for the duration of the dialogue. It consists of a set of statements about our purpose, about the right to speak, the right to disagree, the right of individuals to speak without pressure, the expectation that all should speak, a requirement to listen to disagreement, and other microconversational ethics of conduct, respect, and integrity. Aims ambition. This exercise is visually displayed on a chart and is used in conjunction with, or instead of, the traditional exercises of mediated conferences such as “expectations checking.” It involves the listing and ranking of aims for the dialogue, perceptions of the roles of those involved, and pushes participants to agree on a collective rate of “ambition,” meaning, essentially, how hard will we work and what we aim to accomplish. The aims ambition chart can be adjusted each day, and sometimes each session, as a barometer of progress, aim, and level of collaboration. Contours. I provide an early “map” of how deliberations typically unfold; that is, the predictable or likely stages, phases, problems, information needs, ethical challenges, and reasons for success and failure. The contours exercise has the benefit of allowing all to have meta-understanding of the process and its stages/phases. Hosts and confederates. For some large multilingual dialogues I have used versions of the World Café format (Brown & Isaacs, 2005), mostly the principle of table host, and added the idea of “confederate.” Many configurations are possible, but usually the large group is divided into “table groups” with participants allocated according to lot or facilitator decision, with or without rotation. Each table is attended by a host and a facilitator confederate, who meet at intervals with the facilitator to monitor progress of the dialogue

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and make needed adjustments. The system allows for “safe” tables for shy or excluded groups, such as young teachers, rural persons, or young females, who in one instance complained privately to the facilitator of intimidation from older and powerful males. The format requires training of hosts and confederates but works well to improve social relations, enjoyment, and equal participation. Along with other processes, the hosts/confederates system and World Café tables can accommodate different communication styles and expressive abilities of individual participants and help improve intercultural awareness and sensitivity. Democracies. I have adapted some principles from discursive democracy writings (Dryzek, 1995) to design an activity and presentation on decision-making procedure. The two elements that make up the democracies exercise are “voice” and “vote,” which I discuss according to criteria of “efficiency” (voting is faster, gives clear decisions, but has the disadvantage of majoritarian domination) and “effectiveness” (voice democracy, meaning persuasion and agreement, tends to be slower, can be unclear in outcome and half-hearted, but if successful is more effective and durable than simple voting procedures). These are reviewed and applied regularly in a long-duration dialogue. Discussion/conversation arrangements. I use this term as a catch-all for a series of techniques that aim to organize talk in productive ways and that disperse speaker/listener roles. Familiar activities include brainstorming, storyboarding, and fishbowls, used for different purposes, complemented by procedures I have devised that aim to resolve conflicts between individual antagonists, deal with confrontational aggressive individuals, or remove sharply divisive issues that threaten to disrupt an entire dialogue. Interests/information/ideology. This exercise aims to produce deeper understanding of policymaking processes and self-referencing discussions about professional roles. It is discussed in the next section because it forms a discrete element drawn from the policy analysis literature. Perspective taking: In some dialogues I include activities to “scramble” perspectives and encourage discussion from alternative points of view.

Most dialogues follow an overarching sequence, tracking the outlines of a standard policy writing exercise: day 1, problem identification and elaboration; day 2, goal agreement and specification, especially principles, values, and facts; and day 3, perspective taking, advocacy training, policy text writing, dissemination outcomes, implementation, evaluation, and review. The aim is to collectively write policy declarations, to disseminate methods of concrete approaches to language problem solving, and to build capacity in evidence-based argument writing. The evaluations confirm that the process of dialogue and practice policy writing and methods for addressing contested issues are considered major benefits of the dialogues and are ranked as high as the information given in mini-lectures and the draft policies that we prepare. The

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short duration of dialogues often restricts us to writing agreed preambles, rather than extended statements, much less full policies, though in Mae Sot a bilingual Burmese/English, 32-page declaration, policy, and implementation plan was produced and agreed upon (MINE, 2014). A host of other techniques and activities form part of the moderation repertoire with different activities being deployed when needed for specific purposes while others are “rested.” In addition to these exercises and activities, the dialogues include formal input from the facilitator and others provided in a number of mini-lectures, recommended readings, and action research projects conducted before or after the dialogue. These supply research information and summarized findings with explanations and simulated applications on bilingual and multilingual education: within the person, in the school, in the community, in the economy, in the nation; literacy and multiple languages; models of practice; resource requirements; and outcomes evidence. All of these methods of deliberation conferencing imply a microethics of procedure and a guarantee to participants (De Costa, 2014; Kubanyiova, 2008). This applied ethics of practice is a necessary part of a wider ethical commitment of language planning in the interests of social cohesion, cultural justice, conflict mitigation, and peacebuilding activity in conflict-affected states.

Ethical Quandary The following two narratives occurred at different facilitated dialogues. The first narrative features Person 1: Public Official; Person 2: Indigenous Representative; and Person 3: Legal Academic. Person 1, looking directly at one of the indigenous representatives at the meeting, in the latter part of the first day, but speaking directly to me as the facilitator, said, in standard English, loud enough to suggest that it was her intention to be overheard and to be perceived to be an expert user of English, that she and “the Ministry” had agreed to “have them come to our meeting” and she was “surprised that they are reasonable,” referring by tone and gesture to a table at which indigenous people wearing traditional dress were seated. However, she resented that the (NATIONAL) language had been called “dominant” and that this should not be permitted, since it was “rude” and “not true.” My notes don’t recall the other criticisms she levelled at the “ethnic representative” nor the other complaint she had about his descriptions of (the NATIONAL language). Person 2 had spoken about 20 minutes prior to this outburst about how children from his rural indigenous community faced difficulties in maintaining their home languages when (the NATIONAL language) was “dominant” and “influencing” the lives of children and “ethnic languages.” Person 1’s words were spoken in my direction but appeared to be broadcast to all, and I had that morning to convince some of the skeptical rural indigenous people present, noting that some of them felt ill at ease in the official

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environment, that their participation would be worthwhile. I promised them they would be able to speak and be heard and respected. The comments from Person 1 sparked resentment, and were perceived to be condescending or patronizing and created the serious risk that a response in kind would derail the dialogue even before we had begun to discuss substantive issues. I commenced an exercise entitled “What We Call Things” to try to divert and channel discussion towards more constructive ends. On one chart we wrote the word “denotation,” on an adjacent chart the word “connotation,” and we discussed how words “point to or pick out” things in the world, and sometimes how in addition to this “denoting” what things mean words attach layers of value, emotion, feeling, evaluation, and ideologies onto the meaning. An example I gave was how poverty is likely to “point to” broadly shared notions of material deprivation (its denotation), yet in some ideologies it was also noble, and in other ideologies poverty suggested the personal failings of the poor (connotations). One person clarified that this was the difference between “sense” and “reference” and gave a (NATIONAL language) example. Other English examples were what a tree might connote in a desert environment, compared to a forested alpine setting. We discussed the English word “dominant,” its possible meanings, and (NATIONAL language) equivalents. At this point, 20 minutes into an exercise that appeared to be deflecting a damaging stereotyping conversation into a productive direction, Person 3, a senior legal officer from a university, who also advises government, an individual from an “important family” my interpreter later informed me, who was sitting at the table of the official, Person 1, who had made the original remarks, rose, turned to the indigenous speaker who had first spoken, and, while looking broadly at the audience, demanded that people should not say that (the NATIONAL language) “influences” other languages. A heated and long discussion left my exercise in tatters. Soon discussion reverted to (the NATIONAL language), and my interpreter stopped providing translations to me preferring to participate in the argument. Facing a major dilemma I tried to judge by tone and turn taking when it might be appropriate to intervene. After some 10 minutes I called coffee time early, during which groups had solidified around ethnicity and language, and discussion fluctuated between calm and humor, questioning and answering, and hostility. I moved among the different groups and requested patience and focus on the aims of our workshop. The coffee break extended far longer than scheduled, with some individuals pleading their case to me and to each other. I called an end to coffee time and reorganized the group around an activity: I asked each of them to take 10–15 minutes and write, in any language, an account of the discussion prior to coffee, and its “fit” with the aims of our dialogue. I requested the interpreter not stray from my side and projected a page image onto a wall and wrote the words “Car Park” at the top. Once the reports of what had occurred were completed I requested participants to name an issue to move to

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the car park, a space where there would be no fine for leaving a question overnight or longer, and no requirement that it should ever leave the car park, until its owner wished it to. These reports were requested in round-robin turns, alternating the order of table reports so that different positions disputing what to call (the NATIONAL language) and how to speak about it were heard. Issues or points that could not be resolved were “parked,” and individuals could annotate the list, privately or publicly, so long as these comments were distinct from the issue itself and constructive. They could be anonymous or not, as individuals preferred. I suggested that, by voice consensus or by vote, we could then address the car park issues, but we were not obliged to do so. This worked well. The car park was filled with issues, and the process of parking these issues produced refinement. The objection to “influence” was partly resolved through distinguishing between intentional and nonintentional influence, between harmful and extending or refining influences, and with a discussion about how to incorporate, resist, or creatively respond to the influence from the more powerful. One participant stated that we should discuss “adjectives” for “the language of the most people of the country,” and in brackets after each adjective to include a question mark. In plenary, participants mentioned the following as possible ways to describe (the NATIONAL language): Uniting? Federal? Colonial? Convenient? National? Common? Official? Shared? Compulsory? Majority? Dominant? This, in turn, led to a productive discussion about what “we should say about the language of most people of the country” and about “who” the “we” saying these things was to be taken to be. The second narrative features a local academic with a local contract to evaluate programs, an associate of this person from an international nongovernment agency, a public official involved with the management of these programs, and indigenous parent representatives. An ethical dilemma that often arises in LP advising comes from the hurried timeline demands of policymakers, whose often urgent and practical needs for information are dictated by bureaucratic and political situations, contrasting with the more tentative and sometimes highly qualified knowledge base of the field. LP problems are usually wicked rather than tame; that is, they are not readily amenable to solution with the injection of more information from research or a reframing of the problem. Many language problems tap into the subjective worlds and identity attachments of diverse groups, and in the contested situations addressed by the dialogues such problems can be acute. Even commercial interests can be involved. In one of the dialogues a local academic pursued a line of questioning of a community representative that appeared to me to support a case that the academic was making separately to a public official about future consultancy opportunities. It appeared that the questioning of the community delegate was to ascertain criteria against which to assess experimental programs, or possibly to support a claim that policy was best crafted when it suited individual circumstances or needs, rather than group needs. This was irrelevant to the purposes,

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agenda, and direction of the dialogue, yet the person persisted with the questioning and attracted the interest and support of the public official. The community representative appeared to be aware of this and demanded to know from me, the facilitator, what research existed to support an early shift to English in ethnic minority schools. In towns and cities, middle-class parents, supported by the ministry, tend to favor a very early start to English. In rural and indigenous areas this inevitably means that English and the compulsory teaching of the national language squeeze curriculum time away from the mother tongue of poor, rural indigenous children. During a later session, and weeks later in an unrelated activity, the same public official came to me with a series of very specific, written, questions about how to respond to political and community demands for English to be started from the first years of schooling, what should be said to allay public concerns about immediate English, and a suite of other apparently scripted questions. Some of these questions were: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Can we teach all subjects in language x? In Canada they have complete bilingual education, can we do that here? What if our language doesn’t have textbooks for Grade 3, should we still start the children in the mother tongue? We have three languages here, the Mother Tongue, the National language, and English, should we teach in all of them? Just because the ethnic minorities want their languages do we have to give up English?

An acute ethical dilemma is engaged in this dynamic via three agents involved in local language politics seeking to appropriate the “independent voice” of an external consultant to validate their particular position. This contest for influence in local policymaking pitted a local academic apparently seeking a commission, a community representative pressing the ministry of education to improve its language policy, and the public official most closely involved with the local policy against each other. By asking a series of extra-contextual questions one party, the “interested academic” was seeking to bolster a case with the authority of an external academic voice.

Information, Ideology, and Interests These ethical quandaries arise because it is sometimes in the interests of participants to position a facilitator, foreign expert, or academic in ways that sustain existing local interests. For this reason I have included in the dialogues an exercise that incorporates the complex identities of policymaking actors. I have drawn this from a scheme proposed by a policy analyst (Weiss, 1983), many years ago, that captures aspects of the three recurring and inevitable elements of policy positions:

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ideology, interests, and information. Figure 5.1 is a PowerPoint slide in which I elaborate on the three broad categories that Weiss identifies as being copresent in all participants in policymaking, and which typically jostle for policy influence and shape policy positions. I ask participants to discuss their “speaking position”: Are they mostly or most convincingly speaking as C-O-E (C, community representatives [i.e., citizen actors]; O, officials holding executive decision-making roles; or E, experts/researchers)? These are not mutually exclusive categories, but researchers are typically positioned as technical experts and command their presence in policy debates to the extent that power holders deem explicit knowledge of phenomena, and research into those phenomena, to be relevant to their resolution. Power holders may come to this view independently or through citizen demand that officials, elected or appointed, base policy on evidence. In democratic states, officials/policy makers are usually located within bureaucracies where appointed officials operate with devolved power from elected representatives. In nondemocratic states, power holders occupy their positions through other means and can include members of the army, state party, and other authoritarian positions. The citizen actors’ influence on language policy derives from the consequences for them and their dependents of policy.

information-ideology-interests RESEARCHERS

POLICY MAKERS

COMMUNITY

Knowledge produced through investigation

Knowledge produced through practical action

Knowledge produced through experience

Published in academic journals or books

Written in laws, regulations, ministerial briefs, speeches

Discussed and circulated in networks of trust

Using technical language and statistics

Uses both “public” language and “bureaucratic” language

Using ordinary language and felt-experience

Timeframe set by funding or “discovery”

Rapid timeframes

Timeframe set by needs of children, family responsibilities, or culture/religion

“Explanation” most important

Efficiency most important

“Existential aspect” most important

Information-ideologyinterests

Information-ideologyinterests

Information-ideologyinterests

Policy-shaping forces of ideology, interests, and information by community representatives, experts, and public officials. PowerPoint presentation, Joseph Lo Bianco.

FIGURE 5.1

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Each of these categories is expandable. For example, the category of “expert” includes all professionals, but is also collapsible, in that each of the categories, as a kind of identity formation, contains unique stocks of knowledge (information), ideas and systems of ideas (ideology), and interests (cultural, symbolic, material, or reputational). Few individuals belong exclusively to one or another category. The framework for discussing the ideologies, information, and interests of these categories has been well received on the many occasions I have used it since devising it some years ago. It allows me to organize role-plays around each of the horizontal categories: knowledge (investigation, practical action, experience); form of dissemination (academic writing, briefs, speeches, laws, etc.; discussion); discourse form (technical language, public and bureaucratic expression, ordinary language, and felt experience); time frames (discovery based, policy inf luenced and rapid, responsibility shaped); and overarching orientation to knowledge (explanation, efficiency, existential). Taken too far these classifications would give rise to stereotypes, and so the scheme needs to be adopted as an idealized depiction of types for the purposes of discussion around roles that different social actors/agents perform in language policy.

Conclusion: Ethical Dilemmas in Expert “Advising” An outside facilitator has the advantage of having no obvious history, and therefore no “baggage” of interests and past alignments with disputed questions. However, the outsider has many obstacles to overcome as well. One of these is that no matter how much preparation is done in advance, he or she is mostly relying on public, formal, or academic knowledge, removed from the networks of interpersonal relations, local knowledge, and insider feeling about issues. The risk therefore of “getting things wrong” is high, addressed through disclosure and admission of the positionality of the facilitator/expert, and acknowledgment of the concrete limits of expertise and experience. Such dilemmas of outside—indeed any—expertise interacting with officials and communities pose significant ethical challenges. This is because the commissioning agents tend to emphasize expertise, partly to justify their selection, and to respond to the various constituencies to which they are answerable. This promotion of expertise can create distance and diffidence between the expert outsider and the internal and frank conversations he or she must foster to produce viable agreed statements of policy. Expertise, however, is critical; in its absence neither officials nor community representatives have any reason to set aside time to interact and engage in the deliberation or research. Key challenges have been that local participants in the activities I have been describing are often living in extremely difficult situations, experiencing physical dislocation, poverty, political conflict, and marginalization. They have few resources at their disposal, and inexperience with the practices and procedures,

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or even the possibility of their existence in some cases, of participatory decision making. There is often an expectation that outside experts are problem solvers, with ready solutions. Occasionally the opposite problem is experienced, where there is exhaustion with outside-sourced expertise in physical and social environments that have remained unchanged for decades. These differences constitute an asymmetry of knowledge and power and impose on researchers/facilitators a clear set of ethical requirements concerning the patient building of mutual comprehension. This understanding is only achievable through reliable sourcing of evidence, citing of authors, works, and examples of practice from settings that are relevant and applicable to the situation and extensive use of examples of practice to explain what is being intended in explanations and drafts. Investing in long-term relationship building in which clear and transparent mutual benefit is exchanged and produced enhances credibility for effective work and honest communication. A clear problem in language policy advising is the counterintuitive nature of some research findings in bi- and multilingual education. A further problem arises when research is deployed in order to validate already decided policies. This view of research evidence as an instrument to serve already taken political decisions is pervasive in many policymaking circles. There is an inherent danger that professional responses encouraging local research, building local capacity, working with intuitions, in a practice of “let’s solve this problem” can be coerced to include held policy “principles” that support ideological decisions rather than local community wishes and needs. Because I am not a citizen of the countries in the Southeast Asian settings in which I work as dialogue facilitator, I am ethically precluded from and reluctant to engage in advocacy, and so my role relies only on the expertise I can provide and the facilitation practices I can deliver. I can speak confidently from portable transferable or international evidence that is applicable or the local evidence where it exists. How one speaks changes because expertise requires the offering of information, and ethical considerations demand excluding myself from decision making. Evaluation reports of the dialogues note that even when there was contest and strong disagreement it was precisely the productive addressing of ethical challenges, political positions, and information-based LP that was considered most beneficial. In this context, language policy and planning merges scholarship with intervention, and such applied language planning activity, applied linguistics in practice, demands ethical guidance beyond what official regulation can supply. While rules and guidelines drawn from university ethics regulation and the legal obligations enforced in contracts provide much of the ethical framework for work described here, the modern horkos, minus its ancient curse, but with the addition of local debate and collegial discussion, remains useful as an internal, personal inspiration.

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Note 1. Declaration of Geneva, as amended 173rd WMA Council Session, Divonne-les-Bains, France, May 2006 (WMA, 2014).

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AT THE TIME OF BEING ADMITTED AS A MEMBER OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION: I SOLEMNLY PLEDGE to consecrate my life to the service of humanity; I WILL GIVE to my teachers the respect and gratitude that is their due; I WILL PRACTISE my profession with conscience and dignity; THE HEALTH OF MY PATIENT will be my first consideration; I WILL RESPECT the secrets that are confided in me, even after the patient has died; I WILL MAINTAIN by all the means in my power, the honour and the noble traditions of the medical profession; MY COLLEAGUES will be my sisters and brothers; I WILL NOT PERMIT considerations of age, disease or disability, creed, ethnic origin, gender, nationality, political affiliation, race, sexual orientation, social standing or any other factor to intervene between my duty and my patient; I WILL MAINTAIN the utmost respect for human life; I WILL NOT USE my medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties, even under threat; I MAKE THESE PROMISES solemnly, freely and upon my honour.

References Blackler, F. (2011). Power, politics and intervention theory: Lessons from organization studies. Theory and Psychology, 21(5), 724–734. Brown, J., & Isaacs, D. (2005). The World Café: Shaping our future through conversations that matter. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. De Costa, P. I. (2014). Making ethical decisions in an ethnographic study. TESOL Quarterly, 48 (2), 413–422. Dryzek, J. (1995). Discursive democracy politics, policy, and political science. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Dryzek, J., & Niemeyer, S. (2008). Discursive representation. American Political Science Review, 102 (4), 481–493. Edelstein, L. (1943). The Hippocratic Oath: Text, translation and interpretation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. Engeström, Y., & Glăveanu, V. (2012). On third-generation activity theory: Interview with Yrjö Engeström. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 8 (4), 515–518. Fishman, J. (1994). Critiques of language planning: A minority languages perspective. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 15(2–3), 91–99. Harris, S. H. (2002). Factories of death: Japanese biological warfare, 1932–1945, and American cover-up. New York: Routledge. Heijmans, A., Simmonds, N., & Van de Veen, H. (2004). Searching for peace in Asia Pacific: An overview of conflict prevention and peacebuilding activities. European Centre for Conflict Prevention. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Kubanyiova, M. (2008). Rethinking research ethics in contemporary applied linguistics: The tension between macroethical and microethical perspectives in situated research. Modern Language Journal, 92 (4), 503–518.

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Lo Bianco, J. (2012). Role of deliberation in language policy and planning. In C. A. Chappelle (Ed.), Encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 5004–5008). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Lo Bianco, J. (2013). Language and social cohesion: Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand. Final Desk Review, Conceptual Framework and Strategies. Bangkok: East Asia and Pacific Regional Office. Retrieved from http://www.unicef.org/videoaudio/PDFs/REOI_EAPRO_ RO_framework.pdf. McCargo, D. (2008). Tearing apart the land: Islam and legitimacy in southern Thailand. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Michaels, S. (2014). Pan-ethnic network launches to promote multilingual education in Burma. Retrieved from http://www.irrawaddy.org/burma/pan-ethnic-network-launchespromote-multilingual-education-burma.html. MINE (2014). Ethnic Languages and Education Declaration. Retrieved from http://ebcseng.co.nr. Sikes, P., & Piper, H. (Eds.) (2011). Ethics and academic freedom in educational research. New York: Routledge. South, A. (2008). Ethnic politics in Burma: States of conflict. London: Routledge. South, A. (2011). Burma’s longest war: Anatomy of the Karen conflict. Amsterdam: Translational Institute, Burma Center. Storey, I. (2007). Ethnic separatism in Southern Thailand: Kingdom fraying at the edge? Honolulu: Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. Weiss, C. (1983). Ideology, interests, and information: The basis of policy positions. In B. Callahan & B. Jennings (Eds.), Ethics, the social sciences, and policy analysis (pp. 213–246). New York: Plenum Press. World Medical Association (2014). WMA Declaration of Geneva. Retrieved from http:// www.wma.net/en/30publications/10policies/g1/index.html.

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PART III

Ethics, Voice, and Multilingualism

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6 RESEARCH, RELATIONSHIPS, AND REFLEXIVITY Two Case Studies of Language and Identity Sam Kirkham and Alison Mackey

In her book on four Mexican adolescents in Denver, Thorpe (2011) writes “I have to say it was often a relief to step into their world. These girls served as an antidote to everything else that was going on in my life [. . .] being with them kept me in touch with my origins” (p. 3). Current trends in linguistics and anthropology point towards increased reflexivity with respect to researcher–participant dynamics, foregrounding the idea that the researcher–participant influence is often multidirectional and variable (Bucholtz, 2001; Mendoza-Denton, 2008; Talmy, 2011). In this chapter, we examine how researchers influence the relationship between themselves and their participants, focusing on the subsequent coproduction of data. We present two case studies that focus on language variation and identity. The first is a study of phonetic variation and identity in a British adolescent community. The second is a study of second dialect acquisition and identity among British women in the United States and North American women in the U.K. We explore some of the issues surrounding researcher–participant dynamics in this reflexive turn in social science research, discuss two case studies in terms of researcher–participant relationships, and finally touch on the broader implications of our analyses for research in applied linguistics.

Reflexivity and Researcher–Participant Dynamics It has long been acknowledged that carrying out participant observations involves a fundamental tension in the sense that “participation requires emotional involvement; observation requires detachment” (Paul, 1953, p. 441). While a more positivistic orientation was particularly prevalent in the early anthropological research (e.g., Malinowski, 1922), since the 1960s and 1970s there has been an increasingly reflective approach to participant observation in the social sciences,

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where the notion of what participant observation means has been problematized (Giddens, 1974; Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). In many cases, this involves the researcher foregrounding his or her own involvement in the context under study, which Tedlock (1991) conceptualizes as a transformational shift from a detached “participant observation” to a more reflexive “observation of participation.” This brings with it a heightened sense of reflexivity, which Davies (2008) defines as “a turning back on oneself, a process of self-reference” (p. 4). To this end, researchers have increasingly sought to provide detailed narrative accounts of their highly personalized interactions with a particular ethnographic context (e.g., Mendoza-Denton, 2008). In turn, this work has problematized the distinction between participation and observation and has highlighted the importance of making the researcher’s biases, experiences, and interests an explicitly stated part of the study (Erickson, 1973). We are interested in the synthesis of qualitative and quantitative methods and how the reflexivity that characterizes much qualitative research can inform quantitative analysis. Generally speaking, quantitative research aims to be cumulative in nature and seeks to produce research findings that ought to be replicable and generalizable. Highly contextualized and personally situated qualitative accounts often lack “generalizability” in this sense. However, some argue that intrinsic lack of generalizability is an important part of a socially sensitive approach to language study—shifting the focus towards exploring what can happen, rather than what typically happens (Coupland, 2007, p. 28). The contemporary social world is regarded by some to exist in a state of “superdiversity” that has involved the “diversification of diversity” itself (Vertovec, 2007, p. 1025). In such rapidly changing contexts, what “typically” happens is unlikely to remain static. This is not to say that macrosocial processes are to be ignored; indeed, researchers have persuasively argued for a comprehensive account of the workings of ideology in the mechanics of daily social and linguistic practices (e.g., Bucholtz & Hall, 2005; Rampton, 2006). However, there is also Walford’s (2007) view that in order to fully understand the dynamics and processes that characterize a particular social matrix, we need to attend to what makes a context unique and noncomparable in this sort of research. While it is has long been acknowledged that as researchers our involvement changes the object of study (Labov, 1972), it is also likely that a range of research practices impact the coproduction of data. One example is the concept of anonymity for human subjects. Maintaining participant anonymity is a basic requirement of both official and procedural ethics, and it usually aims to facilitate a balance between protecting subjects and a commitment to producing accurate knowledge (Kubanyiova, 2008; Mackey & Gass, 2015). However, some have argued that anonymity only really protects researchers, allowing them to be more liberal with their descriptions than if participants were explicitly named (Devereux, 1967; Nespor, 2000). Revisiting her classic ethnographic study of rural life in Ireland, Nancy Scheper-Hughes (2000) reflects on how the stories

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that she did not tell impacted her representation of the community under study. She suggests that “[s]acrificing anonymity means we may have to write less poignant, more circumspect ethnographies,” but that “our version of the Hippocratic oath—to do no harm, in so far as possible, to our informants—would seem to demand this” (Scheper-Hughes, 2000, p. 128). To this end, when anonymity is abandoned in ethnographic writing, researchers must have much stronger evidence in making claims about their fieldwork sites (Walford, 2002). Of course, in practice, abandoning anonymity is unlikely to be straightforward and depending on the context, not desirable either. Accordingly, we do not dispense with the usual standards regarding anonymity in the research reported here. However, we raise the issue of anonymity in order to foreground both the extent of the reflexive turn in qualitative research, as well as the perspective that anonymity is an active research decision that also impacts the production of data. In this chapter, we discuss our own quantitative–qualitative research in relation to some of the issues introduced above. We consider the ways in which our involvement with our research participants affected the coproduction of data and how our own personal histories also affected various aspects of the research, including study design, sampling, and analysis. As part of the research, we became aware of how our own identities shape what we notice as researchers, and likely also what we don’t, as well as shaping how others relate to us, and how we shape what others say and/or do. We also look at how knowledge is constructed in our data, in particular, in relation to the social context, along with what constitutes “valued knowledge” in our settings.

Case Study 1: Phonetic Variation and Identity Background The first case study we report on is Sam Kirkham’s sociophonetic ethnography of a multiethnic secondary school in Sheffield, a city located in the north of England (Kirkham, 2011, 2013). As our focus in this chapter is our own narrative experiences as researchers, we use first-person pronouns in these case study sections in order to appropriately situate our individual narratives. Accordingly, the rest of this section is narrated from Sam’s perspective. I originally decided to carry out an ethnographic study in order to better understand the social context in which adolescents use phonetic variation. In particular, I was interested in language and ethnicity in minority and multiethnic communities (Eckert, 2008; Rampton, 1995; Schilling-Estes, 2004) and so decided to carry out a sociolinguistic ethnography in a school, with a focus on social practice and linguistic variation (see Eckert, 2000; Lawson, 2011; MendozaDenton, 2008; and Rampton, 2006, for similar approaches). In earlier work at the school I examined quantitative differences between ethnic groups in the school via an experimental study (Kirkham, 2011), but doing ethnography represented

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an attempt to broaden my perspective on these sociolinguistic dynamics and explore new patterns. In this chapter and elsewhere I use the pseudonym “Ashton Valley School” for the school in my study. Ashton Valley is located in an affluent suburb of Sheffield, but admits students from across the city, resulting in a school with a relatively diverse “social mix.” Indeed, this social mix is celebrated by the school and often used as a “selling point” to prospective students and parents (see Hollingworth & Mansaray, 2012). However, it is worth briefly unpacking the extent of this social mix. While ethnic diversity is much higher in the school than in the surrounding neighborhood (33.6% ethnic minority population in the school vs. 11.1% in the local neighborhood), the school is notably less diverse in terms of social class. The school is below average for the proportion of students receiving free school meals (a common indicator of socioeconomic deprivation in British education) compared to both city and national averages. It is also the case that the majority of the adolescents from ethnic minority backgrounds disproportionally make up those from socioeconomically deprived neighborhoods (based on a U.K. government statistic called the Index of Multiple Deprivation, which captures 38 socioeconomic indicators across seven distinct “domains” of deprivation; see Kirkham, 2013, pp. 103–104). This creates multiple intersections of potential social differentiation in the school, which interact with social practices in various ways. In order to track the social dynamics of adolescent peer groups within the school, I focused on a number of communities of practice (CofPs). A community of practice is “an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavour” (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992, p. 464). CofPs represent the social groupings that individuals construct for themselves and, as such, can only be identified through ethnography (Moore, 2011). The utility of CofPs is that they capture the point at which social categories intersect with social practice; as a consequence of this, previous sociolinguistic ethnographies suggest that CofP membership is often a stronger predictor of linguistic variation than demographic categories (Eckert, 2000; Lawson, 2011; Kirkham & Moore, 2013; MendozaDenton, 2008; Moore, 2004). I identified four female and two male CofPs in the school. In each case, I grouped them into “pro-school” and “anti-school” groups. This reflects each group’s orientation towards the school as an institution, such as whether or not they uphold the institutional ethos of the school, respect the authority of teachers, participate in extracurricular activities, and so on. Previous research suggests that school orientation is a salient social division in urban schools (Eckert, 1989; Willis, 1977), and these categories are also often found to correlate with patterns of linguistic variation among adolescents (Eckert, 2000; Moore, 2004). The different CofPs are briefly outlined below. The Ashton girls are a pro-school group of middle-class girls from a socioeconomically advantaged neighborhood in Sheffield who pride themselves on an individualistic “nerdy” yet “cool” style. The Ashton girls are named after the area in which the girls lived, which is also the area in which the school is located. They never referred to themselves in this way (they felt that they were “normal”

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and everybody else was “weird”), but almost every other student in the school identified this group of girls as such, hence the name. The Twilight girls are a pro-school group of Pakistani and Somali girls who all identify as Muslim and named themselves after their love of the popular teen fiction Twilight novels. They are a much more socially reserved group and generally hang around in the library and inside the school during break times. The Parkdale girls are an anti-school group of White and White and Black Caribbean girls who strongly reject the school’s institutional authority and are often abusive towards teachers and other students. The Rebellious girls are also an anti-school group, but they are more ethnically and socioeconomically mixed than the Parkdale girls. They are also distinguished from the Parkdale girls mainly through their relationship with the institution of the school, as well as in the nature of their transgressive social practices. Instead of rejecting school outright, they instead draw upon discourses of reciprocal “respect,” evoking discourses of “the street” (see Anderson, 1990) and argue that they would participate in school culture if only it was reconfigured in a way that better suited them. The Rebellious girls are also much less likely than the Parkdale girls to engage in highly prohibited activities, such as smoking, underage drinking, and socializing with older boys (see Kirkham, 2013, pp. 47–93, for a much more detailed outline). Amongst the boys, I was only able to identify two CofPs: the Ashton boys are a pro-school, middle-class, and exclusively White CofP, and the Rebellious boys are an anti-school, ethnically mixed, and urban-oriented CofP. The boys were much less likely to name themselves than the girls, which may be indicative of their much larger friendship groups. The names used here are intended to be broadly reflective of the respective girls’ styles, despite not being completely equivalent due to the ways in which gender intersects with social practice (see Kirkham, 2013, pp. 47–93). While the girls formed tight-knit and sharply differentiated CofPs, the boys clustered into two large networks that very rarely experienced much contact with each other. In the following sections, I narrate some of my own interactions and experiences with these different groups of adolescents and analyze the ways in which these relationships impacted upon the coproduction of data.

Adult–Adolescent Relationships in Ethnographic Research Ethnography with adolescents attempts to “get beyond the adult perspective” and understand adolescents on their own terms (Eckert, 1997, p. 53; see also Kirkham & Moore, 2013). However, in the school context adolescents only tend to experience very hierarchical relationships with adults, which can impact upon how an adult researcher may be expected to behave in the school. Eckert (1997) explains that as long as the fieldworker functions as an adult in the school, he or she is expected—by teachers and students alike—to embody adult norms.

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Functioning as an anomalous character, with the adult privilege of mobility but the adolescent privilege of lack of responsibility for the behavior and safety of others, requires special arrangements with both groups. (p. 60) This was a conf lict that I experienced from the start of my fieldwork. Complete alignment with the students would risk completely alienating teachers and potentially cutting short my fieldwork. Do you align fully with the students and risk isolating yourself from the teachers and being barred from their lessons or, worse, the school? Or do you align with the teacher and lose the trust of students with consequent effects for your data? This conf lict is arguably intensified when working in a diverse contact situation, such as Ashton Valley School, as the researcher is likely to have very different relationships with different Cof Ps. I feel as though most of the time I got the balance more or less right (I was only banned from one teacher’s lessons, for example), but the following examples illustrate some of the boundaries and dynamics that characterize this tension. An example of an in-between position from the early stages of my fieldwork is presented below, in the form of an extract from my field notes. In this episode, Aqil, one of the Rebellious boys tests my authority during a Religious Education lesson. Aqil begins to ask me a series of rather uncomfortable questions, including “are you gay?” “have you ever used a condom?” and one that I can’t remember about my knowledge of particular genital diseases (I didn’t know them). This made me quite uncomfortable; I wasn’t really sure how to respond to these! I interpreted this as some kind of test of my authority and was stuck between how to avoid answering his questions and not coming across like a teacher. In the end I settled with “I’m not telling you” as a response, which had the effect of not giving an answer, but not reprimanding him either. Had the above conversation occurred in the absence of a teacher, then I may have had more flexibility with my response, but at this point I was already coming under pressure from some teachers not to “encourage” the students’ disruptive behavior, as my presence had allegedly correlated with greater levels of disruption in some lessons. Interestingly, this sort of interaction with Aqil continued over the entire 15 months at the school and became a sort of ritualized interaction in which we would frequently engage. The above example is given as a simple demonstration of some of the conflicts in ethnographic practice. However, what I wish to explore further is the idea that a single in-between position is unlikely to suffice in the context of a highly diverse school. Different groups display different orientations towards adults—some students were very respectful and only spoke when spoken to,

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some expected a relationship based on “earned respect” rather than predetermined hierarchies, whereas others were highly suspicious of adults altogether. Getting some students to fully accept me would have required me to engage in fairly serious transgressions. For example, the Rebellious boys were a community of practice that oriented towards the “street” and urban “gangster” masculinity. They rejected the authority and ethos of the school in favor of discourses of street life. Ideologically, schools provide the primary context for adolescents’ socialization with their peers, but these boys had much broader peer networks that extended beyond the school. Thus, it was sometimes more difficult to form meaningful relationships with some of the boys due to their strong distrust of adult figures and, in some cases, gaining their trust would have involved me participating in illegal activities, which I wasn’t prepared to do due to the ethical and legal issues involved. This is an example of how there are limits to which you can “break the rules”—in the end, I decided that I had to make a compromise between carrying out a detailed study of all adolescent groups and not breaking the law, but it meant that I wasn’t able to obtain the sorts of rich data on the boys that I was able to with the girls. Ethnography may be about leveling hierarchies, but how far do we—or indeed, can we—go? A different sort of in-betweenness characterized my interactions with very affluent White British students, such as the Ashton boys and girls. Instead of regarding me as a suspicious figure, I was usually positioned as “in-between” an adult and a teacher and potentially somebody whom they could use to access unofficial information about higher education. Indeed, some of the Ashton boys were children of academics who had been told that taking part in university research projects was a very good thing to do! On the other hand, the Rebellious boys had experienced almost no contact with anybody from university at this stage, and they seemed suspicious that anybody from an official institutional would show an interest in them. I provide a brief example of this below, which is taken from an interview with a Somali boy called Mohammed who was a member of the Rebellious boys. At this point, I had actually known Mohammed for around a year. However, I had taken a strong methodological decision not to carry out any audio recordings until 12 months into my ethnography and, as such, most of my examples of explicitly negotiating boundaries and relationships were not audio recorded. However, the following example illustrates how Mohammed utilizes the concept of trust and my status as an adult outsider in order to do certain kinds of identity work. 1 Mohammed: why you want interview so many Muslim boys? 2 it’s like everyone you spoken to today is Muslim innit? 3 Sam: I’m really interested in talking to people from all 4 different backgrounds across the school. 5 Mohammed: right. 6 Sam: so I don’t just want to interview people from Ashton,

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7 we want to find out what everyone thinks. 8 Mohammed: but who’s going to listen to this? 9 are you going to show it to teachers or the police or our 10 parents?= 11 Sam: =no no no not at all, 12 just me. 13 (.) 14 Mohammed: ok ok safe As noted above, I actually knew Mohammed fairly well by the time of the above conversation, and we had already spoken about my project. However, this sort of discourse often occurred at the outset of my project with many students, so it is worth commenting upon this phenomenon more generally. In this instance, and probably in many others, too, the Rebellious boys appeared to use the idea that I might be an authority figure as a way to do identity work and strengthen their “tough” and “street” image. In this instance, Mohammed asks “are you going to show it to teachers or the police or our parents?” which implies that he gets up to things that could get him into trouble, potentially even with the police. I knew firsthand from other conversations that Mohammed had never been in trouble with the police and that he was actually one of the less “rebellious” of the Rebellious boys, but this represents one instance in which the boys used my presence and my project as a form of discursive positioning, representing themselves as engaged in potentially illicit activities.

Implications for the Coproduction of Quantitative Data The tensions described above are by no means unusual in ethnographic research; in fact, they are highly characteristic of work with adolescents. However, they do have implications for the production of quantitative data. One of the analyses in Kirkham (2013) focuses on the realization of what is often called the “happY” vowel—the vowel that occurs at the end of words such as happy, furry, silly. This vowel varies extensively in Sheffield, ranging on a continuum from the “traditional” [ɛ̈] realization (similar to the vowel in dress in British English) to the contemporary supralocal [i] norm (similar to the vowel in fleece in British English). Notably, [ɛ̈] is typically associated with White working-class speakers and [i] with White middle-class speakers in Sheffield (Beal, 2004). The happY vowel presents a nice case study for examining whether different CofPs may maintain the working-class “local” variant or use the middle-class “supralocal” variant. Amongst the girls, the pro-school Ashton and Twilight girls both produce this vowel with higher F2-F1 formant values, suggesting something closer to [i], whereas the anti-school Parkdale and Rebellious girls produce happY with lower F2-F1 values, suggesting something closer to [ɛ̈] (see Kirkham, 2015, for details of the results). While it might be tempting to interpret these results as

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indexing a middle-/working-class distinction, many of the CofPs are socioeconomically mixed, so there is no straightforward mapping. However, I suggested that this result may actually represent an ideological reinterpretation of the social meanings of happY, with associations such as “middle-class” and “workingclass” being mapped onto more local categories that are relevant to the context of the school, such as “pro-school” and “anti-school.” This is an example of what Irvine and Gal (2000) call fractal recursivity—a process by which oppositions at one level are projected onto oppositions at another level. The results for the boys showed rather different patterns, with no significant differences between the Ashton and Rebellious boys in the statistical model. This could suggest that this vowel is only socially salient amongst the girls, given the much greater phonetic differences evidenced amongst their peer group. One conclusion that could easily be drawn from these results it that the happY vowel is used as an identity marker and distinguishes communities of practice amongst the girls, but not amongst the boys. However, this result is partly an outcome of how my interaction with the adolescents impacted upon what I could find out about them. My desire to not impose upon groups who didn’t take to me immediately meant that the working-class White boys, who were likely to be the most prolific users of the happY vowel, were not adequately sampled in this study. In addition to this, the fact that I was less able to probe the depth of the Rebellious boys’ networks means that there were probably more fine-grained divisions within the larger Cof P that might have shown strong links with particular types of variation if only I was able to investigate them. This is a fundamental issue in carrying out variationist ethnographic work, as it becomes strikingly apparent that the relationships we forge with different groups strongly impacts our ability to understand the community under study and, as a consequence, the ways in which speakers use language for social ends. However, while my account of the boys’ sociolinguistic practices is potentially less rich as a consequence of this, my closer relationship with the girls allowed me to uncover a rich tapestry of social differentiation within their peer group. In particular, the difference between the Parkdale girls and Rebellious girls was not obvious until after spending a few months at the school. The close patterning between these two CofPs and phonetic variation (see Kirkham, 2013) suggests that a more reflexive model of social practices may afford insights into systematic patterns of language use that would be inaccessible using a more “etic” approach.

Case Study 2: Second Dialect Acquisition Background This section is written from the perspective of Alison Mackey. In Seigel’s (2010) field-shaping book, second dialect acquisition was defined as “a special type of

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second language acquisition – when the relationship between the L1 and L2 is close enough for them to be considered by their speakers to be varieties of the same language” (p. 1). I will restrict the ambiguous terms of language and dialect so that language implies mutual intelligibility and dialect implies “a set of linguistic features distinguishable both qualitatively and quantitatively from other dialects of the same language” (following Hazen, 2001, p. 86). This definition applies to British English and North American English, which are considered by both linguists and the general public to be varieties of the same language, English. Different types of dialects fall under the umbrella term of second dialect acquisition. For example, the term national dialect refers to dialects across countries, such as British, Australian, and American English. Regional dialect, refers to dialects within a country, such as New York (North American) English versus Texas (North American) English. And sociolect refers to dialectal differences that reflect social differences, such as the /r/-stratification discussed by Labov (1996). As a British immigrant to the United States, I have a longstanding interest in how British women living in the United States and American women living in the U.K. construct their evolving identities. I arrived in 1994, and for almost 15 years I was a member of a loosely constructed group of British Women in the greater DC area who met monthly at one another’s houses for a cup of tea and to discuss topics deemed important to British people in the United States. These ranged from things like whether British Airways was having a fare sale, so that those of us who tried to go “home” for the summers might benefit, to topics like where you could buy English treats like trifle sponges or back bacon and other ingredients for British cooking. Although these practical matters were the topics of the meetings, and depending on how organized the host was they appeared on a formal agenda, the group also functioned as a support group, with those who had arrived recently being mentored by those who had been there for many years. A subset of the group also organized and hosted a formal Christmas party most years, as well as a few other social evenings to which spouses were invited. However, it was primarily a monthly get together of women. Most of the women were married to British men who, reflecting the Washington, DC location, had worked or were working for the U.K. or U.S. governments in various capacities. A few of the British women were married to American men. Of the younger group members, it was more common for women themselves to have moved to the United States for their own jobs and to have met their husbands in the United States. For the older women, most had met their husbands while in the U.K. and had moved to the United States “for” their husbands. These younger women tended to be more transient members of the group, often leaving the area or the country after a few years. The core group had been in existence for at least 25 years, and many of the original founding members were still present. Subgroups also existed.

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My interest in identity began with two sisters who were members of the group. They had moved to the United States at the same time. One story that I was told suggested they had arrived in the United States on the QE2, although I was never able to confirm whether the sisters were pulling my leg with this story. At the time I joined the group, I qualified as one of the younger members. It was not clear to the group how long younger members would stay, and there was a certain amount of joking about how “fresh” the recent arrivals were. Of these two sisters, each married their (American) husbands in the same year. They each had two children, of similar ages, and they lived within 10 miles of each other, in a suburb of Washington, DC. They were approximately 3 years apart in age. I say approximately, because on the biodata form I gave them, at the same time as their consent form, they each wrote “not your business” under date of birth (DOB), so I guessed their ages based on some things they told me about their college years (which partially overlapped). A few of the other women also declined to fill this DOB question out, and one of them told me I should have had age ranges that they could check, to place them in a decade. Working primarily with second-language learners, usually college-level adults, it had never before occurred to me that my participants would not want to disclose their ages. This was just one of the things I found interesting about this particular group. Anyway, of the two sisters, one of them had retained every aspect of her cut-glass English accent, which as a linguist I judged was quite close to classic received pronunciation, and which showed very little evidence of dialect shift. In order to ascertain this, I recorded and listened to myself chatting with her several times about different topics and in different settings (a formal tea, an informal chat at the beginning of a drive, a charity auction). I asked a North American– speaking linguistics colleague trained in phonetics to listen and I asked two other British English–speaking linguists to listen, and none of us could determine much more than the occasional use of a U.S. lexical item. At the same time, her sister evidenced considerable shift. She consistently used postvocalic /r/ and flapped realizations of /t/ in words such as water. She also used U.S. lexis rather than U.K. lexis most of the time. Both sisters had clerical jobs, even though they both made it clear that they didn’t need to work. One was a secretary, and the other was a bank teller. I found myself wondering how two people with similar backgrounds, contexts, and lives could end up sounding so different. They had been in the United States for around 25 years at the beginning of my longitudinal case study. Ten years later, when I concluded that study, there had been little perceptible change. Being initially experimental and quantitatively oriented, I looked for differences in the linguistic or contextual environment that could help to explain why one sister’s dialect was unmistakably British and the other sister was identified, even by linguists, as a native North American English speaker (one

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guessed Canadian). Over time, I realized that the salient difference between the two sisters involved their concepts of who they were, and what made them who they were—in other words, identity. There were many markers of this. As just one example of many, one sister had accepted her adopted country as her home and always referred to it as such, saying she was relieved to get back home after an extended trip to England, and to drive on a “regular-sized” road home after she arrived at the airport. The other sister, in the same conversation, bemoaned the fact that the roses in her Washington, DC garden would not bloom as well as the ones in her garden “at home” and that she longed for the weather that produced the blooms at home as opposed to the dreadful humidity of the East Coast. Although these patterns were frequent in my data, I had not designed my initial longitudinal case study to answer questions about identity, and I left the group when I moved house. So I designed a new study based on the insights I had gained through the first group, with the goal of merging my interests and existing expertise in research into second language acquisition with these new interests in the acquisition of second dialects (or nonacquisition, as the case may be). One of my questions was whether targeted sociophonetic analysis of American versus British English features would reveal a manifestation of any accent and identity shifting, especially as concerns like postvocalic /r/ and intervocalic /t/ and /d/ (tapping) are very commonly discussed by Brits and Americans living in each other’s countries. Examination of changes like these might be revelatory of overlapping and shifting identities. I was particularly keen to know whether second dialect speakers intentionally use features of the second dialect and/or place more emphasis on their first dialects, and whether their use of or attention to dialectal features change according to the situation they found themselves in. I wanted to understand if the patterns were the same for British and American women, living in a country where they did not grow up speaking the native dialect.

Second Dialects and Identity Second dialect acquisition is different from second language acquisition in that it can happen without the speaker intending it to happen. Speakers may begin to incorporate elements of a second dialect without being aware that they are doing so. It is also important to point out that there is mutual intelligibility between the first dialect and the second dialect, which is unlike the situation when people acquire a second language. Like second language acquisition, second dialect acquisition can also be mediated by social factors (Ellis, 2008), the presence of affective variables (Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991), and individual differences (Dornyei & Skehan, 2003). Affective variables include factors such as motivation and anxiety. Individual differences refer to attributes that make some individuals

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better language learners than others. Examples of individual differences include creativity, anxiety, and motivation. I take identity to broadly refer to “the way a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space, and how the person understands possibilities for the future” (Norton, 2013, p. 4 and see also the discussion in Golden & Lanza, 2013). In this study, as noted, I was interested in examining how dialect changes affect identity and vice versa. The women in my first study often talked about not being sure where they belonged anymore. One of the saddest stories I heard was from a woman in her sixties who told me that now that her husband had retired from his government job, she wanted nothing more than to go home to England and look after her aging parents and live close to her sisters and get to know their children. But she couldn’t, because her own children were in the United States, and she was a new grandmother. She said she felt as though she would never be “a full person” in either country, because someone would always be missing. I realized that situation would also apply to me in the future. The recent research on transnationals began to feel very close to home to me. Applying this concept to language, Chambers (1992) mentions the idea of “double foreignness” when discussing second dialect acquisition. “Dialect acquirers . . .” he writes, “invariably discover when they revisit their old homes that their dialect is now perceived as ‘foreign,’ yet their neighbors in their new homes also perceive their speech as ‘nonnative’ ” (p. 695). That is to say, they sound foreign and different in both their new and old homes. The question, then, is whether or not they also feel foreign. And this brings up important questions about how acceptance or rejection by both their new and old homes impacts the second dialect acquisition of people like this.

American Women in the U.K. and British Women in the United States In my next study, then, I focused on semi-structured interview data from British women living in the United States, in the same vein as the chats I had had with the group I was a member of so long. However, this time I also included in my research pool North American women living in the U.K. I was interested in particular in the relationship between accent and prestige (Jones, 2001) in the two countries. As a Brit in America, I am often made aware that many Americans have a special affection for British accents. I had noticed in my previous data pool that this seems to cause some speakers to play up a type of accent with an associated higher degree of prestige. An example from a speaker with this type of awareness is shown below. Elyssa is a Brit who is living in the United States and is talking about how people respond to her accent.

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Elyssa: You can talk your way. Yeah absolutely. It’s the feeling of being superior. And I think—I know it sounds silly but—but that kind of scares me about going home. That I’ve got so used to it here—that walking into any situation I feel like I’m—like I’m already five points up. Researcher: Right. And you know that you’ll like somehow win the situation. You know like, it’s like you’ll be the person who’s right, like— Elyssa: I know that most of the time that I could save anything just by—by saying “Oh, I’m terribly sorry” or something . . . Like really pulling out the British cards.

The privilege situation seems to be reversed though, for the American women living in the U.K. as Jane’s comment suggests. Jane is from the Midwest and has been living in the U.K. for three years.

Jane: They act like they don’t understand you when you say something like you miss mixer taps but they do know, it’s their way of being superior. And I think—look, you’re the stupid ones, you have these separate taps . . . Researcher: Yeah, that bothers so many Americans, and the Brits tell you, well just mix the water in the sink but the sink is dirty, right— Jane: It’s so dirty, toothpaste in there or whatever, why, why, why? Even in modern houses. Researcher: And don’t get me started on the useless heating Jane: Expensive and it doesn’t even work.

When talking about identity, all of the British women were clear to say they thought of themselves as “not American,” and all the American women made sure to let the interviewer know they were “not British.” Concomitantly, though, production data shows all of them use features of the second dialect, sometimes intentionally to gain advantages (as Elyssa makes clear when she exaggerates how upper class she sounds in pronouncing the word “terribly”) and sometimes inadvertently. In the case of the British women, however, the participants all reported making an explicit effort to strive to maintain their native dialects in the United States and their comments indicated this was due to the social rewards of being a British English speaker in the United States. On the other hand, the American women in the U.K. talked more about wanting to fit in to avoid perceived prejudice of various kinds. Both sets of women seem to have a sense of a relationship between their national identities and their dialects. One thing that was very interesting, though, in relation to this dataset was how the interviewer impacted the data. I was the interviewer for the American

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women in the U.K. The data suggest that despite the fact that my accent comprises features that would generally mark me as a speaker of British English, I identified quite strongly in a cultural way with the Americans. When I was collecting those data, I was in the U.K. for 18 months after having been gone for 25 years, and after living in the United States for the last two decades, and being a U.S.–U.K. dual citizen, and having an American husband and two (mostly) American children. The data showed me that I can, and was, playing it both ways with my identity. As many novelists have observed, there is nothing like being somewhere else for providing you with clarity about what you are (not). This shifting and uncertain identity of mine likely impacted the coproduction of the data, as the Americans and I sympathized with each other over the inadequate heating of U.K. houses, and the obsessions with the weather and gardening (as shown in the excerpt above). I was not the interviewer for the British women in North America though; instead, my two collaborators, Kaitlyn Tagarelli (American) and Sheena Shah (British), collected these data. We are at work on a paper discussing this dataset in depth. How each of us, and our accents, impacted the data is an interesting object of study. Sheena, as a fellow Brit, behaved like I did, which is to say, she acted like a participant herself, fully involved in the content, telling her own stories, and co-constructing the data. Kaitlyn, who is primarily a neurolinguist who uses fMRIs to measure brain activation, was much more hands-off. Her touch was light, and her influence was less obvious. Initially, we were concerned about the ways that Sheena and I were present in the data. We felt that our participants went further with their stories of identity change, development, and shift because they understood they were talking to someone who was experiencing the same thing. Over time, and with reading, however, we realized that this was simply an outcome of the authentic reflexivity of the context, foregrounding the idea that researcher–participant relationships can be highly multidirectional and variable.

Discussion and Conclusions Taken together, these two case studies combine to illustrate the nuanced and ref lexive relationship between researchers, elicitation methods, and participants. We both express overlapping concerns about identity shifts between researcher and participant. Sam’s research shows how differential relationships with the adolescents led to rich insights into social practices in some cases (the girls), but limited his interactions with other groups. This highlights the idea that applying the “same” data collection and analysis method to different groups may be unrealistic because, under the surface, they elicit markedly different data, given the ways in which researchers and participants interact with and experience the fieldwork situation. Rather than seeing this as a barrier to producing an objective account of social and linguistic processes, we view it as an opportunity to reconceptualize the nature of research, framing the

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differential nature of data collection as qualitative data in itself. This ref lects what King and Mackey (in press) have recently called for—a more layered approach to the understanding of data. Alison’s case study illustrates the highly personalized nature of how researcher identities and histories can also influence the trajectory of qualitative data collection. Her own beliefs and experiences surrounding living in the U.K. and United States motivated her study. However, this influence went far beyond initial motivation: The case study snippets reveal how the women positioned themselves in relation to Alison, but also how Alison’s interactions, and Sheena’s, foregrounded their own relationships with British and American culture and their own shifting identities. Again, one way to view this is as the collection of noncomparable data, due to the highly personalized interactions with the different participants. Indeed, one interpretation of Alison’s choice to use other interviewers for the British women in North America is that she was aiming to reduce her own influence on the data collection process. However, the analysis and reflections presented in her case study suggest that the dialectic between empiricism and reflexivity exposes a productive tension that highlights the richness of the social matrix in which these women operate. As a concluding note, our narrative aims to be nonpolemical. We take the position, again like King and Mackey (in press), that this perspective is only one way of understanding more about language and the social world.

References Anderson, E. (1990). Streetwise: Race, class and change in an urban community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Beal, J. C. (2004). English dialects in the North of England: Phonology. In E. W. Schneider, K. Burridge, B. Kortmann, R. Mesthrie, & C. Upton (Eds.), A handbook of varieties of English 1: Phonology (pp. 113–133). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Bucholtz, M. (2001). Reflexivity and critique in discourse analysis. Critique of Anthropology, 21(2), 168–183. Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614. Chambers, J. K. (1992). Dialect acquisition. Language, 68 (4), 673–705. Coupland, N. (2007). Style: Language variation and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, C. A. (2008). Reflexive ethnography: A guide to researching selves and others. (2nd ed.). Oxon: Routledge. Devereux, G. (1967). From anxiety to method in the behavioral sciences. The Hague: Mouton. Dörnyei, Z., & Skehan, P. (2003). Individual differences in second language learning. In C. J. Doughty & M. H. Long (Eds.), The handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 589–630). Oxford: Blackwell. Eckert, P. (1989). Jocks and burnouts: Social categories and identity in the high school. New York: Teachers College Press. Eckert, P. (1997). Why ethnography? In U. Kotsinas, A. Stenstrom, & A. Karlsson (Eds.), Ungdomsspråk i Norden (pp. 52–62). Stockholm: MINS.

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Eckert, P. (2000). Linguistic variation as social practice: The linguistic construction of identity in Belten High. Oxford: Blackwell. Eckert, P. (2008). Where do ethnolects stop? International Journal of Bilingualism, 12 (1–2), 25–42. Eckert, P., & McConnell-Ginet, S. (1992). Think practically and look locally: Language and gender as community-based practice. Annual Review of Anthropology, 21(1), 461–490. Ellis, N. C. (2008). The dynamics of second language emergence: Cycles of language use, language change, and language acquisition. The Modern Language Journal, 92 (2), 232–249. Erickson, F. (1973). What makes school ethnography ‘ethnographic’? Council on Anthropology and Education Newsletter, 4 (2), 10–19. Giddens, A. (Ed.). (1974). Positivism and sociology. London: Heinemann. Golden, A., & Lanza, E. (2013). Metaphors of culture: Identity construction in migrants’ narrative discourse. Intercultural Pragmatics, 2, 295–314. Hammersley, M., & Atkinson, P. (2007). Ethnography: Principles in practice. (3rd ed.). Oxon: Routledge. Hazen, K. (2001). An introductory investigation into bidialectalism. Working papers in linguistics: Selected papers from NWAV 29, ex. Daniel Johnson and Tara Sanchez (pp. 85–99). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Hollingworth, S., & Mansaray, A. (2012). Conviviality under the cosmopolitan canopy?: Social mixing and friendships in an urban secondary school. Sociological Research Online, 17(3), 2. Irvine, J., & Gal, S. (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In P. V. Kroskrity (Ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities (pp. 35–83). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Jones, K. W. (2001). Accent on privilege: English identities and anglophilia in the U.S. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. King, K., & Mackey, A. (in press). Research methodology in second language studies: Trends, concerns and new directions. The 100th anniversary issue. The Modern Language Journal, 100. Kirkham, S. (2011). The acoustics of coronal stops in British Asian English. In Proceedings of the XVII International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 1102–1105). Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong. Kirkham, S. (2013). Ethnicity, social practice and phonetic variation in a Sheffield secondary school. (Unpublished PhD dissertation.) Sheffield: University of Sheffield. Kirkham, S. (2015). Intersectionality and the social meanings of variation: Class, ethnicity and social practice. Language in Society, 44 (5). Kirkham, S., & Moore, E. (2013). Adolescence. In J. K. Chambers & N. Schilling (Eds.), The handbook of language variation and change (2nd ed.) (pp. 277–296). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Kubanyiova, M. (2008). Rethinking research ethics in contemporary applied linguistics: The tension between macroethical and microethical perspectives in situation research. The Modern Language Journal, 92 (4), 503–518. Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, W. (1996). Some notes on the role of misperception in language learning. In R. Bayley & D. R. Preston (Eds.), Second language acquisition and linguistic variation (pp. 245–252). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Larsen-Freeman, D. & Long, M. H. (1991). An introduction to second language acquisition research. London: Longman.

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Lawson, R. (2011). Patterns of linguistic variation among Glaswegian adolescent males. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15(2), 226–255. Mackey, A., & Gass, S. M. (2015). Second language research: Methodology and design. (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge. Mendoza-Denton, N. (2008). Homegirls: Language and cultural practice among Latina youth gangs. Oxford: Blackwell. Moore, E. (2004). Sociolinguistic style: A multidimensional resource for shared identity creation. Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 49 (3–4), 375–396. Moore, E. (2011). Variation and identity. In W. Maguire & A. MacMahon (Eds.), Variation in English: What we know, how we know it, and why it matters (pp. 219–236). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nespor, J. (2000). Anonymity and place in qualitative inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 6 (4), 546–569. Norton, B. (2013). Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation (2nd ed.). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Paul, B. D. (1953). Interview techniques and field relationships. In A. L. Kroeber (Ed.), Anthropology today (pp. 430–445). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rampton, B. (1995). Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. London: Longman. Rampton, B. (2006). Language in late modernity: Interaction in an urban school. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scheper-Hughes, N. (2000). Ire in Ireland. Ethnography, 1(1), 117–140. Schilling-Estes, N. (2004). Constructing ethnicity in interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 8 (2), 163–195. Siegel, J. (2010). Second dialect acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Talmy, S. (2011). The interview as collaborative achievement: Interaction, identity, and ideology in a speech event. Applied Linguistics, 32 (1), 25–42. Tedlock, B. (1991). From participant observation to the observation of participation: The emergence of narrative ethnography. Journal of Anthropological Research, 47(1), 69–94. Thorpe, H. (2011). Just like us: The true story of four Mexican girls coming of age in America. New York: Scribner. Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30 (6): 1024–1054. Walford, G. (2002). Why don’t researchers name their research sites? In: G. Walford (Ed.), Debates and developments in ethnographic methodology (pp. 95–105). Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing. Walford, G. (2007). Everyone generalizes, but ethnographers need to resist doing so. In G. Walford (Ed.), Methodological developments in ethnography (pp. 155–167). Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing. Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labour: How working class kids get working class jobs. Hampshire, UK: Gower.

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7 NEGOTIATING ETHICAL RESEARCH ENGAGEMENTS IN MULTILINGUAL ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDIES IN EDUCATION A Narrative from the Field Patricia A. Duff and Klara Abdi Over the past 20 years, an increasing amount of research in applied linguistics and education has taken an ethnographic or more broadly qualitative and sociocultural approach to explore language and literacy practices and multilingual development in homes, communities, schools, and other educational institutions (Duff, 2008a, 2008b, forthcoming). Theoretical and practical issues and populations that were under-researched in the past have inspired new research questions and research participants representing diverse demographic features. New conceptual frameworks, constructs, methodological designs, analytical and recording tools, and even reporting genres1 are being used in this research as a result. The role and voice of the researcher is also more prominent in such work than it was previously, with more narratives and reflections on the process and experience of conducting and interpreting research included in dissertations, published articles, and books. Indeed, in contemporary ethnographic research this form of explicit subjectivity has become almost mandatory (Atkinson, Coffey, Delamont, Lofland, & Lofland, 2001; Van Maanen, 1995). Yet discussion of the actual negotiation of ethical research engagements and protocols receives insufficient attention in publications (particularly in journal articles, where space is limited) on ethnographic research in applied linguistics and education. For example, in a special issue of The Modern Language Journal noteworthy for featuring a multifaceted discussion of ethics in second language acquisition research (Ortega, 2005), the ethical dimensions had more to do with such issues as ecological validity, discourses surrounding the positioning of learners (e.g., as “deficient” versus “multicompetent”), the problem of contentious paradigm debates and related critiques in the field, and the importance of replication and practical applications based on research. In the education literature,

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Heath and Street’s (2008) book on ethnography in language and literacy education written for novice researchers has a short section dedicated to researcher reflexivity, but this is not explicitly linked to ethics; they nonetheless address the role of power and authority in research and thus meaning-making. They also discuss (post)colonialism and ethnography, scholarly responsibility to populations and to knowledge construction, and the possible impact—both positive and negative—of research on particular communities. In Murchison’s (2010) introductory textbook on “ethnography essentials” (research methods), ethics is discussed mainly in connection with the need to protect human subjects when studying sensitive topics (e.g., HIV/AIDS, trauma) or illicit activities (e.g., drug use) that might have stigmatizing or harmful consequences for research participants, if identified, or for researchers if they become enmeshed in or cognizant of illegal activities or have taken field notes that can be subpoenaed in court cases. All of these considerations should be recognized as features of ethical engagement, reflection, and responsibility. A much more explicit treatment of research ethics is found in the third edition of Ethnography: Principles and Practice (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007), in which an entire chapter—the last in the book—is devoted to ethics, whereas it was absent from the first edition of the book in the 1980s. Similarly, Robben and Sluka (2007) dedicate a whole section (five chapters) of their anthology on ethnographic research to fieldwork ethics, a topic that gained attention in the 1990s with greater professionalization in the field of anthropology and concerns about the power of researchers in relation to those they typically research and especially when the research is done in the service of (covert, classified, or clandestine) foreign policy agendas or corporate interests. Finally of note, in their edited Handbook of Ethnography, Atkinson, Coffee, Delamont, Lofland, and Lofland (2001) include a chapter on the ethics of ethnography (Murphy & Dingwall, 2001) that examines many of the issues and factors involved in research fieldwork relations, activities, and reporting (e.g., interpretive authority), citing examples from key studies in the 1990s especially.

Changing Discourses, Cultures, and Practices Surrounding Research Ethics Since the early 1990s when the first author (Patsy) completed her Ph.D., institutional guidelines, requirements, and procedures for ethical review and approval have evolved quite dramatically and explicitly in Canada and the United States, not only for research by full-time faculty but also for students conducting empirical research for theses, dissertations, and course assignments. In Canada, much of this development has been driven by the three major national research councils and funding agencies; the council funding most educational research in Canada (including work by both Klara, who is currently conducting her Ph.D. research under Patsy’s supervision, and Patsy) is the Social Sciences and

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Humanities Research Council (see Duff, 2008a). These more stringent guidelines and requirements for ethical review and documentation ref lect concerns among government funding agencies, universities, and other institutions (e.g., schools or hospitals) about protecting the well-being of those who participate in research and especially about minimizing risk or harm to them; they also signal the institutions’ own responsibility and liability for research that violates agreed-upon principles and any possible negative consequences for the university, its employees, or students. Among other possible repercussions, future research endeavors by university researchers with local school districts or other institutions can be imperiled when major breaches in research ethics are reported. Another reason for more explicit attention being paid to ethics in ethnographic research in the United States, in particular, according to Sluka (2007), is the acknowledgment of regrettable past covert research for military or political purposes by researchers sent to other countries and the more recent professionalization and corporatization of anthropology (e.g., with companies employing ethnographers to study their institutions or marketplaces). Although the management of institutional ethical review in the social sciences, humanities, and education might help provide essential protections for research subjects, researchers, funders, and institutions, certain types of research have become quite difficult to navigate and negotiate approval for, despite the best intentions and high degrees of cooperation and patience of the university committees and staff who manage such matters (in our experience)2 and the various other parties involved. Furthermore, in addition to institutional research ethics protocols, many academic and professional associations such as the American Psychological Association (APA), the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and the American Anthropology Association (AAA) themselves have developed and formally adopted ethical codes that underscore some of the same principles about researchers’ academic integrity, respect for participants, sensitivity to possible harm that might befall those involved in research, and ways of minimizing such harm and instead maximizing benefits to participants and society. These “codes” or statements emphasize, as guiding principles, beneficence (promoting the well-being of people and communities) and nonmaleficence (doing no harm), fidelity and responsibility, integrity, fairness and justice, and respect for human rights and dignity (APA, 2010). The AERA (2011) Code of Ethics is a 12-page document pertaining to matters including, but also extending beyond, academic scholarship. It provides very detailed guidelines regarding values, dispositions, and practices that the profession expects from researchers toward their research and communities. The AAA (2012) guidelines (or code of conduct), especially relevant to ethnographic research, present core principles and other supporting materials informing ethical practice by anthropologists.

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Negotiating Research Ethics for (and in) Ethnographic Fieldwork Ethnographic fieldwork is an approach to scholarly inquiry that can pose challenges for researchers and their university’s research ethics board (i.e., the behavioral research ethics board [BREB], as it is known in Canada, for nonclinical research involving humans; or institutional review board [IRB] in the United States) and other stakeholders or sponsors of research. For work that is envisioned in communities outside of mainstream English-speaking academic ones, such as Indigenous communities with oral traditions and with their own ethical protocols, or in countries where North American BREB protocols may be viewed as alien, suspicious, and unwelcome, the process becomes even more complicated. Thus, the protocols developed for Canadian or American universities might not be well received or even appropriate in certain contexts, or may simply be inadequate. There may be additional local (e.g., Indigenous) cultural practices and principles for securing permissions for access to sites, participants, knowledge, or artifacts that may be different and even contradictory to the researcher’s own institution’s norms. Other ethical dilemmas may arise and need to be addressed to the satisfaction of all parties (institutions, parents/guardians, and research subjects themselves) when aspects of the research involve children or other vulnerable participants and populations or when participants have low levels of proficiency in the language of institutional consent forms—both in the English language, in our context, and in a particular formal, written, and quite legalistic register, even when translated into participants’ own languages. Complications may also arise when other public and private educational institutions are involved as research sites that have their own equivalents of BREB and their own policies and protocols that might be different from those of the principal investigator or when some, but not all, of the parties potentially involved are enthusiastic about or supportive of a proposed study (e.g., De Costa, 2014). Ethnographic research typically unfolds in dynamic ways that may not have been predictable at the outset of a study, as Klara’s narrative in the second part of this chapter illustrates. The researcher might simply have become more familiar with the cultures, social groups, focal participants (if any), and by means of a “funneling process” might proceed from a broader contextual understanding to a focus on particular practices or activities of special interest, or new developments might be observed and noted (e.g., Duff, 1995), or new participants recruited. Both of us (Klara and Patsy) have conducted ethnographic research on issues connected with language ideologies, classroom interaction, and language learning and use in Canadian secondary school courses (e.g., Abdi, 2009, 2011; Duff, 2002). Patsy has conducted numerous other studies as well that have entailed ethical review and has supervised thesis and dissertation research by approximately

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30 graduate students, and projects requiring BREB approval by another dozen supervised students. Each of these studies received close scrutiny and usually required some changes, as requested by the university’s BREB. (Concerns or requested changes, clarifications, or amendments are referred to as provisos.) Patsy also sat on her university’s BREB for 2 years in the 1990s (invited to do so after initially failing to receive approval for a proposed action research project involving teachers). She gained additional insights while serving on that committee, and since then, into some of the dilemmas and difficulties of seeking to conduct research that meets disciplinary standards and fulfils researchers’ intentions, but is constrained by institutional requirements. The research that we and many other applied linguists do explores language and literacy learning and use in everyday settings in order to understand the processes of second language (L2) learning and socialization, identity formation, and the types of participation in learning communities that facilitate or impede social and linguistic integration. Much of the research, and the case that follows, attempts to track the learners’ educational and linguistic trajectories over time as well. We believe that the research we have conducted or have been closely involved with has sought to contribute interesting, timely, and valuable insights to our field and to society, and has also aimed to minimize risk to participants and institutions (e.g., by changing or withholding details about participants and sites to protect their identities and by being respectful of people’s time, preferences, privacy, and dignity). Yet each study or case also represents a complex but largely untold narrative, full of drama and uncertainty, time pressures, compromises, disappointments, relief, or even jubilation (when research proposals and BREB applications are approved, and when suitable participants have agreed to take part). There have also been countless unexpected twists and turns and questions. Anxious behindthe-scenes interaction is often part of the untold research narrative: interactions between researchers (or between the supervisor, who is the principal investigator on all student applications at our university, and the student, the coinvestigator but primary researcher); interactions with the departmental authorities who must sign off on all applications and may seek changes or clarification before doing so; a whole series of interactions with staff from the office of research services that oversees ethical review applications (who in our case have invariably been very helpful, efficient, and obliging) and with comparable boards at other institutions involved; and interactions with research partners, agencies, and participants. The process may take weeks or months, as in Klara’s narrative below, well before the participant recruitment and research can proceed.3 Any significant changes in plans then necessitate further ethical review and deliberation, adding to the plot, characters, and arc of the continuing narrative and project, and possibly extending the project’s timeline and likely completion date considerably. The time factor is all the more significant given that many universities and funding sources in Canada and the United States now expect doctoral students to complete their degrees in 4 years, having conducted, presented, and published original research,

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gained recent teaching experience, and having thereby become well positioned to embark on a career in academia and scholarly research. Adding to the time pressure is the typically longitudinal nature of ethnographic research in applied linguistics commonly requiring a half year to a full year of fieldwork or longer. Ethnographic research is often interdisciplinary, drawing on anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and psychology, as well as education, and involves the documentation and interpretation of cultural and linguistic practices within social groups of interest (and/or within researchers themselves as autoethnographic subjects or participant observers). Data might include recorded interviews in more than one language, observations, print or electronic logs or journals kept by researchers and participants, and other documentation relevant to the study, such as tests, essays, oral presentations, websites, or visual images that are produced. When seeking to triangulate various sources of data and perspectives, the researchers generally seek to incorporate the perspectives of participants as well as their own observations and interpretations. The focal participants may include children, adolescents, adults, and extended family members or other members of the social groups that the focal participants interact with, all of whom must agree to take part in the study. It is clear from this short description that many kinds of documentation and consent (and assent for minors who cannot give consent on their own behalf ) are required in order to obtain data from multiple individuals, agencies (schools, universities), and other sources. Participants themselves may represent different ages, backgrounds, and levels of oral and written proficiency in their first and second languages and different levels of cognitive maturity. The use of images of participants or their intellectual property (e.g., drawings, essays) must also be negotiated. Being longitudinal in design, ethnographic research requires a major commitment by the researcher and participants to remain engaged in the study through to its completion. But the longer the study, the greater the risk that participants will move away (physically), lose interest in the study, or become involved in other activities that prevent their ongoing participation. Therefore, a great deal of discussion is required in ethical planning, decision making, applying for ethical approval, and negotiating participants’ involvement. More specifically, this entails: (1) identifying the goals, design, and parameters of the proposed study, sometimes requiring changes to meet the expectations of committees and boards but also in response to changing contexts and circumstances for the research (e.g., attrition, new opportunities, the need to recruit new participants); (2) examining the university’s institutional research ethics policies and practices and forms of documentation and review required; (3) understanding stipulations by other institutions involved in the study whose permissions and approval are required and which may seek additional information or changes beyond those requested by the home institution; and (4) honoring the wishes and preferences of the participants and other stakeholders in the research at all stages of the project.

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Against the backdrop of the ethical, moral, epistemological, and practical dimensions of ethnographic educational research outlined above, in what follows we present and analyze one narrative describing an unusually complicated study (in terms of both research ethics and logistics) that we are currently engaged in, involving the early stages of Klara Abdi’s ongoing Ph.D. dissertation research. This narrative illustrates in close detail precisely the sorts of processes and considerations involved in multisited ethnographic research with families and students in contemporary multilingual, transnational educational contexts, especially when the researcher and her children, themselves, also become participants in the study.

A Narrative of the Negotiation of Research Ethics and Multiple Contingencies Klara conducted her master’s thesis (Abdi, 2009, 2011) in Vancouver-area schools examining Spanish-language classrooms that combined heritage and nonheritage learners. She then lived and worked in educational contexts in China for nearly 4 years, becoming proficient in Chinese in the process. She is now undertaking an even more ambitious study for her Ph.D. Her research proposal was approved by her supervisory committee in November 2013 and was presented publicly to the department (see event dated 11/2013 in Table 7.1 in the Appendix). Her dissertation research is a 2-year ethnographic multiple-case study of transnational children moving between Canada and China (drawing on work by transnationalism scholars Appadurai & Breckenridge, 1988; Basch, Glick Schiller, & Blanc-Szanton, 1994; and Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002). It is a study of the children’s language socialization (Duff & Talmy, 2011; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986) across different contexts (home and school), different countries (Canada and China), and different languages (English and Chinese). The two overarching research questions follow: 1. What are the discourses surrounding Chinese/Canadian4 transnationalism (in educational institutions and Chinese communities in both countries)? What language ideologies underlie these discourses? 2. What are the multilingual socialization practices and trajectories of Chinese/ Canadian transnational children? The study was designed in different phases. The first phase consisted of a pilot study (or more accurately, a small, exploratory, preliminary study) involving life history interviews with parents of transnational families. The second phase, or first part of the main study, involved interviewing the children of the pilot study families.5 The third phase involved the selection of focal families from among the families interviewed in the first and second phases and the observation of the children at home and school in Canada. The fourth phase is the observation of the focal children in China. Although these phases were sequential, they sometimes overlapped, such as when potential new participants were identified during the third phase (and possibly the fourth), which then marked the beginning of the study for them (e.g., interviews with parents).

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To answer the first research question, interviews with various school and school board employees are being conducted and analyzed in conjunction with the (earlier) parent interviews. For the second research question, observations of the children at home and school may involve the inclusion of teachers, classmates, friends, various family members, etc. Therefore the study is a complex one requiring many kinds of consent forms, many of which also had to be translated into Chinese. As of mid-February 2014, nearly 50 different consent forms, in Chinese and English, depending on the audience, were submitted to BREB, some of them revised versions of earlier ones; these documents represent over 180 pages of paperwork for that alone—with other documents including bilingual interview protocols for parents, children, teachers, and school and school board employees. The study was conceived of in very broad terms, with an interest in following the focal participating children across different contexts in their daily lives and perhaps even as they move transnationally from Canada to China, or vice versa. However, it was also understood that the study would likely evolve over time and that certain aspects of the study would take precedence over others or that some aspects might not be possible at all, as is often the case in ethnographic research. A major aspect of the study involves the investigation of the effects of transnational movements on children and, to that end, a comparison of the children’s interactions and language use and choice in various settings before and after such a move is expected to yield rich data. Klara is moving back to China in August 2014, along with her own family and bilingual children, and is coordinating her move with that of (some of) her participants. Therefore, the final phase of the study involves a year of ethnographic fieldwork in China. The following section presents a thematic narrative of some of the most salient issues that Klara and Patsy have faced in getting this project off the ground during the first three phases of the study. In Table 7.1 in the Appendix, we provide a more detailed timeline showing the various stages of the conception of the project; the parties involved, the negotiation of ethics (mainly from an institutional perspective), and the results.

The Evolving Nature of Ethnography vs. the Fixed Nature of BREB Documentation As noted earlier, qualitative research, and ethnography in particular, by its very nature, involve an emergent design where certain research directions are followed and may change over time. This creates a tension with the nature of BREB protocols that were originally based on a positivist biomedical paradigm where the study design is predetermined and necessarily static, risks and all procedures are outlined and assessed beforehand, and all aspects of the research are tightly controlled once the study has begun. There are, to be sure, very good reasons for requiring researchers to follow carefully vetted and scientifically

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defensible procedures that are planned, explicated, and justified well in advance. In that way, furthermore, the prospective human research subjects are assumed to have enough information to make truly informed decisions about whether to participate and what they can expect if they do. Risk assessment in such studies historically has been related to physical or psychological harm that clinical interventions, in particular, might cause. Although the ethics guidelines have been revised regularly to accommodate research with populations and methodologies not originally relevant to the designers of ethical review policies in biomedical contexts (e.g., autoethnographic research, interview-based social research),6 BREBs still expect that researchers will amend applications whenever a change in design or recruitment occurs and require an audit trail of these through dated versions of forms and archives of all consent forms and data in a secured space in the supervisor’s (i.e., principal investigator’s) university office for at least 5 years. Thus, there is the potential for a study to evolve in a more dynamic way, but this creates an ensuing torrent of electronic documentation, reappraisal, explanations, confirmations, modifications, and iterations of the review process so that the BREB office has all supporting documents on file. Thus, as of June 2014, Klara’s pilot study had been amended once and the main study two times (see Appendix, events dated 12/2013, 01–02/2014, and 05/2014).7 Some of these changes were minor, such as changes in the amount of time for interviews (1 hour initially vs. half an hour8) or a later start date for a portion of the study when submitting documentation to school boards. Although such changes would not pose any greater risk to participants and do not deviate very much from the research design, they still had to be documented. However, the amendment process, often dragging on for weeks, hindered the progress of the study and was itself very time-consuming. As an example, out of the six families that participated in the pilot portion of the study in the spring and summer of 2013, which involved life history interviews with first-generation Chinese/Canadian parents in Vancouver, four were selected as potential focal participants for the main study. Two of these families had young children and were families that had an intention to move to China, possibly in the near future. The other two had preteen and/or teenaged children that had already returned to Canada from an extended stay in China. As it turned out, only the former families with younger children consented to become focal participating families. This led to an attempt to recruit more families for the life history interview portion of the study in order to find more focal families, especially ones with older children. Initial recruitment had been done through snowball sampling with Klara’s Chinese friends and acquaintances. This choice was due to Klara’s knowledge of Chinese culture in which people normally prefer to make new social connections mediated by other trusted members in their social networks rather than by complete strangers whose intentions may be unclear. However, when recruitment through friends and acquaintances did not yield the results hoped for, the pilot study was amended to recruit online through local

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Chinese networking websites; this change therefore required the approval of a new recruitment notice. Unfortunately, as feared, these attempts did not produce any results (i.e., new participants). This revised recruitment process took several weeks, precluding the beginning of the school-based research in January 2014 as intended, and delaying also the school board applications. The consent forms for schools therefore had to be amended before school board applications could be submitted. When Klara contacted BREB about this, she was told that amending the study after conditional approval but before the school board approval was something that the most experienced board member with whom Klara was in contact had never encountered before. That person was not even able to advise how such a process would work and warned Klara to be very clear in her proviso so as to explain why such changes were being made at that particular time. When the amendment was filed, one proviso was indicated by BREB, which involved only minor wording changes to eliminate a source of misunderstanding. However, after this was responded to, no further communication from BREB was forthcoming, and it was not clear whether we would receive a subsequent message. This is because the status of conditional approval remained unchanged and the corresponding letter had already been issued. Not sure of what to expect next and knowing that if there had been any problems with the consent form changes they would have been explained in the proviso, Klara decided to go ahead and apply for school board approval. One school board very quickly approved the study, and the following day BREB issued a proviso stating that once a letter of approval from a school board was received the study would be approved and a certificate issued. The letter was submitted and certificate issued as shown at the bottom of the timeline in Table 7.1 (Appendix, event dated 02/2014).

Negotiating Approval for Research Conducted in Different Institutional Sites and Countries When the ethical review process reached the stage of applying for school board approval, Klara had contacted two school boards for their respective research application packages, which were in some ways quite different from each other. One school board wanted a description of the background and purpose of the study, the research questions, methodology, and research procedures, plus a copy of all the consent forms, research instruments, and evidence of university BREB approval. Only after gaining such approval at the district level are researchers able to contact principals and teachers. The other school board also required a similar description of the study but did not ask for copies of consent forms. As for getting access to sites and participants after approval, a “research invitation” form was to be filled out that would be sent out to principals who would contact the researcher if they were interested in the study. Thus the researcher, in such cases, is at the mercy of the principals’ interests, initiatives, and

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availability to respond, given their many other duties and priorities. This factor, along with a statement in the school board application guidelines saying that they prefer studies of groups rather than individual students, made Klara very nervous when applying to that particular school board. Yet that same district has the largest numbers of transnational Chinese children, from Klara’s experience. This observation was also confirmed by the preteen and teenaged children of the two families living within the district (who were interviewed for the first part of the main study but withheld their consent to become more involved, as ongoing focal participants); they were able to think of several such children in their own classes. Klara therefore decided to scale back her study and simply ask for classroom access, no lunchtime observations of linguistic and social interaction, and no focal participants.9 The fear of not being approved or contacted changed the nature of the study. Another challenging aspect of the ethical approval process has to do with the next phase of the research, 6 months after the Canadian phase: conducting research in another country with very different research traditions, and practices or understandings connected with informed consent. In China, and many other authoritarian countries in the world, people are very wary of signing what appear to be very legalistic forms, and all the more so when the researcher is not well known to them and is from another country. In addition, within school settings, classes are large (sometimes with 60 or more students) and educational authorities and schools make decisions about what is permissible in terms of research considering what appears to be in the best interests of their students and institutions. These decisions are typically accepted by the students and their parents. Asking teachers to hand out hundreds of consent forms to students and their parents or grandparents (who may be the children’s guardians) and then manage their collection would be seen as time-consuming, unnecessary, and institutionally problematic. Fortunately, Klara was able to explain this in sufficient detail in the BREB application, and after a little negotiation, it was accepted. In this aspect it was helpful that Patsy and one of Klara’s other committee members had experience working in China and Africa where similar circumstances exist in this aspect of research and were able to provide advice on how to proceed. However, some research ethics boards might not be as flexible or understanding of the exigencies of working within other countries or within cultures with their own notions of ethical research and relationality. To our knowledge, the issue of negotiating formal research ethics protocols in transnational/transcultural research, and particularly in distant sites in other countries, has not been explored, theorized, or reported on sufficiently in applied linguistics, despite its pervasiveness in anthropological and ethnographic research. Beyond the actual procedures and regulations for negotiating ethical engagements in research are a number of other interesting political, cultural, and social aspects of individual versus collective rights, voice, and agency in social life and in educational and other research more generally. For example, Barrett and Parker (2003),

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writing in the area of medical research, discuss the myth of truly collective versus individualistic societies, giving examples where the consent process in a western setting was actually somewhat collective in nature (in the case of doing research with a medical team). In Klara’s study, when she sought consent from a group of potential participating teachers in Canada, they decided as a group, rather than individually, whether to take part in the study (they opted out, unfortunately). Furthermore, the role of guanxi, or personal connections, can be essential in facilitating access and permissions within Chinese and many other contexts, including those in Canada and the United States, where more junior participants may also be expected to defer to the wishes (and blanket consent) of their superiors, or colleagues and friends, who have already given consent and whom they trust (or cannot easily go against, without consequences). Liang and Lu (2006) discuss this issue of power, culture, and consent in Chinese research, which raises intriguing issues about what constitutes truly “free and informed” and individual consent. In contrast, ethical procedures for negotiating and conducting research with local Indigenous cultures has received much more recent scrutiny, in part because of the legacy of generations of exploitation in the past on the part of some university researchers working in Indigenous communities.

Working with Acquaintances and Family Members Due to Klara’s recruitment methods, the families that participated in her pilot study were either her acquaintances or those of her friends. When it came to asking them to become focal participants for the larger study, the two that consented were both her own acquaintances, whereas those that were her friend’s acquaintances or friends did not consent. Perhaps one reason was that Klara did not have a strong enough relationship with them for them to trust her to undertake such a time-consuming study of their families. One of the two who consented was an acquaintance Klara had made within the past year. She is an early childhood educator, genuinely interested in the study and very open to participating in all aspects of it. Besides their somewhat shared educational background, they also have other things in common, such as being very driven women. The other person who consented is an acquaintance Klara has known for many years. She was actually one of the people who sparked Klara’s interest in conducting research with transnational families when she spoke to Klara about moving back to China with her young twin boys near the start of Klara’s Ph.D. program. They kept in contact as they belong to the same faith community. However, Klara sensed that she consented to participate in the study more as a result of their relationship than a genuine interest in the study. This made things awkward when Klara would ask her about coming over to her (the participant’s) home for observations. Klara had initially planned on weekly visits but they always ended up being every other week. After over a month of observations, Klara decided to discuss the frequency of observation visits with her participant,

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asking her if she preferred that Klara come every 2 weeks. However, her response was that she had decided that she wanted her 4-and-a-half-year-old twins to take some English classes on the weekend, and their time would be less flexible as a result. Klara then offered to work on their English with them for half an hour during each 1.5-hour observation. The mother got very excited about this and asked Klara to come every week. Klara felt happy mainly because she was now able to give back something to her research participant and her family for the time they generously gave her to do her research, a form of reciprocity. When Klara was beginning her data collection with these two families, they had both been asking for Klara’s own children to come play with theirs. Klara thought it could be interesting to include her children as secondary participants in the study since they too are transnational children (having lived in China for 4 years and being speakers of both Mandarin Chinese and English themselves), although they do not have a Chinese background. However, when her children accompanied her for her observations, things did not go well, particularly with one of the two families. They did not play very much with those children, being quite a bit older, and Klara was torn between her role as mother and researcher. She decided that having her children involved with that family for the research would not work and continued her observations on her own. However, with the other family, the mother continued to ask for Klara’s children to come over, which they occasionally did, and in the end Klara’s younger child became friends with those children and there were some observations of them playing together. This experience showed how including the researcher’s children in her study may be a complicated undertaking. However, this was only the beginning of Klara’s children’s involvement in the study. This is because, as the focal child observations continued and Klara found out that the plans for these two families to move back to China in the coming year were far from certain, she began considering how to carry out the second portion of her research in China, as her original plan had been to follow a family or two to China. At around the same time, she found out through one of her friends still living in China that there exist classes for returning overseas Chinese children in some key public schools. Conducting research in such schools seemed like it would yield rich data. Klara began to consider more seriously what kind of role her own children could play in the research since they are also transnationals but from a very different background, having a Czech-Canadian mother and an Iranian-Canadian father. If they were to be in those same classes with Chinese-background children returning from overseas, the interactions could be very interesting (e.g., would they use Chinese, English, or a mixture of the two?). Moreover, she could document her own children’s changing language use and adjustment to the move to China. They had previously begun playing together in Chinese when the family had first lived in China, so Klara wondered if this would happen again this time and wanted to see what language(s) they would use when playing with their (returning overseas and other) classmates and friends.

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Furthermore, Klara’s children have a unique perspective on themselves and their linguistic/cultural practices and identities. Her older child (11), for example, thinks of herself as Chinese and Canadian (and not Czech and Iranian) due to her lived experience and hybrid identity, in contrast to everyone else’s perception of her as non-Chinese. However, when Klara and Patsy envisioned adding Klara’s own children as additional focal participants, it seemed potentially problematic in terms of the BREB process, which is generally concerned about the potential for coercion when teachers set out to study their own students (as Patsy had encountered earlier in other studies, though they were ultimately approved) or when parents study their own children. Fortunately, BREB approved this amendment without provisos (see Appendix, event dated 05/2014).10 The actual negotiation of involving the children, however, may be challenging, particularly with the older child who is at an age where she is very conscious of how she is seen by her peers. Interestingly, this child told Klara that she would be more comfortable being observed in China where she is already seen as different due to her foreigner status. Having Klara’s children involved in her research will involve ongoing dialogue and assent renewal during various stages of the study and will require sensitivity to the negotiation of mother and researcher roles, as well as attention to issues of children’s privacy, autonomy, and family harmony (Adler & Adler, 1996; Kabuto, 2008).

Using Video and Gaining Approval and Consent The use of video can greatly enhance data collection and analysis in ethnographic research. However, it can be complicated to gain consent for the use of video. Before applying for BREB approval, Klara was warned by many colleagues and superiors that it would be difficult to gain approval for a study using video. Surprisingly, BREB had no problems with the use of video. However, in the field, video recording was sometimes an obstacle for gaining access to research sites. For example, when Klara approached a daycare that the 4-and-ahalf-year-old twins attend, she was told directly that if the daycare were to allow her to conduct her study there she would have to remove video recording from her study procedures on the consent form (i.e., she could not just list it, together with audio-recording as another option, for participants to choose to consent to or not consent to). This strong preference by the daycare manager meant that two different consent forms had to be created for daycare observations (the other focal family has an after-school care/daycare in their home and agreed to video recording), adding another layer of complexity and paperwork to the BREB process. The reasoning of the first daycare was that the parents were very much against the use of images of their children even for the daycare’s own advertising. The manager felt that assurances that the video recordings would only be used for data analysis would be ineffective.

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As Klara continues with her recruitment, consent, and ethical review processes, it will be interesting to see how the different aspects outlined above, such as institutional approval and access to sites and participants in two countries, the use of video, and the inclusion of Klara’s children in the study will impact the nature of her evolving ethnographic study. No doubt there will be more challenges as the study moves on to its next phase in China. Clearly, however, although these kinds of issues are part and parcel of conducting ethnographic research across various local and national contexts at the present time, they create enormous burdens for researchers seeking to undertake their studies and often delay the research timeline considerably.

Discussion Klara’s narrative reveals some of the contingencies, exigencies, and dilemmas encountered in research of this sort, where participants may (or may not) wish to participate for a variety of reasons and where gaining permission to proceed with research may take months of lead-time and negotiation. Even once approvals have been received and the research commences, participants’ involvement and investment in the study may change over time, and their own participation may affect that of others, particularly if they are in the same social network. Klara’s account is very situated in the time that it was written and is bound to change dramatically as she concludes her data collection in Canada and begins the portion of her study in China, and as she seeks permissions from schools and other institutions on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Many of the issues and concerns illustrated in this narrative are not unique to this study, however, or even to ethnographic research. Perhaps the scale of paperwork and negotiation of access and permissions is magnified in this case due to the number of institutions and sites potentially involved; the bilingual, bicultural, and transnational nature of the study; the age of the participants (thus requiring both assent and consent forms); the participation of the researcher’s own family; and then the duration of the study and fieldwork on two continents. However, much educational research with children is complicated for similar reasons. For novice and experienced researchers alike, the process can be bewildering and intimidating, and changes also arise when BREB guidelines and procedures are updated and refined. Many researchers in applied linguistics might opt, instead, for convenience sampling of competent adults in one familiar site who are able to provide consent on their own behalf and for whom ethical reviews can be expedited as study procedures are deemed to pose minimal risks to them (when video-recording, focus groups, deception, action research, or other research strategies that pose greater levels of institutional concern are not used; see Duff, 2008a). Although it may be expedient and, indeed, very worthwhile to conduct research in that manner and with participants of majority age, understanding the multilingual and transnational lives of families at home,

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school, and in the wider community, which is the focus of much very productive language and literacy socialization research, offers important insights to applied linguistics and education. Our understanding of transnational multilingualism and education would be incomplete without being able to observe children’s (and families’) actual linguistic and literacy practices, preferences, progress, and performed identities in situ. Designing such a study, however, must be done in a very provisional way, with sufficient latitude to adapt to local contingencies, as needed and authorized. There are other equally if not more important aspects of research ethics that have not been addressed in this chapter. These are related, for example, to the “crisis of representation” in ethnographic research in the latter part of the 20th century (e.g., Van Maanen, 1995), when considerable attention was directed to the manner in which data (and human subjects and their cultures, dispositions, and practices) are interpreted, represented, and written about. In addition, as noted earlier, disclosures about the role and positionality of the researchers themselves in studies, and a critical reflexivity, are aspects of ethical engagement that warrant explicit discussion in the larger research narrative (and which we have included in Klara’s narrative). Another ethical aspect of research in ethnographic work and life history interviews of the sort Klara has undertaken with the adults in her study is that it is conceivable (even probable) that some of the reasons for participants’ transnational migration may not be fully or candidly disclosed by participants, due to privacy concerns, worries of potential negative repercussions from immigration officials, and perhaps the perception that some information might cast them in a less favorable light (e.g., related, hypothetically, to personal problems or financial issues encountered when living in one country versus another). Thus, the accounts given by participants, while naturally produced and taken in good faith, must also be viewed as such: social coconstructions of experiences and decisions with the researcher-interviewer (see Talmy, 2010, 2011). Again, the discursive and ethical processes and issues in eliciting, and then reconstructing, interpreting, and reporting on lives, actions, decisions, motives, and trajectories are by no means unique to this study. Finally, we have welcomed the opportunity to craft this exposition and narrative of the negotiation of research ethics while we are in the very midst of many discussions with each other and with the research ethics board staff and the committee members who have provided reviews, as well as with other parties to the research (school boards, families). Naturally, as time goes by, memories about the details and complexity of these interactions will fade as new challenges arise (e.g., connected to data analysis, writing, and revisions). Furthermore, we have intentionally included a narrative that is not complete and for which not all aspects have been resolved. The narrative also focuses on the Canadian portion of the research only due to the timing of the writing of the chapter (during the fieldwork in Canada and prior to the move to China11). Although a good deal of the BREB work had to be done well in advance, in anticipation of the

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China phase, some issues may arise that could require a further BREB amendment. Thus in presenting this “tale of the field” (Van Maanen, 1988), we wish to convey the uncertainty, the anxious waiting, the onerous work, and the compromises that unfold in research, no matter how carefully planned or envisioned. At the same time, we also wish to show that ambitious projects such as the one described here are indeed worth the difficulties they may present to the researchers undertaking them. In doing so, we hope to embolden other researchers who might become discouraged or overwhelmed by the process so that they begin to see opportunities (and not just obstacles) for conducting complex ethnographic studies, such as those examining multilingual socialization through transnational migration and education. Rich opportunities also exist for critically reflecting on the research ethics involved in such projects.

Appendix TABLE 7.1 Klara’s research and ethical review timeline

Date

Parties involved

Action/Event

09/2012

Klara, Patsy

12/2012–01/2013

Klara, Patsy

01/2013

Klara, Patsy, committee

02/2013–03/2013

04/2013

Klara, Patsy, Department Head, BREB Klara, Patsy, BREB

Start of Klara’s Ph.D. and Patsy’s supervision. Meeting: Ph.D. progress, pilot study, dissertation committee membership. First dissertation committee meeting: Klara’s coursework, comprehensive examination, dissertation research, and pilot study discussed. BREB application for pilot study completed and submitted.

04/2013–12/2013

Klara

09/2013

Klara, Patsy, committee

10/2013

Klara, Patsy, committee

Provisos received and answered; pilot study approved. Pilot study initial and follow-up interviews with parents of (6) transnational families. Second dissertation committee meeting: Klara’s pilot study progress, pieces to be included in comprehensive examination portfolio, proposal, BREB, as well as timeline for all of the above. Comprehensive examination portfolio submitted; committee meets about portfolio and upcoming proposal. (Continued )

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TABLE 7.1 (Continued)

Date

Parties involved

Action/Event

11/2013

Klara, Patsy, committee, Department Head, BREB

12/2013

Klara, Patsy, BREB

Proposal submitted, publicly defended and approved; advancement to candidacy; BREB application for main study completed and submitted to Department Head; Department Head issues proviso that is answered and application is forwarded to BREB. Due to insufficient numbers of participants, pilot study undergoes a post-approval amendment for online recruitment (previous recruitment was through snowball sampling); amendment approved and online recruitment begins.

12/2013

Klara, Patsy, BREB

12/2013–01/2014

Klara

01/2014–02/2014

Klara, Patsy, BREB

02/2014

Klara, school boards

02/2014

Klara, Patsy, BREB

04/2014

Klara, Patsy, BREB

Main study provisos received and answered; study gains conditional approval pending school board approval. Main study commences with interviews of children of pilot study parents and invitations to four families to become focal participating families; two families with younger children consent to participate in study but no families with older children do. Email exchange with BREB representative about amendments during preapproval stage (these include the addition of daycare observations for youngest participants, changes in study commencement dates, and lowering of teacher time commitment to ensure approval by school boards after school board packages received); amendments submitted, provisos received and responded to. Research applications are submitted to two school boards; one school board approves study. BREB approves study upon receipt of letter of approval from school board; approval certificate issued. BREB approves annual renewal of pilot study.12 (Continued )

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TABLE 7.1 (Continued)

Date

Parties involved

Action/Event

05/2014

Klara, Patsy, BREB

05/2014

Klara, school board

BREB amendment submitted and approved (amendment includes inclusion of Klara’s children as focal participants and interviews with immigration experts). School board where Klara’s children attend school contacted for approval of interviews with teachers, principal and school board employees13; school board approves study.

Notes 1. That is, there is greater recognition in ethnographic research of the importance of reflexivity among researchers regarding their role, positionality, and voice in research in relation to the communities or individuals participating in the research and the research process itself; similarly, there is an increase in autoethnographic research. Both trends have resulted in genres and registers of writing that are creative, deeply personal, and often multimodal (incorporating images or performative aspects of the research process) and that are therefore distinct from more traditional reporting genres in the social sciences. 2. This is quite a feat considering that they process roughly 1,100 new BREB applications a year, according to the university’s website (http://research.ubc.ca/ore/ breb-frequently-asked-questions). 3. Applications require, on average, 7 to 8 weeks from the time of submission to notification of approval (i.e., without subsequent amendments unless initiated by the researcher), according to the university’s website (http://research.ubc.ca/ore/ breb-frequently-asked-questions). 4. We have chosen to use the term “Chinese/Canadian” rather than “ChineseCanadian” because the latter term typically connotes long-term Chinese immigrants to Canada. It also implies that the children originally come from China. However, Klara’s own children, who became part of the study, do not have a Chinese background but have lived in and later returned to China. The use of the slash also gives the visual image of a border that is being crossed as the families move back and forth between the two countries. 5. Interviews with children were not part of the pilot study; its purpose was to lay the groundwork for the main study whose design it would inform. As such, the data from the pilot study formed the basis of one of Klara’s comprehensive examination papers. Through these interviews, Klara sought to gain an understanding of the Chinese/Canadian transnational phenomenon from the parents’ point of view and also to identify potential participating families for the main study. Also, interviewing the parents first provided important contextual and background information for subsequent interviews and observations involving their children as well as allowed Klara to get to know the families gradually. Interviews with children were then included in the main study procedures and application for ethical review, and therefore required a more extensive BREB review as well. 6. See Tri-Council guidelines and notes from our university available at http://research. ubc.ca/ore/breb-forms-guidance-notes. 7. One additional very minor subsequent amendment was required when the certificate of approval was found to have incorrect information in it due to a clerical error.

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8. The reason for this (seemingly minor) change was anticipation of school boards not wanting to approve studies that required too much teacher time. Ironically, although the consent form was amended for this reason, the school board in question still rejected the study on the grounds that it would take up too much teacher time. In general, having a wider potential range in time for interviews would give researchers maximum leeway for such contingencies but can then also be a disincentive to potential participants concerned about onerous time commitments. 9. As noted above (note 8), this school board did not approve the study, even when scaled back. 10. Around the same time that this amendment was approved, one of the families made the firm decision to move to China in early July 2014. 11. Since the writing of this chapter, Klara moved back to China in late August 2014 and began data collection in a public primary school with five focal children who had all moved from Canada or the United States during the summer of 2014. She also tried to continue working with one of the original focal families but they moved to a different city quite far away from her, and the children’s kindergarten did not approve the study. She is also continuing to conduct new and follow-up interviews with transnational families residing in various cities in China. 12. Although labeled and originally conceived of as a pilot study, due to ongoing recruitment and follow-up parent interviews, this phase 1 of data collection actually continued through phase 3 and will likely continue into phase 4, when new families may be recruited in China (see first section of narrative for a discussion of the study phases). 13. The reason that the school board was not contacted before is because there were no focal children attending school there until Klara’s children were approved by BREB as focal children.

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8 ETHICAL ISSUES IN INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE RESEARCH AND INTERVENTIONS Steven L. Thorne, Sabine Siekmann, and Walkie Charles

Over recent decades, ethical dimensions to scholarly inquiry have become increasingly visible across academic fields. Within applied linguistics and language education circles, a wide array of concerns are now commonplace, such as adherence to human subjects protocols, issues of representation and contextualization as they manifest in published research and reports, and the imperative to consider the implications of empirical analyses and theoretical constructs as they impact human agents and communities (e.g., Ortega, 2012). In this chapter, we discuss the complex ethical considerations and dynamics in three grant-funded Indigenous language revitalization projects in Alaska, focusing primarily on intervention efforts aimed at Yup’ik-medium education and the professional and academic advancement of Native Alaskans through participation in graduate degree programs. The first project, Second Language Teacher Education (SLATE), graduated 3 Alaska Native Ph.D.s and 18 master’s students focusing on improving Yup’ik and English language instruction. The second, Piciryramta Elincungallra : Teaching Our Way of Life Through Our Language (PE), is a materials development and pedagogical intervention project focused on elementary school–level Yup’ik-medium education. The third project, Improving Alaska Native Education through Computer Assisted Language Learning (ANE CALL), has as its goals to build capacity and leadership within Native Alaskan communities by graduating 4 Alaska Native Ph.D. students and 15 M.A. students (10 focusing on Alaska Native languages and 5 focusing on teaching English language learners) and to improve and extend uses of technology in Alaskan schools. These projects are built on partnerships between university faculty, regional school districts, an Alaska Native nonprofit organization, and local communities. In addition to institutional issues, we trace the negotiations among project partners that attempt to represent the multivocality of this work (e.g., Bakhtin, 1986; Scollon,

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2000; Thorne, 2005); describe the interwoven histories of academic research, colonialism, and relationships of historical oppression in these settings (e.g., Bourdieu, 1991; Menezes de Souza, 2007; Said, 1979); and discuss the intricacies of situating this work in and among educational institutions, which have historically acted as catalysts for language shift to English in Alaskan Indigenous communities. We focus particularly on the fact that these intervention projects involve, and impact, individuals and communities in complex and sometimes conflicting ways. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of trust and relationship building among project partners as the foundation of successful actions oriented toward building self-governance in Indigenous Alaskan communities. The biographies of the authors of this chapter are relevant to many of the issues we will discuss: Walkie Charles is one of the first Native Alaskan Ph.D.s and a Yup’ik speaker and faculty member at University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), Sabine Siekmann is a German-born academic working at UAF on Native Alaskan languages revitalization projects with a specialization in computer-assisted language learning, and Steve Thorne is an American (though U.K.-born) working at Portland State University in the United States and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands with a long-standing interest in Indigenous language revitalization and uses of technology in language learning environments. Our process for developing the themes and foci we will discuss involved a series of 90-minute recorded conversations between the authors. In these conversations, we strove to ask ourselves difficult questions regarding ethnic identities, the relations between Indigenous and western epistemologies; how colonialism has resulted in historical oppression, linguicide, and cultural displacement that is as relevant now as at any time in the past; and the continuing challenges of stigmatization, intercultural communication failures (e.g., participant structures, Philips, 1983), and the problems that arise in the context of indigenous community, school district, and university collaborations. Importantly, we also discussed the many positive and change-producing initiatives, curricular interventions, and university–school– community partnerships that are demonstrably increasing the decision-making power of communities and the effectiveness of language revitalization efforts for speakers of Indigenous Alaskan languages (Marlow & Siekmann, 2012, 2013; Siekmann et al., 2013; Wyman et al., 2010).

Background and Overview of Projects Recognizing the shortage of trained educators to participate in Yup’ik-medium educational models, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in partnership with local school districts and regional partners, submitted several U.S. Department of Education grants between 2002 and 2012 (see Marlow & Siekmann, 2012, for an overview of these grants). Together, the early projects focused on capacity building and the professionalization of Indigenous language educators by creating a career ladder and degree

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options for Yup’ik language teachers that included establishing a certificate and associate-level degree (Yup’ik Language Institute), as well as a baccalaureate degree in Yup’ik Language and Culture (Yupiit Nakmiin Qaneryaraat). Our story builds on this foundation and begins with the Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE) grant that made possible the development of a language teaching specialization at the graduate level at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. SLATE supported 18 M.A./M.Ed. and 4 Alaska Native Ph.D. students; as the SLATE grant drew to a close in 2008, 8 of the graduate students met with university faculty to jointly develop the focus for the next grant project. All of the participating graduate students were community members involved and invested in Yup’ik-medium instruction. The meeting resulted in the successful application and funding of the Piciryaramta Elicungcallra (Teaching Our Way of Life Through Our Language, or PE) grant, which focused on developing Yup’ik-medium materials based on Yup’ik culture and epistemology (Yuuyaraq) while at the same time meeting state standards in social science and reading. In the most current effort of our articulated grant projects, Improving Alaska Native Education through Computer Assisted Language Learning (ANE CALL), several of the SLATE Ph.D. graduates act as faculty advisors to the new cohorts of M.A. students, while three of the SLATE master’s graduates are now pushing forward to pursue their Ph.D.s. This project focuses on developing culturally responsive technology infused pedagogical innovations in rural schools throughout Alaska. All of these grants were funded through the U.S. Department of Education’s Alaska Native Education program.1 In the remainder of this chapter, we discuss specific events, participant experiences and reflections, and outcomes of the SLATE, PE, and ANE CALL projects in order to provide grounded examples of the ethical dynamics associated with these Indigenous language intervention projects. In particular, we discuss three interconnected ethical issues, all of which have been significant factors in each of the projects. 1. 2. 3.

The moral imperative to maintain Indigenous language-culture ecologies: Language choice in university programs From colonization to hybridities and agency: Indigenous teachers and scholars in the academy Insider–outsider dynamics and knowledge production

Ethical Issues in Indigenous Language Revitalization Projects Ethical Issue 1: The Moral Imperative to Maintain Indigenous Language-Culture Ecologies: Language Choice in University Programs Nineteen Indigenous languages are still spoken in Alaska, with Central Yup’ik as the strongest. At the time of this writing, there are approximately 21,000 central

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Alaskan Yup’ik Eskimo people, some 10,000 of whom speak their ancestral language. However, children growing up speaking Yup’ik as their first language occurs in only approximately one-quarter of all Yup’ik villages (Krauss, 1997). In the other Yup’ik villages, most children grow up speaking English as their first language and only the older generations speak Yup’ik. Standard English speaking skills among young Yup’ik Eskimos are often limited. Upon entering school, most Yup’ik children speak what has been described as Village English, a non–Standard English variety influenced by Yup’ik (Jacobson, 1984). Language shift to English and culture loss have had serious effects on Alaska Native populations. In the Yup’ik-speaking region of the Lower Kuskokwim School District (LKSD), for example, where approximately 3,900 students are enrolled in the district, 64% of students are classified as bilingual (coming from a background where there is some contact with a second language). These numbers differ significantly from community to community, with lower numbers of bilingual children in the hub city of Bethel and higher numbers (often as high as 95%) in outlying communities such as Toksook Bay. Overall f luency in Yup’ik becomes rarer each year. Suicide and dropout rates are very high among adolescents and young adults. In villages where the Yup’ik language and culture are stronger, however, indicators of social problems such as substance abuse and suicide are lower, pointing to the very real and concrete ways in which language loss and maintenance/revitalization are linked to social, community, psychological, and physical well-being. In this sense, and for these communities (based on reports by social and health workers), Indigenous language-culture maintenance and/or revitalization is a critical dimension of broader community health on physical and psychological levels. More broadly, the ecological metaphor, derived from relational health associated with diversity in the natural world of plant and animal species, applies equally to the overall health and well-being of Alaska Native populations (e.g., Hornberger, 2003, 2009; May & Hill, 2005). In our recorded conversations, each of the authors agrees that despite the many problems, seeming incommensurabilities, and frustrations that arise, statesponsored Indigenous language revitalization efforts provide critically important resources that ultimately support endangered language-culture practices. This said, and as we discuss below, the ethical and conceptual challenges to doing this work require constant vigilance and adaptive tactics. Given the context of language endangerment, language choice by the participants is a key consideration and is an issue that we have been paying attention to over the course of the projects discussed here. One of the ways in which Indigenous communities throughout the world have been trying to maintain and revitalize their ancestral languages has been through school programs, especially through immersion education (Hinton & Hale, 2001; Johnson & Swain, 1997; Kipp, 2000). As stated above, the history of mandatory state-sponsored schooling in English has contributed significantly to language shift to English in Alaskan Indigenous communities. It should thus not be surprising that Yup’ik-medium

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schools, including Yup’ik Immersion and Yup’ik/English Dual-Language programs, are contested spaces in which language choice becomes not just a pedagogical, but also a political, ideological, and ethical issue. All three grants are designed to support Alaska Native language–medium instruction through teacher professional development and materials development. However, because several key individuals in these efforts are not Alaska Natives and are not proficient in Yup’ik, language choice played a significant role in the planning and ongoing administrative process. Just as language choice has serious ramifications in K-12 educational settings, the graduate faculty also had to seriously consider options for using, and further encouraging, Alaska native languages in classroom interaction, in course assignments, and in theses, projects, and dissertations. This last consideration will be explored below through vignettes shared by the authors. One mechanism of language shift is the tendency for Indigenous graduate students and faculty to accommodate speakers of the dominant language, English in this context, especially if the English speakers are viewed to be in positions of authority. As non-Native academics who are not speakers of an Alaska Native language, both Siekmann and Thorne have been actively working to avoid being the impetus for language shift to English in their interactions with Alaska Native students and collaborators. For example, in the SLATE project, Siekmann was the faculty advisor for a cohort of Yup’ik women, all of whom were proficient in Yup’ik. She describes her efforts to foster interactions in Yup’ik the following way: During cohort meetings I would encourage students to interact with each other in Yugtun [Yup’ik language]—even though I do not speak Yup’ik. This was not easy for them at first, because of the tendency to accommodate the one white person and non-speaker in the group. I was also the one with the institutional power, but I used that positionality to foster interactions in Yup’ik. I told the students that I would feel terrible if I was the reason they switched to English. I did not want to be that person. In a related episode, Thorne, who acknowledges his often hyperverbal disposition in academic work settings, reports that during the early stages of his participation in the PE grant project he found it important to remain silent and in a background position in order to not disrupt communication between the Yup’ik-speaking project partners. He also initially struggled with the extended silences between speakers during group and full team discussions, and only slowly developed the inhibitory control necessary to not fill gaps and silences in large group discussion with his own voice, which, in turn, helped to make possible a participatory dynamic that did not center around language shift to English to accommodate the non-Indigenous team members as the default scenario.

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The SLATE students themselves confirm the importance of building trust and affirmation around the choice to use Indigenous languages even when some copresent parties will not understand: Moses: And we were encouraged to use Yugtun [Yup’ik] even in our presentations, which was good. It was [a] good experience. And it gave us a chance to . . . . Oulton: It made us more comfortable . . . and it gave us more understanding. Moses: And in Yugtun we were able to express our feelings both good and bad. (interview, June 12, 2012) (cited in Marlow & Siekmann, 2012, p. 63) As much as Yup’ik was encouraged in cohort meetings and classroom interaction, university-level instruction was typically delivered in English and course assignments had to be prepared in English. In the SLATE grant, each non-Native faculty member worked with an Alaska Native Ph.D. student who acted as a near-peer mentor to the master’s students and also cotaught courses. As coinstructors, the Ph.D. students were well positioned to facilitate Indigenous language use by the master’s students. Charles’ reflection on one such occasion highlights the pedagogical and ethical dimensions of this practice. When it came to the second quiz [in the course], I prefaced the quiz by explaining that students should respond to the prompts in the language of their choice. The room was silent as the students began writing their responses to the test questions. At some point I began to hear sniffling from one of the Yup’ik students. When I asked her what was wrong, she said, “I never thought I would have the chance to write in my own language. I’m just thrilled to be able to express myself in my own language [in this formal academic context].” During the materials development grant (PE), teachers (many of whom were graduates of the SLATE program) were increasingly comfortable speaking to each other in Yup’ik. In a direct effort to elevate the status of conversations conducted in Yup’ik, Dr. Theresa John (a Ph.D. graduate of the SLATE program) participated as the evaluator on the grant. In this capacity, she enacted a leadership role through the medium of Yup’ik. It was furthermore significant that a Yup’ik person, with a Ph.D., was working in an equal position of authority alongside the non-Native academics, Siekmann and Thorne in this case. Continuing on this trajectory, the ANE CALL grant was organized around language-specific cohorts and, when possible, classes were divided into a section of Yup’ik speakers and a group of non-Yup’ik speakers. Furthermore, the two Yup’ik Ph.D. students supported through the SLATE grant are now serving as advisors, committee members, and faculty in the ANE CALL project. Taking the concern

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for meaningful use of Yup’ik language within graduate programming a step further, Dr. Theresa John taught a Ph.D. seminar entitled Native Ways of Knowing that used Yup’ik as the medium of instruction throughout the course. As part of this course students read, discussed, and wrote academic texts in Yup’ik. More work remains to be done in terms of language choice in educational settings. For example, students in the ANE CALL grant still have to produce their projects and dissertations in English. However, with increasing numbers of Yup’ik Ph.D.s in leadership positions in the academy, this, too, might change in the future. We discuss the role of Native scholars in higher education in the following section.

Ethical Issue 2: From Colonization and “Narratives of Transition” to Hybridities and Agency: Indigenous Teachers and Scholars Scholarship from many disciplines has described the effects of colonization in areas such as epistemology, ethics, material exploitation, and control of knowledge production (Bhabha, 1994; Said, 1979). Drawing upon Mignolo (2000), Menezes de Souza (2007) argues that “knowledge, culture, and languages are unequally and hierarchically distributed . . . in favor of the former colonizing powers and to the detriment of the colonized regions” (p. 135). As a consequence, colonized peoples and regions are often rendered as obsolete or even invisible. From a Eurocentric perspective, Indigenous cultures are represented as engaged in a “narrative of transition” (Mignolo, 2000, p. 204) that will eventually bring them from a stigmatized premodern state into closer convergence with the kinds of rationality and material and economic technologies that the colonizing cultures have ostensibly already attained. State-sponsored educational institutions explicitly, and generally unreflexively, endorse and support this ideology and definition of development to a greater or lesser degree. As discussed by postmodern critics such as Mignolo and Menezes de Souza, the problem for Indigenous peoples “in transition” is that the telos of their transition is western modernity understood as a universal good. These critics also observe, however, that an opposite problem is also present when Indigenous histories and ways of knowing are idealized or interpreted as utopic. A productive response to this contradiction is not anticoloniality, nor reification of an idealized premodern past, but rather to increase opportunities for agency and decision making such that postcolonial populations become the “locus of enunciation” for their own discursive reconstruction (e.g., Bhabha, 1994). Menezes de Souza (2007) describes it this way: A consequence of this usurpation of the locus of enunciation from the hands of colonial discourse producers is that the power/knowledge collusion may become clearer, and knowledge may cease to be seen as neutral, scientific and universal; it may now be seen (on both sides of the divide)

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as the ‘local’ product of a particular ideological and discursive community and its socio-historical context. (p. 138) We will now describe the ways in which in our projects we have attempted to affirm the human and community aspects of working across heterogeneous institutional, cultural, and epistemological boundaries. In particular, we have focused on building leadership and academic professionals from within Indigenous Alaskan communities in order to strengthen local influence in regard to language policy and program decisions.

Teachers as Advocates As described above, nearly all Alaska Native communities are in various stages of language shift towards English. On one end of the spectrum, in the case of Eyak, the last Native speaker recently has passed away. Yup’ik, which is spoken in a more remote area of the state, is on the other end of the spectrum, with approximately 10,000 speakers, and with some children still growing up with Yup’ik as their primary language. Yup’ik-medium instruction is available to some students, mainly at the elementary level. Several Alaska Native languages are taught at the university level. For example, the Alaska Native Language Program regularly offers courses in Yup’ik, Inupiaq, and Gwich’in. Institutionally, at all levels of K-20 education, however, Alaska Native individuals are underrepresented and tend to be positioned in junior or support positions at the margins of decisionmaking processes. In many public schools serving Alaska Native students, certified teachers are predominately White. The Lower Kuskokwim School District (LKSD), for example, employs approximately 400 certified teachers, only about 20% of whom are Alaska Native. In many rural schools, the Alaska Native student population is 97% and the cook, the janitor, the school secretary, and teacher’s aides are Alaska Native, but the majority of teachers, the school counselor, and principal are predominantly non-Native. In fact, in LKSD only 2 of the 27 site administrators are Alaska Natives. High school graduation rates in LKSD are well below 50%, which mirrors the national trend of low high school graduation rates of Alaska Native and Native American students. For those who do continue on to postsecondary education, attrition rates are high (Aud, Fox, & Kewal Ramani, 2010; DeVoe & DarlingChurchill, 2008; Faircloth & Tippeconnic, 2010; Reyhner, 1991). As a consequence, very few Alaska Native individuals hold advanced university degrees. As part of the goal to develop local leadership in language programs, two of the projects described here (SLATE and ANE CALL) focused on teacher professional development through graduate education. In the SLATE grant, completion rates were remarkably high, and all 18 M.A. students who completed the initial summer session completed the degree. To this date, 3 of the 4 Ph.D. students

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have completed their degrees, and the fourth is due to complete her degree late in 2015. In 2013, 19 educators entered the M.A. in Applied Linguistics Program, and 4 Alaska Native teachers and university faculty entered an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. program through the ANE CALL grant (3 of the Ph.D. students earned their master’s degree through the SLATE grant). At the writing of this chapter, 16 M.A. students remain in the program, and all 4 Ph.D. students have advanced to candidacy and are in the process of data collection and analysis. As capacity building and community decision making are central concerns, we describe below two instances of grant participants enacting leadership positions in their respective school districts. Sarah Bass is a Yup’ik immersion teacher in the Lower Yukon School District and was an M.A. student in the SLATE grant. Children in her community grow up speaking predominately English at home, so the community decided to implement a K–3 Yup’ik immersion program. In 2012, without consulting the teachers or community members, the district office informed the school that starting immediately the program needed to include 50% English instruction per day. Rather than begrudgingly accepting this unilateral decision, Bass decided to draw on her resources (including faculty in the SLATE program) to stand up and fight for her program. In order to have her voice heard, she attended the final school board meeting of the year to argue her point of view. In the end, the school board agreed with Bass and the immersion program was retained in full. In an interview with Siekmann, Bass explains the critical role of her experience in the SLATE graduate program in providing her with the academic and professional expertise to successfully influence language programming decisions in her district: What helped me was having you as a sounding board. . . . And I think I wouldn’t have gone as far as I [did] without your advice and input. . . . Because . . . I wouldn’t have had the resources I have. . . . You know, all the research papers—what research says about second language acquisition and language development and so on. So, it helped me having gone through the SLATE program and having been involved in materials development. (Bass, interview, September 7, 2012, in Marlow & Siekmann, 2012) A second case involves Sally Samson, a Yup’ik immersion teacher in the Lower Kuskokwim School district and a participant in all three projects discussed here. She earned her M.A. through the SLATE grant, developed Yup’ik-language elementary-level reading books as part of the PE grant, and is currently a Ph.D. student in the ANE CALL grant. The following is an excerpt from an email she sent to Siekmann regarding advocating for the distribution of the Yup’ikmedium books developed as part of the PE grant: I told the [Regional School] Board that the books are sitting at the bookstore waiting to be distributed. To make the long story short, I went to

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the bookstore so that I could take our books. It took us about an hour to collect the books and put them in boxes. . . . You should have heard the chairman and the person sitting next to her. They were very upset that the books were not distributed yet, and that if it were materials for science, math, and social studies they would have been distributed already. So the superintended had an earful . . . (Personal Communication, email, October 17, 2014) Samson’s status as a Ph.D. student and experience interacting with administrators and non-Natives in authority positions empowered her to intervene, to find out why the K-6 Yup’ik reading texts she had helped to produce were not in use, and, ultimately, to physically collect the books and facilitate their distribution to classrooms in district.

Indigenous Scholars The academy has traditionally been viewed as highly resistant to change and evolution (Bourdieu, 1988), save perhaps for its steady induction into neoliberal ideology, which itself is an ethical issue in that neoliberalism has become the naturalized economic reality across the world (Harvey, 2005), and increasingly, within higher education (Block, Gray, & Holborow, 2012). This said, new areas of study do enter the academy, including Native Alaskan languages such as Yup’ik, Gwich’in, and Inupiaq, which now are regularly taught on the University of Alaska, Fairbanks campuses. The Alaska Native Language Center was established by state legislation in 1972 with the purpose of researching, documenting, and teaching Alaska’s Native languages (http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/mission/find mission statement). Until very recently no Alaska Native individuals held tenure track positions in this center. It is within this context that the grants described here (see also Marlow & Siekmann, 2012, 2013) focused on the advancement and support of Indigenous scholars. With the goal of having Alaska Natives move into leadership positions within the university, the SLATE program specifically recruited Alaska Native individuals already employed by the university. Walkie Charles was a Yup’ik instructor, Kathy Sikorski was a Gwich’in instructor, Theresa John was Assistant Professor in Rural Development, and April Counceller was working at the Alutiiq Museum. As part of the SLATE project, these Ph.D. students not only acted as near-peer mentors to the SLATE master’s students, they were also apprenticed into taking on leadership and mentorship positions within the institution, roles that they are now carrying out. At the time of this writing, three of four Alaska Native Ph.D. students funded through the SLATE grant have finished their doctoral degrees. Dr. John has been tenured and promoted to Associate Professor of Alaska Native Studies at UAF. Dr. Charles has been hired into a tenuretrack position within the Alaska Native Language program. Dr. Counceller has been hired into a term-funded position at the University of Alaska Anchorage’s

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Kodiak Campus, where she is responsible for developing an Alutiiq Studies program. In the following discussion, we focus on the case of Dr. Charles, but see Charles, Counceller, John, Marlow, and Siekmann (2013) for accounts of other Indigenous students’ graduate study experiences. After Charles earned his Ph.D. he was hired as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Yup’ik and asked to lead the Yup’ik program. In this capacity he created instructional space for advanced Yup’ik classes to be conducted through the Yup’ik language. While this is commonly the case for fourth-year foreign language classes, this was not the practice in the Yup’ik language classes before Dr. Charles started teaching this course. Previously, a non-Native linguist taught the class as a grammar review largely within a framework of teaching “about the language” rather than teaching the language (e.g., Kramsch, 1993). However, with Dr. Charles in the role of Yup’ik program leadership, there was also a refocus on using the target language as the medium of instruction. Dr. Charles engaged the students in metalanguage in Yup’ik, thereby expanding the expressive domains of the language for himself and his students. Charles reflects on the increased agency brought about by his promotion to tenure-track assistant professor: With the newer generation of Yup’ik heritage students wanting to learn Yugtun [the Yup’ik language], I felt that the time was right to accept the agency to make appropriate changes in teaching Yugtun so that current and future students develop the appropriate tools to gain access to the language of their ancestors. In addition, three Indigenous scholars who achieved or nearly completed their Ph.D.s are now serving as faculty on the ANE CALL grant. In this capacity they are mentoring their own Alaska Native Ph.D. students and advising a group of Alaska Native M.A. students. The SLATE graduates also serve in leadership positions beyond the university and the state. For example, when the Alaskan governor signed Senate Bill 130 establishing the Alaska Native Language Preservation and Advisory Council in 2012, Drs. Charles and Counceller were appointed to serve on the council and Dr. Charles was appointed as the inaugural chair. One of the first concrete policy decisions made by the council resulted in the recent signing of House Bill 216, making all 20 of Alaska’s Native languages official languages of the state of Alaska. Charles also testified in the ultimately successful court case to make election materials available in Alaska Native languages. While we have described some meaningful examples of how we have seen Alaska Natives move into leadership positions, we are aware that we need to continue asking the question of how much their presence “at the table” ultimately changes the culture of institutions themselves. Moving beyond tokenism is not a straightforward, linear, or uncontested process. For example, being appointed into a tenure-track position at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) does

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not necessarily lead to institutional change. In the case of Dr. Charles, who had been employed as an instructor at UAF for over 10 years, moving from instructor to assistant professor required renegotiating the annual workload to reduce the number of teaching hours associated with his new rank and obligations. As a language instructor, Charles had taught 22 credits each year, while a regular teaching load at the tenure-track level is 15 credits. This adjustment was not automatic, as one would expect with a shift in responsibilities from instructor to tenure-ladder status, with the latter inclusive of substantial research and leadership responsibilities. Instead, the process of establishing a rebalanced tenureladder faculty workload required an explicit conversation with the program chair and mediation by a faculty mentor. This challenge was successfully negotiated in the end, but it illustrates how difficult it can be to break away from preexisting assumptions about roles and responsibilities. In many ways, Charles states that he feels “in” but “not in,” and while he acknowledges that his promotion to tenureladder rank provides greater agency in negotiating his own position within the academy, at other times he continues to feel excluded from important conversations. In the following comment, Charles describes his continuing sense of being in a peripheral and subordinated position in contexts such as faculty meetings: Even though I am a tenure-track faculty, do I still feel less-than? Yes, of course I do. Caucasian professors talk amongst themselves and maintain control of conversations in faculty meeting. This excerpt describes the problem of potential tokenism that Alaska Natives can experience and the ongoing challenge of being acknowledged as a core participant in decision-making settings in the academy. Speaking to this point, Bourdieu (1977) has argued that established order tends to produce the “naturalization of its own arbitrariness” expressed as a “sense of reality,” which, in turn, forms the basis for an “ineradicable adherence to the established order” (pp. 167–168). In a related vein, Bourdieu (1991) uses a marketplace metaphor to describe discursive fields—such as academic discourse communities—that operate through forms of symbolic exchange that support reproduction of status quo power relations. This takes place through a mechanism of selection bias that favors individuals who represent and enact established and conventionalized categories of perception. If this assessment of the post-Enlightenment institution of university life is accurate, what are the possibilities for, and limits to, substantive inclusion of Indigenous peoples, epistemologies, and cultural practices? In response, we remain optimistic about the fact that Alaska Natives are attaining advanced degrees and being hired in tenure-ladder faculty positions. This is a recent and significant success in terms of pluralizing the professoriate and providing greater diversity among the faculty that reflect the demographic and ethnic makeup of Alaskan university students. The next step forward will require moving beyond recruitment and symbolic inclusion of Native Alaskans as an

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underrepresented faculty minority group and toward substantive opportunities for hybridizing and transforming aspects of university education that would be more inclusive of Indigenous epistemologies, manner of participation, and, as we discuss below, forms of scholarly contribution.

Ethical Issue 3: Insider–Outsider Dynamics and Joint Knowledge Production In the case of Indigenous language education efforts, there is general consensus that successful language revitalization and maintenance efforts are rooted in community initiative and local commitments (Hermes, 2007; Hermes & King, 2013). In contrast, when language policy and curriculum decision making are centralized and removed from immediate community interests, the result can be to limit what Bryson and de Castell (1993) term access to the “means of discursive production” (p. 355), such as community involvement in educational programming and practice. In this section we will explore insider–outsider dynamics affecting both the non-Indigenous academics and the Alaska Native scholars and teachers involved in our work, with a focus on the role of research. We discuss our own understandings and experiences of insider–outsider dynamics against the backdrop of a long-standing and problematic tradition of doing research “on” Indigenous peoples by non-Native academics, as well as more recent calls for Native scholars to conduct research with Native communities (Swisher, 1998). It is clear, of course, that binaries such as Indigenous versus non-Indigenous are oversimplifications. Merton (1972), for example, has challenged a monolithic view of the insider-outsider issue, stating that: [s]ince we all occupy various statuses and have group affiliations of varying significance to us, since, in short, we individually link up with the differentiated society through our status sets, this runs counter to the abiding and exclusive primacy of any one group affiliation. Differing situations activate different statuses which then and there dominate over the rival claims of other statuses. (p. 25) Addressing the contextual specificity of individual and group identifications, Herr and Anderson (2015) list a number of dimensions of insider–outsider dynamics among researchers, such as the more obvious condition of insider– outsider positions vis-à-vis the setting under study. They also describe the hierarchical position and level of informal power within the organization/community, and this observation articulates with the institutionally affirmed shift in hierarchical position from lecturer to tenure-ladder status, described above in the case of Dr. Charles, with the residual contradiction of a relatively unchanged distribution of power that maintains preexisting power relations.

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The historical context within which these dynamics play out in Alaska includes the legacy of colonization and disenfranchisement. Indigenous scholars such as Brayboy (2005) have strongly endorsed activist engagement from within educational institutions, arguing for “knowledge learned in school to be used in conjunction with tribal knowledge toward community-based social justice ends” (p. 196). In order to do this, Indigenous scholars are encouraged to engage in transformational resistance through “the acquisition of credentials and skills for the empowerment and liberation of American Indian communities” (p. 196; see also Brayboy & Castagno, 2009). We would offer the examples mentioned above (promotion to tenure-track professor, being named to a state council for the preservation of Alaska Native Languages, participating in the bill elevating Alaska Native languages to official status) as examples of how the efforts discussed here are transformational resistance as enacted by the teachers and scholars supported through our grant projects. While we recognize the need to do more and acknowledge many additional social justice issues pertaining to Alaska Native communities, we would suggest that community–school–university partnerships have helped to catalyze a sense of agency through participatory engagement. In a kind of double-bind contradiction, it is also important to acknowledge the potential and real costs for Indigenous scholars. As Brayboy (2005) states, transformational resistance is “sometimes romanticized and is attended by often serious individual costs and consequences” (p. 196). Going to university and earning advanced degrees is not always looked favorably upon by other community members, as those pursuing higher education might be seen as “thinking they are better than everyone else,” “turning their backs on traditional subsistence lifestyles,” and might even be accused of “becoming” or trying to be “White” (quotations are excerpts from recorded conversations among the authors). Charles expresses this concern as follows: [Despite successfully completing my Ph.D.] the element of guilt remains. This is because I am still Yup’ik and I feel guilty for not being home to take care of my family. In this way, as Brayboy (2005) and others have remarked, Indigenous scholars often experience various and complex insider–outsider relationships both in their home communities and in the academy, in essence feeling “less than” or “other than” in both contexts. This situation is not unique to Indigenous scholars, but also applies to the White academics involved in research with and in Alaska Native communities. While we in no way equate the challenges non-Indigenous academics face with the systematic oppression of Indigenous populations, we would like to explore the tension between activism and academics from the point of view of the two White academics involved in these projects. Considerations of insider–outsider status of the participants came to the fore in the initial planning meeting of the PE grant as the overarching goals,

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timelines, and organizational structure of the project were discussed over the course of a 2-day meeting. In the process of developing a project based on the perceived needs of the teachers, participants enacted particular positionalities (Herr & Anderson, 2015). For example, Dr. Siekmann initiated the meeting, created the agenda, asked the questions, and was the only experienced grant writer in the group. In these ways, as well as through being a White academic, she was an outsider to both the Yup’ik communities being served by the grant as well as to the group of Indigenous teachers. The teachers were all Yup’ik women involved in Yup’ik-medium instruction. All participants shared an interest in developing linguistically and culturally appropriate thematic units for Yup’ikmedium schools (grant goal 1) and in integrating technology to foster authentic and meaningful interaction between children in Yup’ik-medium schools (grant goal 2). However, while the teachers primarily focused on materials development and developing Yup’ik language proficiency, the faculty member stressed the need to evaluate the effectiveness of the developed units (grant goal 3), which is a form of research. There was significant push-back by the teachers regarding conducting any type of research. The teachers’ concerns were manifold and included the following issues: Would the research take precious time and energy away from the materials development aspect of the grant? Would they be expected to conduct the research “on their students”? Who would benefit from the research? From a conventional academic perspective, the research was seen to serve several functions, such as to demonstrate the effectiveness of the materials for grant reporting, to validate teacher-created materials as “research based” (a buzz word in the education scene), to count towards the required research productivity for the university, and to share the insights and lessoned learned in this Indigenous language revitalization project with a broader audience of Indigenous peoples, language educators, and language education researchers. Siekmann recalls the following interaction: I explained to the teachers that it was important to investigate whether or not the materials were going to make a difference and to strengthen their voices in relation to decisions being made by the school district office. I also admitted that doing research was important to me personally as a tenure track faculty member. I told them that, “if we cannot publish on this, I cannot afford to spend my time doing this. If I don’t publish, I will not be around to continue doing this work.” In essence, from the point of view of an academic with an appointment at a university with research expectations, there needs to be research production associated with projects. As non-Indigenous academics, Siekmann and Thorne are sensitive to, and empathetic regarding, the history and understandable distrust of outsiders doing research in Indigenous communities. It is also the case that many Indigenous

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communities have perceived outside academic interests as in conflict with, or even in violation of, a community’s right to self-representation and nonexploitation. Indeed, the Maori author Linda Tuhiwai Smith, in a text titled Decolonizing Methodologies (1999), notes that “ ‘Research’ is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary” (p. 1). Thorne, in interaction with an Indigenous scholar, reported that when describing the pedagogical emphasis of the PE grant and its overall success within the school district and community, but that the project had resulted in little research output, the Indigenous scholar responded by saying, “Good—that’s the way it should be!” In our view, there remains a utilitarian argument for viewing research conducted by and with Indigenous peoples as a catalyst for contributing in meaningful ways to language maintenance and revitalization efforts through the sharing of difficult lessons learned as well as successful strategies. The PE project, for example, produced 38 elementary grade–level books written in Yup’ik to be used by approximately 800 Yup’ik schoolchildren in Yup’ikmedium Language Arts instructions, about a dozen newspaper articles written by teachers and students involved in the PE grant (many of them published in the Yup’ik language or as bilingual stories), several conference presentations at academic venues, and only one academic article that was published in a proceedings related to a conference that focused in part on language education in Indigenous communities. Nota bene, the latter conference proceedings article lists all teachers and district office personnel involved in the grant as coauthors.

Discussion and Conclusions Discussing Bhabha’s work, Menezes de Souza (2007) suggests the following strategy: [R]ather than persisting within a colonizer/colonized dichotomy, Bhabha’s move from representation to agency introduces the . . . dimension of power/knowledge collusion in post-colonial cultures; as a result, the previous dichotomies—“either/or”, “them/us”, “true/false”, “myth/history”, “science/mysticism”—are now replaced by hybridities arising from the complex sites of colonized spaces, traversed by ideologies, languages and cultures both native and colonial. (p. 138) In the grant-funded projects we have described above, we have ardently attempted to work together, to support multivoicedness (teachers and administrators, Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, communities and institutions, academic interests and intervention projects), and most importantly to create conditions of possibility (to borrow from Foucault) for those who live most intimately within, or with the hope of, maintaining and revitalizing Indigenous

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languacultures (term from Agar, 1994). These are the people for whom this work has the greatest consequence; therefore, they should have the most to say about how things should play out and the decisions that are made. While all three authors agree that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions to the ethical issues involved in university–school–community collaborations conducted in teams involving Native and non-Native scholars, there are a few key points that we take away from our work so far. White/non-Indigenous academics working in Indigenous settings must acknowledge historical conditions of colonization and must carefully consider the various insider/outsider positionalities of everyone involved. Collaborations (regardless of who the collaborators are) rely in large part on mutual trust and respect. In the end, the individuals, communities, and institutions working together need to be able to rely on each other and believe in the shared vision and intended outcomes. Because of the historical conditions governing our positionalities relative to the condition and health of Indigenous languages and cultures, it is non-Indigenous researchers who have to establish their trustworthiness to other project partners. Trust is earned through the development and maintenance of long-term relationships and by putting the goals of the communities before the goals of the academy. Developing trust takes time, giving of oneself, and entering into personal relationships with one’s collaborators. Andrew, an Indigenous SLATE graduate and collaborator on the PE grant, explains the importance of trust in the following way: Trust . . . developed because in your heart . . . you really mean who you are. That’s what’s important in Yugtun. If I didn’t trust you . . . if you didn’t mean from your heart, I would have nothing to do with you. . . . That’s what trust is. . . . [It is] person to person—heart to heart. I can read your mind, read where you came from [and] who you are—because I trust you. You opened your life to us [and] that’s how we began to trust. (Interview, June 7, 2012, cited in Marlow and Siekmann, 2012, p. 60) In summation, there are no “answers,” only choices, processes, and provisional outcomes. All partners need to frequently ask themselves—what am I doing this for? Who benefits and in what ways? There is no manual for this sort of work, but the following were critical to the processes and outcomes we have described above: maintaining dialogue and transparency even when issues are painful or difficult, the significant investment of time and effort by all parties, and collaboratively forging a shared purpose.

Note 1. Funding levels and U.S. Dept. of Education grant numbers: SLATE: $1.3 million, S356A060055; PE: $1.7 million, S356A090066; ANE CALL: $1.99 million, S356A120055.

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Johnson, R., & Swain, M. (1997). Immersion education. Cambridge: Cambridge Applied Linguistics. Kipp, D. (2000). Encouragement, guidance, insights, and lessons learned for native language activists developing their own tribal language program. St. Paul, MN: Grotto Foundation. Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and culture in language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Krauss, M. E. (1997). Indigenous languages of the North: A report on their present state. In. H. Shoji & J. Janhunen (Eds.), Northern minority languages: Problems of survival (pp. 1–34). Senri Ethnological Studies, 44. Osaka, Japan: National Museum of Ethnology. Marlow, P., & Siekmann, S. (2012). Changing the conversation: Promise and vulnerability in Alaska Native language revitalization. Journal of American Indian Education, 51(3), 46–69. Marlow, P., & Siekmann, S. (2013). Communities of practice: An Alaskan Native model for language teaching and learning. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. May, S., and Hill, R. (2005). Māori-medium education: Current issues and challenges. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 8 (5), 377–403. Menezes de Souza, L. M. (2007). Entering a culture quietly: Writing and cultural survival in indigenous education in Brazil. In S. Makoni & A. Pennycook (Eds.), Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages (pp. 135–169). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Merton, R. K. (1972). Insiders and outsiders: A chapter in the sociology of knowledge. American Journal of Sociology, 18 (1), 9–47. Mignolo, W. (2000). Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges and border thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ortega, L. (2012). Epistemological diversity and moral ends of research in instructed SLA. Language Teaching Research, 16, 206–226. Philips, S. U. (1983). The invisible culture: Communication in classroom and community on the Warm Spring Indian reservation. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Reyhner, J. (1991). Plans for dropout prevention and special school support services for American Indian and Alaska Native students. In Indian Nations at Risk Task Force Commissioned Papers. Washington, DC.: U.S. Department of Education. ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 343 762. Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. New York: Random House. Scollon, R. (2000). Methodological interdiscursivity: An ethnographic understanding of unfinalizability. In S. Sarangi & M. Coulthard (Eds.), Discourse and social life (pp. 138–154). London: Longman. Siekmann, S., Thorne, S. L., Arevgaq John, T., Andrew, B., Nicolaui, M., Moses, C., . . . Bass, S. (2013). Supporting Yup’ik medium education: Progress and challenges in a university–school collaboration. In S. May (Ed.), LED2011: Refereed conference proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Language, Education and Diversity (pp. 1–25). Auckland, New Zealand: The University of Auckland. ISBN 978–0–473–24021–9 Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books. Swisher, K. (1998). Why Indian people should be the ones to write about Indian education. In D. A. Mihesuah (Ed.), Natives and academics: Researching and writing about American Indians (pp. 190–199). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Thorne, S. L. (2005). Epistemology, politics, and ethics in sociocultural theory. Modern Language Journal, 89, 393–409. Wyman, L., Marlow, P., Andrew, C. F., Miller, G., Nicholai, C., & Rearden, Y. (2010). High stakes testing, bilingual education and language development: A Yup’ik example. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13(6), 701–721.

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9 ETHICAL ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC ETHNOGRAPHY Balancing the Micro and the Macro Fiona Copland and Angela Creese

Linguistic ethnography is an interpretive approach that studies the local and immediate actions of actors from their point of view and considers how these interactions are embedded in wider social contexts and structures. It is a “disciplined way of looking, asking, recording, reflecting, comparing, and reporting” (Hymes, 1980, p. 105), combining discourse analysis with ethnography. Linguistic ethnography, a mainly European phenomenon, has been greatly influenced by North American scholarship in linguistic anthropology, and because of this we share many of the same antecedents. Indeed a common bedrock of “metatheorists” (McElhinny, Hols, Holtzener, Neunger, & Hicks, 2003, p. 316) such as Gumperz and Hymes, Goffman and Erickson, Agha and Silverstein, Gal and Heller, Blommaert, and Rampton highlights the theoretical and methodological backgrounds we share. Although a chapter on ethics is not the place to rehearse the emergence and development of linguistic ethnography in Europe, a rationale for its gathering momentum can be found in its ability to cluster and network groups of researchers who might otherwise feel fairly isolated (for overviews, see Copland & Creese, 2015; Creese, 2008, 2010; Maybin & Tusting, 2011; Rampton, 2007; Rampton et al., 2004; Rampton, Maybin, & Roberts, 2015; Tusting & Maybin, 2007). At its heart, linguistic ethnography is concerned with how micro, in terms of talk and action, are played out against the macro, in terms of the wider political social context. Linguistic ethnography makes explicit what people often take for granted, making accessible new ways of understanding. It does this by discovering knowledge through participation rather than just observation and through drawing on interactions in the field. Linguistic ethnographers rely greatly on learning from those with whom they are closely involved. In linguistic ethnography, the researcher usually attempts not to inform, tell, or treat, but rather to forge a “partnership of equals” (Blommaert, 2010, p. 5). This is usually earned through

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the researcher’s long-term investment and involvement in the field. According to Hymes (1980), ethnography as a research methodology is the “most open, the most compatible with a democratic way of life, the least likely to produce a world in which experts control knowledge at the expenses of those who are studied” (p. 105). Blommaert (2010) calls this the democratic dimension of ethnography in which the ethnographer is agentive: being an agent thus involves an explicit and methodologized ethics and politics of work—a commitment to construct knowledge in a “fair” way, balancing the potentially always thunderous and silencing effect of science against the weakness and inarticulateness of local voices, the voices of those who used to be called the “informant” or the “subject.” (p. 5) As Blommaert eloquently argues, ethnographers attempt to counter and transform existing social orders through flattening the relationship between researcher and researched. He suggests that there is a reward to be gained from being a good agent, “an agent of improvement, not of continued or exacerbated oppression and exclusion” (Blommaert, 2010, p. 5). A further aim is to bring back “ethnological knowledge” to the community that has provided it through turning ethnographic research findings into useful and meaningful materials for further learning and reflection. Linguistic ethnography adopts this democratic dimension, setting store by the imperative not only to do no harm (nonmalefience) but also to ensure beneficence, that the research is in the interest of the participants (Murphy & Dingwall, 2001). This does not mean that linguistic ethnography is free of ethical dilemmas. Rather, the opposite is the case, as will be shown. Our illustration of the dilemmas faced by two ethnographers, Fiona and Angela, in two different linguistic ethnographic projects, pays attention to Blommaert’s notion of “a partnership of equals” and the flattening of hierarchies as they moved between the microethical and macroethical and between capturing the emic perspectives of participants and the etic frameworks of constraining social structures. We believe the reflexive processes of linguistic ethnography provide the tools for responding to and bridging the micro and the macro ethical domains. We also make the argument that a concern for ethics should extend to researchers as well as participants, because they, too, face issues of vulnerability and social justice.

Macro and Micro Ethics: Standardization, Sensitivity, and Control In academia in general and the social sciences in particular, principles of ethical research have been drawn from medical sciences and experimental research, and although it has been argued that these principles do not “fit” ethnographic

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endeavor (Agar, 2008) they inform the work of most ethics committees and the questions on ethics approval forms. Critics of research ethics committees (REC) have argued that those most challenged by “the codification of ethics through regulatory frameworks” (Guta, Nixon, & Wilson, 2013, p. 301) are those working in the qualitative tradition because the professional ethics rooted in interpretive academic norms are not easily incorporated into the standardized protocols influencing ethics review bodies. Increasing standardization of ethical procedures in universities, therefore, creates “tensions between centralized professional standards and local practices” (Jaspers, Houtepen, & Horstman, 2013, p. 311). This means that what appears on the face of it to be an administrative procedure gains in significance to include debates about academic freedom. Researchers worry that their professional judgements and experience are less important than committee protocols. Guta et al. (2013) ask if a “moral panic” (p. 307) exists about research ethics boards in which a “faceless bureaucracy” appears to control and obstruct research. They argue that this can be seen in the emergence of such rhetorical devices as the “research ethics industry” (Allen, 2008) and “ethics creep” (Haggerty, 2004). Ethics creep involves, “a dual process whereby the regulatory structure of the ethics bureaucracy is expanding outward, colonizing new groups, practices, and institutions, while at the same time intensifying the regulation of practices deemed to fall within its official ambit” (Haggerty, 2004, p. 394). Recently, important work has emerged that critiques decontextualized accounts of ethical procedures and argues for a shift towards being sensitive to local research contexts. Kubanyiova (2008) highlights the issues that can arise when researchers focus primarily on what she calls macroethics, the procedural aspects of research ethics, such as following an institution’s ethical procedures with its ethical form-filling. She suggests that another problem with the standardization of ethics is that too often researchers believe that “satisfying macroethical principles will automatically ensure ethical research conduct” (p. 504; see, too, de Laine, 2000). On the contrary, Kubanyiova’s position is that some macroethical principles are inadequate when applied to situated research practices. Indeed, they can in fact be at odds with microethical considerations, which are, “ethical dilemmas that arise from the specific roles and responsibilities that researchers and research participants adopt in specific research contexts” (p. 504). These, she argues, are, equally, if not more, important. Drawing on Haverkamp (2005), Kubanyiova suggests that researchers should develop virtue ethics (the ability to recognize situations that require an ethical response) and ethics of care (the ability to recognize that research is carried out in relation to people and contexts and therefore is contingent and situated), an injunction that fits with the participatory approach of linguistic ethnography. Guta et al. (2013) question the “them” (research ethics boards) and “us” (researchers) and suggest that the conversation be widened to consider the powerful systems of control in which ethics committees sit. They use Foucault’s

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concepts of the examination and surveillance to describe how boards normalize procedures and come “to qualify, to classify, and to punish” (Foucault, 1995, p. 184). They explain how universities operate within a neoliberal apparatus and market ideology that is managed through targets, appraisals, and peer review. This means that in higher education “trustworthiness” becomes associated with “standardization, competence, continuity, and reliability” (Morley, 2003, pp. 5–6) played out in committees like ethics boards. Ethics boards are sites that should be investigated because they sit at the crossroad of power and knowledge, but also within a “larger system of seemingly unrelated processes, systems, and rules” (Guta et al., 2013, p. 308). Their view is that research ethics should be interrogated as an institutional and political discourse and opened up for counterdiscourses and alternative ethical frameworks that create possibilities for critical resistance. As they suggest, “We are all implicated in the ‘games of truth’ that produce knowledge, and need to interrogate our own motivations to know as researchers” (Guta et al., 2013, p. 308). In the discussion so far we have identified three issues in the micro and macro relationship with regard to ethics. The first is the seeming disconnect between the academy’s (macro) ethical procedures and the reality of conducting (micro) ethics in the field. The second is that macro ethical procedures have generated a culture of detachment between boards and researchers so that an unhealthy indifference to the procedures themselves has sprung up. The third problem is that the macro procedures of ethics boards are themselves part of super-macro processes of institutional and political discourses. In the next section we consider the micro and macro in linguistic ethnography and look at the potential of reflexivity to bridge the domains.

The Micro and Macro in Linguistic Ethnography: Considering Ethics A methodological and theoretical orientation informing linguistic ethnography is the tension between the micro and macro. In ethnography the micro is mostly conceptualized as the situated, small, and interactional, whereas the macro is described as the societal, large, and ideological. A further dimension of the micro/macro discussion in ethnography is the emic/etic framework. Whereas the emic perspective endeavors to describe participant practices and beliefs from an insider position, the etic viewpoint is said to provide a wider framework for looking across social encounters (Hymes, 1964; Pike, 1967). Linguistic ethnographers typically pay attention to the movement between the domains of micro/ macro and emic/etic in making and evidencing arguments. Silverstein (2003, p. 2002) has argued that the macro is a consolidated projection of “a complex, and ever changing, configuration of interdiscursivities in micro-contextual orders” some of which turn out to be more important than others at particular points in time. As Blommaert (2005) puts it, “both levels can only be understood

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in terms of one another” (p. 16). Hornberger (1994) call this a “creative tension” (p. 688), because it is only through this dynamic that we can see how communication interrelates in systematic ways. Adding “ethics” to linguistic ethnography’s concern with the macro/micro relationship is welcome for two reasons. First, it allows the linguistic ethnographer to consider the macro processes of ethical approval in the academy, as outlined above, with the micro processes of ethics in the field. Second, it adds another dimension to the researcher’s movement between emic and etic frameworks, as researchers must consider ethics from a variety of viewpoints. We use this chapter to reflect on some of the ethical dilemmas we faced as we moved between macro and micro concerns. We provide examples of ethnographers in field sites making local decisions that have wider implications, while we also discuss how decisions about representation index wider discourses of power in the academy. Researchers working in linguistic ethnography are aware that each research project brings its own ethical challenges. Although we firmly believe that ethical issues must be resolved locally, drawing on contextual realities and mutual understandings, we also suggest that dimensions of ideology, discourse, and power be considered. Throughout the case studies we use reflexivity to uncover and to interrogate our decision-making processes, and it is to this methodological approach that we now turn.

Reflexivity in Considering Ethics in Linguistic Ethnography Reflexivity as methodology has developed in importance over the last 30 years as ethnographers have struggled to deal with the so-called “crisis of representation”; that is, how they show themselves and others in the products of their research. However, as Pillow (2003) shows, reflexivity as methodology is not without its problems and its critics. While Patai (1994) argues that reflexivity is self-indulgent and does not lead to better research or help us to “escape the consequences of our positions by talking about them endlessly” (p. 70, cited in Pillow, 2003, p. 177), Pillow (2003) suggests that we have become too “comfortable” with reflexivity and apply it almost mechanically. Through revealing our subjectivities, prejudices, cultural affiliations, and beliefs, ethnographers may make the mistake of assuming that we create validity, truthfulness, and familiarity (see, for example, Berger, 2013). In contrast, Pillow (2003) believes we should not: situate reflexivity as a confessional act, a cure for what ails us, or a practice that renders familiarity, but rather [should] situate practices of reflexivity as critical to exposing the difficult and often uncomfortable task of leaving what is unfamiliar, unfamiliar. (p. 177)

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Pillow’s central argument is that the ethnographer need not make the familiar strange in all cases. Sometimes ethnographers must be content to live with uncertainty, in both their understandings and in their representations of what is “going on.” In this chapter, we use reflexivity in this way. In the following case studies, we show how in linguistic ethnography, reflexivity is an uncomfortable process, causing us to question our own assumptions, feel uneasy with our ethical decisions, and remain unsure about our representations. We also show how this reflexive disposition requires us to revisit our ethical choices and question the decisions we made.

Example 1: Researching Trainers and Trainees During Feedback Conferences: Some Ethical Issues (Fiona Copland) Fiona’s linguistic ethnography focused on the feedback event in a preservice training program. The Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA) program is internationally known and provides a baseline qualification for teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) in private institutions in the U.K. and in teaching centers around the world. The CELTA is a program that includes input sessions on how to teach English, guided observation of experienced teachers, and, most importantly perhaps, teaching practice, which trainees had to pass. After teaching practice, there was a feedback conference in which trainees and the trainer discussed the lesson for about an hour, evaluating its positive and negative aspects. Fiona’s data provided responses to the following research questions: 1. 2. 3. 4.

What are the generic features of this feedback event? Which positions are enacted and reproduced by trainers at the Chamberlain Centre? What strategies do these trainers and trainees use to introduce, maintain, and negotiate power in their feedback sessions? Are these trainers and trainees adequately prepared to take part in the feedback event?

In brief, she found that feedback conferences followed generic conventions and that participants demonstrated resistance to feedback and to other participants by troubling the limits of these. Particular ideas about language learning and teaching were circulated in the feedback conferences, and these ideas drew, to a great extent, on the trainers’ own experiences and beliefs and, to a lesser extent, on the CELTA syllabus. Power was mostly in the hands of the trainers, although wily trainees were able to introduce their own agendas and get their voices heard. There was no training to support trainees in taking part in feedback, and this might be detrimental to trainees who, for whatever reason, are unused to discussions of this type. As a result of the research, Fiona suggested that preparation for feedback should form part of the induction processes of CELTA (and other) programs (see Copland, 2010, 2011, 2012).

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Fiona had worked at the center for many years prior to the research and had a very good relationship with the head of English and colleagues there. This meant that it was easy to negotiate access and her researcher status, although her relationship with the center and the trainers in particular threw up some ethical issues. In the account she provides below (for a fuller account see Copland & Creese, 2015) she describes one particular critical episode in which she brings together micro and macro issues. I had to resolve a number of ethical issues before, during, and after collecting the data. My first issue concerned consent from the trainers. The problem was not getting consent; indeed, given the fact that I knew all the trainers well professionally and socially, this was easy. Rather, the problem was, and remains, is it ethical to recruit participants who are so wellknown to the researcher? What choice do such participants really have when it comes to taking part or later on, withdrawing, given this close relationship? And given that much research in education in particular has a critical function, is it fair to expose colleagues and friends to the approbation of others? These concerns had to be balanced with the importance the study might potentially have in the future to trainers and, perhaps more importantly, to trainees, particularly given the paucity of research in this area. Kubanyiova (2008) suggests that such dilemmas are common in situated applied linguistics research, particularly when focusing on a particular case, or cases, as this study did. She characterizes the problem as one where the “definition of what constitutes the ‘greater good’ largely ignore the relational character of situated research” (p. 506). In other words, macroethical concerns, obtaining approval from the institution(s) and gaining consent from participants, override microethical concerns such as ensuring no harm is done to those taking part in the research project. I designed the research so that these issues were approached in three ways: first, I tried to make sure that the trainers were as informed as possible about the nature of the research and their part in it. This took the usual form of holding an information session about the research and then giving the trainers time and space to complete, or not, the consent form. Second, during the research process, I tried to be sensitive to messages I picked up from the trainers, messages which might not be available to a researcher who did not know his/her participants as well (see too Berger, 2013). For example, chatting with trainers outside the research site, I learnt which trainers minded having a video camera in the room and which did not and I altered the data collection accordingly. Third, in the post-course interviews, I asked for the trainers’ feedback on data collected and to explain their own positions and views on what had happened in feedback. This was integrated into the data analysis and also publications.

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However, it would be naive to think that addressing ethical concerns is something only done pre-data collection. As the research progressed, a number of other issues arose which had to be addressed. For example, early on in the research, I observed and recorded a very emotional and tense feedback conference. A male trainee became very upset and angry. He accused the trainer and the training team of insensitivity and challenged their expertise in teaching English in quite damning terms. The trainer retaliated, became very angry with trainee, and refuted the challenge that he (and other members of the team) was not competent. The trainee started to cry and left the room. The trainer followed soon after, leaving the remaining trainees, and me, to wait. The trainee left the course. This became for me what Guillemin and Gillam (2004), cited in Kubanyiova (2008), call an “ethically important moment[s].” I had to decide whether to include this in my study given that a number of participants may have felt exposed and even compromised if the data (field notes and audio recordings) were made public. On advice, I contacted the participants individually and via email (so that they had time to consider a response) to ask if they prefer me not to include the data from the conference. All participants gave their consent and seemed much less concerned than me about the data circulating. I then included them in my original Ph.D. work. However, I remained uncomfortable with using the data as I did not feel the participants had understood, in the way I felt I did, the potential ramifications of revealing what had happened in that session to an academic and professional audience. In the end, I decided not to write about it in work I sought to have published. The work I have done as a researcher around this ethically important moment—thinking, contacting, rethinking, considering the context of the research, and then deciding—demonstrates an important principle of ethics: ref lexivity. I had permission from the institutions to conduct the research, and permission from the participants to use these particular data (in other words, I was “safe” in terms of ticking the boxes of ethical research). I could have used the data in published work with no repercussions (and in terms of the research questions 2, 3, and 4 they were very good data indeed). But thinking, discussing, and rethinking brought me to the understanding that the data did not need to be fully in the public domain. Had I published them, I would have put my own concerns as a researcher above my moral responsibility to my research participants, and for me, this is unethical. Kubanyiova (2008, p. 506) suggests that researchers should display “microethics of care” in situated research of this kind so that the researcher develops a moral approach to the participants and regards them not as the subjects of the research but as “specific individuals, located in specific situations that require actions

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based in care, responsibility, and responsiveness to context” (Haverkamp, 2005, pp. 149–150, cited in Kubanyiova, 2008, pp. 506–507). The data show the trainer getting angry. He did not behave unprofessionally in my opinion, but others might disagree. Furthermore, the world of English language teacher training is quite small, and it was possible that the trainers’ anonymity would not have been maintained if the data were in the public domain. Had the awarding body recognized the participant there might have been ramifications in terms of employment. In this particular instance, I feel I have made the right decision as a researcher, but more importantly, as a human being. Finally, in terms of ethics, I had to decide what to do about publications. As we all know, academics in universities are under huge pressure to publish their research in journals and books and are in danger of losing their positions if they do not do so. Publishing data becomes an ethical dilemma, however, if the researcher knows that what will be published could potentially damage the research participants. This is particularly the case, I feel, in research on teacher education as in most cases there is some criticism, overt or implied, of the practices of teachers or trainers. It has also been suggested that nothing should be put into print that could not be said to the participants face-to-face (de Laine, 2000), and this I have found a useful rule of thumb. However, as Kubanyiova (2008, p. 515) points out, if the welfare of the research participants is always prioritized above the contribution to knowledge that the research might make, “there is a risk that this type of situated research . . . could never contribute fully to the advancement of theoretical knowledge in any discipline.” In the end, researcher reflexivity must again be called upon and a decision made which addresses both considerations. It is important to write with sensitivity to the feelings of the research participants, although these may at times contradict each other, to demonstrate empathy with their positions and to acknowledge the influences and constraints under which they work. This is the path I have tried to follow in publishing findings from this and consequent studies. Hertz (1996) describes ethical and moral dilemmas as inescapable and the vignette provided by Fiona above illustrates this. Fiona’s decision not to publish is only understandable if we consider two axes of macro and micro: the approval process (macro) and ethics of care (micro); and the etic (macro) and emic (micro) perspectives. The macro and micro on the first axis seemed to coincide. The institutional approval process gave her carte blanche to publish. The discussions with participants after the disagreement also gave her permission. It would have been possible for Fiona to make the ethical argument that she had full permission and that discussing the data would advance knowledge and understanding of the area and could be written with respect to the participants’ feelings. But

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this was not the road she chose to take because the micro and macro dimensions of emic and etic came into play. Fiona’s concern for her participants worked on several levels. Her participants were people she knew well. As a researcher, she was somewhat of an insider herself, having worked as a trainer in the same organization in the past, giving her an emic perspective on the research site. Her understanding of etic considerations beyond the immediate episode meant she saw the risks of releasing the data, which could potentially lead to criticism of the trainers. The reflexive approach demanded by the ethnographer meant she reached an ethical decision that looked beyond the local situated encounters of a feedback conference to its interpretation in other educational contexts. As an experienced researcher, trainer, and teacher herself, she worked between the interstices of micro/macro and emic/etic to reach a decision that was ethical. Fiona anticipated that reporting on and publishing about one particularly difficult feedback event could be harmful to those she was researching with. She therefore chose to advocate on behalf of her participants to protect against dangers lurking in the academy. Writing this chapter has created a further ethical dilemma. In the first version of the chapter, Fiona did not provide a detailed description of the incident that caused her consternation (marked above with ). However, following editorial comments for this chapter that suggested that the discussion of ethics could not be effective if a summary of the incident were not presented to readers, she provided a brief synopsis. Fiona felt catapulted back to her original conundrum. If she gave details was she not compromising her participants? If she didn’t would science and scholarship lose out? As you can see, Fiona decided to give a brief outline of the incident. However, she has not “used” the data in ways normally associate with linguistic ethnography: analyzing the unfolding talk in context. This is a compromise she can live with, although she remains uncomfortable with this decision and continues to worry about how her participants are represented in writing.

Voice and Reflexivity in Linguistic Ethnography As the first case study illustrates, linguistic ethnography insists that researchers should be reflexive about their own intellectual assumptions and sociohistorical positioning. Because ethnographers are positioned subjects, they grasp “certain human phenomena better than others” (Rosaldo, 1989, p. 19). Rosaldo points out that interpretation is always provisional due to the “distinctive mix of insight and blindness” that each researcher brings (p. 19). This is made even more apparent when doing ethnography in a team where each ethnographer brings his or her own history and subject positions to the research and writing processes. Heller (2011) argues that a key dimension of ethnography is representation—that is, how we tell the story we think the analysis of the data warrants. This is “an issue of ideology of language and discourse, and a question of voice” (Heller,

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2011, p. 46). Heller points out that in telling our story we must find our own voice, reflecting on and taking responsibility for what we say, how we say it, and to whom it is said. Ethnographers are never outside the narratives they write and the descriptions they inscribe. Geertz (1988) calls this an “un-get-roundable fact” because “all ethnographical descriptions are homemade . . . they are the describer’s descriptions, not those of the described” (p. 144). Linguistic ethnographers produce descriptions through their observations, interviews, and publications. In all these activities the ethnographer works to be reflexive and ethical. A crucial consideration in conducting linguistic ethnographic research is the ethical representation of the voices of the researched. This is a fundamental issue in ethnography, as Bauman and Briggs (1990) indicated when they argued “much of what we do as linguistic anthropologists amounts to the decontextualization and recontextualization of others’ discourse, which means as well that we exercise power” (p. 78). In a team approach to ethnography the number of voices are increased as individual researchers’ recontextualize the voices of their participants in discussion. Increasing the number of ethnographers working collaboratively has the capacity to introduce a greater range of researcher and participant profiles, biographies, histories, discourses, and subjectivities. This further complicates issues of reflexivity and representation as team members contemplate whose stories get told, when, and how and whether these voices are heard and acted upon through interpretation and publication. Reflexivity in team practices is made potentially more complex because knowledge production in teams must pay attention to such issues as who feels able to represent what and whom, why this might be so, and how such mixtures of insight and blindness play out in team processes. As the Bauman and Briggs’ quote indicates, linguistic ethnographic approaches foreground issues of power and representation in research. For those of us working in teams, this leads us beyond the ethics of the participant–researcher relationship and context to the ethics of researcher relationships and the wider academic environment. In order to be reflexive about power and representation in teams, this can mean rather painfully turning the lens on our own ethical practices and dilemmas in working collaboratively.

Voice in Team Ethnography For the last 12 years Angela has been researching language practices in community-run language schools. These are known in the U.K. as complementary or supplementary schools and in the United States as heritage language schools. Complementary schools are grassroots institutions that have developed with very little government funding. In many ways vulnerable and surviving from handto-mouth, they are nonetheless sites that have a political role in countering the monolingual orientation of mainstream schooling and providing young people with an opportunity to resist ethnic categories and social stereotypes associated with static identity markers. These nonstatutory and voluntary schools provide a

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community resource for young people, parents, and teachers to network, and to support positive student-learner identities. They also create spaces where young people and their teachers are able to negotiate identities through the performance of diverse linguistic repertoires. Angela and the wider team have conducted ethnographies in 11 British complementary schools, spending on average 1 year in each site collecting data for projects that last approximately 2 years each (for more information, see Blackledge & Creese, 2010). We have also partnered with other European sites investigating a similar phenomenon (Blackledge, Creese, & Takhi, 2015). The schools we investigated taught Bengali, Cantonese, Gujarati, Mandarin, Panjabi, and Turkish as a community language to mostly British-born young people. We negotiated access into the schools through contacts made by researchers who for the most part already have excellent community networks. We then observed, recorded, interviewed, and collected field documents, often with more than one researcher on site at the same time. Funding from the U.K. and European funding councils has allowed Angela and her colleagues to work in multilingual, multisite, and increasingly multidisciplinary research teams, and this has become her default approach of conducting linguistic ethnography. A methodological research aim was included in every grant proposal to pay attention to the processes of knowledge construction in the team itself. This means we use diversity within the team to investigate the very diversity we are researching outside the team to understand multilingualism, heritage, voice, and identity. We believe this kind of reflexivity is important for understanding our own involvement in knowledge production and to make explicit ethical issues that might otherwise remain hidden.

Example 2: Researcher Voices in Team Meetings (Angela Creese) As a team, we occasionally record our team meetings. This happens when an individual researcher wants to make a recording for later personal reflection and contemplation. We do not have any formal processes to obtain permission for making these recordings; rather, the researcher checks verbally with others before recording and makes clear the purpose of recording is for personal use only. For the most part we never revisit these recordings again. However, there has been one exception. In one instance we have published a transcript of a team discussion that appeared in Creese and Blackledge (2012). In that publication we used the transcript of one team meeting and used a Bakhtitian (1981) analysis to look at how researchers’ ventriloquized the voices of their participants in a team meeting with other researchers. We found the relation between the reporter and her or his interlocutors was as important as the relation between the reporting and the reported voices. In other words, the telling of the narrative to other team members communicated the researchers’ own social and ethical positions by ventriloquating and evaluating the voices of the participants.

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In publishing this paper we faced an ethical issue. As described above, our original recordings did not seek consent for data to be used in this way. Therefore, in order to publish we sought consent from the original members of the team to use the data differently. We achieved this by writing individually to everyone around 2 years after the original interaction had taken place to obtain their approval, which was given before we published. A very short extract of the original recording is provided below. Overall there were seven people at the meeting. Present in this short extract are Arvind Bhatt (male researcher employed on a short-term employment contract), Adrian Blackledge (male tenured researcher), Chao Jung Wu (female contract researcher), and Angela Creese (female tenured researcher), listed in order of appearance. The following discussion has taken place after a short piece of data had been presented by one of the case study teams. Arvind Bhatt (AB) turns the discussion to talk about the politics of multilingualism. The transcript has been truncated to make reading easier and because of space restrictions. AB: Now you have to look at the political nature of when mother tongues were focused on by the government. . . . the government reintroduced mother tongues either through complementary schools or through the mainstream to start teaching them to people, so they can reclaim the language, not because it was their right, not because of any pedagogical reason, but for political reason . . . to reduce alienation and so to reduce the incidence of riots CJW: It’s yea I sABL: It’s very interesting because following the 2001 riots the opposite argument was made that everybody should learn English and AB: How things have changed in 20 years, you know, the argument has changed AC: I think we’ll Chao-Jung do you want to make a last point cos CJW: No no it’s ok, it I just thought it’s quite different from my feeling on the Chinese community schools, because Chinese community schools always been there, since you know, there are Chinese second generation or wives and children, they start to have Chinese school because Chinese is always very big on their education thing so AC: You’re I think what’s happened you’re I’m sure those kind of communities are able to use what’s being said politically at the moment about Chinese to their advantage. Don’t all pack up [laughter] The short extract documents Arvind and Adrian discussing government policy and taking up a position in relation to government discourses. In representing the voice of the policymakers Arvind evaluates them and distances himself from them. In Adrian’s enthusiasm to agree with Arvind’s point and add to it, he interrupts Chao Jung Wu. However, Angela is determined that Chao Jung Wu has her turn, and offers her the opportunity to make the final point. In doing so

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she refers to “Chinese” five times and “schools” three times, as she appears to speak both for and through the voices of the “Chinese community.” Specifically she mentions wives and children. Finally, Angela causes laughter by telling everyone they are not allowed to pack up for the end of the meeting. As mentioned earlier, a full analysis is available in Creese and Blackledge (2012). However, other lines of enquiry were not picked up in this original article, and the transcript remains ripe for further analytical pickings. A return to the data might prompt a different set of questions not asked before, and these include: • • • • • • • •

Who gets the floor and for how long? Who interrupts whom? Who manages turns? Who is silent? Which speech acts are in play (e.g., agreeing, disagreeing, joking)? Who hedges, who asserts? What speaker topics are preferred and dispreferred? What politeness features are in play?

Unfortunately, such a detailed analysis does not have a place here, but the range of questions is suggestive of how an interactional analysis highlights ethical issues of voice, power, and representation, which are at the heart of linguistic ethnography done in teams. In some ways the transcript might be read through recognizable stereotypes around gender performativity, with two older men referring to politics, speaking authoritatively about policy while providing a historical account. This juxtaposes with a younger woman talking about community, gendered roles within the community, and the specifics of her own research site. An older woman chairs group processes of turn taking, listening, and group dynamics. Politeness is also of interest, with Angela issuing an imperative for the group not to pack up. The “baldness” of such a command and the ensuing laughter perhaps suggests an intimacy and ease in the group. Such interactions in teams are ripe for further discourse analysis and what this might reveal about power, voice, and representation in teams taking a linguistic ethnographic approach. Looking at team interaction in this way produces an analysis that requires individuals in the team to be reflexive about their own assumptions and orientations to those they research, as well as those with whom they are employed. It forces the team to contemplate how they represent others and themselves in a group of peers. It compels them to think about professional status, job security, and gender and their impact on knowledge production. But it is also highly risky. It throws up issues of anonymity and consent but also reputation and trust. If we embark on an analysis of our own interactions, what might this do to our professional and personal relationships and our reputations as scholars? Will research of our own interactive processes shut down the frank and transparent

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discussions that contribute to creativity and innovation? Aren’t these best done in private? How might we feel if there are errors in what we say that go on to become consolidated in printed transcripts? What if our comments are given a value in interpretation beyond what was deserved? What if in revealing these power issues we are still unable to, “escape the consequences of our positions’ by talking about them endlessly” (Patai, 1994, p. 70)? On the other hand, why should we researchers be protected from the very kinds of issues we contemplate when we approach our participants? What might be lost if we don’t make transparent these interpretive team processes? Whose voices might be silenced? Blommaert (2010) suggests that ethnographic research often revolves around understanding the conflictual dynamics of macro and micro hegemonies. Analysis of team meetings provides an example of this. On the one hand, there is the micro “hegemony” of the research team and the macro hegemony of wider employment in academia. Power dynamics are a factor in any social context and need managing in relation to who gets to speak when, which arguments are heard and taken forward, and how researchers represent themselves and others. We can view reflexivity in team processes as an attempt to interrogate the production of knowledge in linguistic ethnography and our own role in the “games of truth.” In the recordings of team meetings we argue that paying attention to researcher voice leads to a more fruitful avenue for considering the ethics of representation and power dynamics in teams. All funded research projects are situated in structures of power and finance. There are always structural hierarchies, some of which are institutionalized, such as in employment contracts or professional status, whereas others are less institutionalized but still pernicious in discourses of “reputation” and “fame.” Teams involve doctoral researchers, new-to-research researchers, postdoctorate researchers, and experienced researchers. Gender, ethnicity, social class, age, and disability are all etic factors played out in the micro interactions of team meetings, where emic dimensions of identity are in constant and dynamic flux. These all are in the mix during the interpretation discussions of team meetings.

Conclusion In this chapter we have considered the microethical and macroethical in linguistic ethnography. We have argued that the emic/etic dimension continues to be a useful heuristic in making connections across different scales. We have illustrated through two very different examples how researchers view local decisions as embedded in wider discourses and ideologies and how decontextualized macroethical procedures are inadequate when dealing with ethical dilemmas in the field. For Fiona, it meant taking a reflexive approach to ethical decision making with particular regard for the etic perspective. This protected her participants from exposure to damaging discourses in other educational contexts, but also reduced the power of some of her arguments about power

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and hegemonies. Her story also highlights the ongoing nature of ethical decision making through examining whether a decision made for one context is appropriate for another. In Angela’s example, it meant paying attention to the ethics of representation brought about by working in teams and being open to analyzing the kind of talk that is usually hidden from view. We hope that both examples provide evidence of how researchers move between the microethical and macroethical in conducting research. We also hope the two vignettes illustrate the small ways in which both researchers were agentive in shaping a local ethics brought about by the demands of ref lexivity in ethnography, which resisted a view of ethics as nothing more than procedural and ref lexivity as nothing more than mechanical.

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de Laine, M. (2000). Fieldwork, participation and practice: Ethics and dilemmas in qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books. Geertz, C. (1988). Works and lives: The anthropologist as author. Cambridge: Polity Press. Guillemin, M., & Gillam, L. (2004). Ethics, reflexivity, and “ethically important moments” in research. Qualitative Inquiry, 10 (2), 261–280. Guta, A., Nixon, S., & Wilson, M. G. (2013). Resisting the seduction of “ethics creep:” Using Foucault to surface complexity and contradiction in research ethics review. Social Science & Medicine, 98, 301–310. Haggerty, K. D. (2004). Ethics creep: Governing social science research in the name of ethics. Qualitative Sociology, 27(4), 391–414. Haverkamp, B. E. (2005). Ethical perspectives on qualitative. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 52 (2), 146–155. Heller, M. (2011). Paths to post-nationalism: A critical ethnography of language and identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hertz, R. (Ed.) (1996). Introduction: Ethics, reflexivity and voice. Qualitative Sociology, 19 (1), 3–9. Hornberger, N. (1994). Ethnography. TESOL Quarterly, 28 (4), 688–690. Hymes, D. (1964). Language in culture and society: A reader in linguistics and anthropology. New York: Harper and Row. Hymes, D. (1980). Language in education: Forward to fundamentals. From Language in education: Ethnolinguistic essays. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Jaspers, P., Houtepen, R., & Horstman, K. (2013). Ethical review: Standardizing procedures and local shaping of ethical review practices. Social Science & Medicine, 98, 311–318. Kubanyiova, M. (2008). Rethinking research ethics in contemporary applied linguistics: The tension between macroethical and microethical perspectives in situated research. The Modern Language Journal, 92 (4), 503–518. Maybin, J., & Tusting, K. (2011). Linguistic ethnography. In J. Simpson (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics (pp. 515–528). Abingdon: Routledge. McElhinny, B., Hols, M., Holtzener, J., Neunger, S., & Hicks, C. (2003). Gender, publication and citation in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Language in Society, 32 (3), 299–328. Morley, L. (2003). Quality and power in higher education. Philadelphia: Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press. Murphy, E., & Dingwall, R. (2001). The ethics of ethnography. In P. Atkinson, A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Lofland, & L. Lofland, L. (Eds.), Handbook of ethnography (pp. 339–351). London: Sage Publications. Patai, D. (1994). When method becomes power (response). In A. D. Giltin, (Ed.), Power and method: Political activism and educational research (pp. 161–176). London: Routledge. Pike, K. L. (1967). Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behavior. (2nd ed.). The Hague: Mouton. Pillow, W. (2003). Confession, catharsis or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodological power in qualitative research. Qualitative Studies in Education, 16 (2), 175–196. Rampton, B. (2007). Neo-Hymesian linguistic ethnography in the United Kingdom. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(5), 584–607.

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Rampton, B., Maybin, J., & Roberts, C. (2015). Introduction: Explorations and encounters in linguistic ethnography. In J. Snell, S. Shaw, & F. Copland. (Eds.), Linguistic ethnography: Interdisciplinary explorations (pp. 14–50). Palgrave: Macmillan. Rampton, B., Tusting, K., Maybin, J., Barwell, R., Creese, A., & Lytra, V. (2004). Linguistic ethnography in the UK: A discussion paper. Retrieved from http://www.ling-ethnog. org.uk. Rosaldo, R. (1989). Culture and truth: The remaking of social analysis. Boston: Beacon. Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication, 23(3–4), 193–229. Tusting, K., & Maybin, J. (2007). Linguistic ethnography and interdisciplinarity: Opening the discussion. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(5), 575–583.

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PART IV

Ethics and the Media

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10 ETHICAL CHALLENGES IN CONDUCTING TEXT-BASED ONLINE APPLIED LINGUISTICS RESEARCH Xuesong Gao and Jian Tao

The exponential spread of the Internet is having a profound impact on our daily lives and social interactions, and this phenomenon has become the focal issue for an increasing number of sociology studies (Dicks, Manson, Coffey, & Atkinson, 2005; Hine, 2000; Johns, Chen, & Hall, 2004; Jones, 1999). The Internet has also transformed our research practices, as it has become both the site and the medium for conducting research to explore individuals’ existence and social issues in the online world. As a result, there have been intensive discussions among social sciences researchers on how traditional offline methods can be adapted to online research settings and what constitutes ethical conduct of Internet-based research (Bloor, Frankland, Thomas, & Robson, 2001; Jones, 2004; Sharf, 1999; Stewart & Williams, 2005; Williams, 2007). Like their colleagues in the social sciences and humanities, applied linguists have also begun to pay attention to communication practices mediated by the Internet; that is, social discourses that reconstruct reality in cyberspace and the application of communication technology in language pedagogy (e.g., Kern, 2006; Lam, 2004; North, 2007; Thorne & Payne, 2005; Warschauer, 1999). However, to date there has been little discussion of ethical issues in Internetbased applied linguistics research (except De Costa, 2014; Herring, 1996; Ortega, 2007). For this reason, this chapter draws on methodological and ethical discussions in other fields, including psychology, communication, health, and others, before it recounts the first author’s (Gao’s) experiences of dealing with ethical issues when using text-based online data for applied linguistics research. By doing so, we intend to stimulate an “ongoing dialogue” among applied linguists who are interested in conducting Internet-based research (Flicker, Haans, & Skinner, 2004).

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The Internet as an Appealing Methodological Alternative Given that “the Internet has qualitatively transformed . . . everyday communication and information practices . . . and the interpersonal realms,” the Internet has opened up a new research platform for applied linguists (Thorne & Black, 2007, p. 2). This section will offer an overview of what and how text-based applied linguistics research has been done through the Internet, along with its associated strengths and limitations. In contrast to elicited data commonly seen in survey-based or experimental studies, the Internet as a methodological alternative affords a huge, automatically updated repository of naturally occurring linguistic data that feature “a freshness and topicality unmatched by fixed corpora” (Fletcher, 2004, p. 91). As Maunter (2005) asserted wittily that it is “time to get wired” (p. 809), it has recently become a new way of doing applied linguistics research projects to use unelicited texts derived from computer-mediated communication (CMC). For example, Koteyko (2010) utilized online blog discussions to trace the usage of carbon-related compounds as a way of examining “public participation, engagement, or deliberation” in relation to the issue of climate change (p. 657); Vásquez (2011) selected negative online customer reviews from TripAdvisor, a widely used travel website, to identify the shared patterns of complaints that appear in naturally occurring written data of American English; and Han (2011) studied the creative use of metaphors in Chinese entertainment news on the Internet and found that the playful use of war, martial arts, and food metaphors prevailed in online news reports. These studies affirm that the Internet constitutes an important site to explore individuals’ dynamic language usage (e.g., Lam, 2000, 2004; North, 2007). Moreover, second language acquisition (SLA) researchers have been exploring ways of applying communication technology and cyber games such as Second Life in innovative pedagogical practices. A recent study by Cai and Zhu (2012), for example, showed that online learning communities contribute positively to learners’ language learning experience and promote foreign language learning. These findings are consistent with Lam (2000, 2004), who examined how immigrant learners interacted with peers in the virtual space to develop alternative ways of using English and acquired new identities through such language usage. As text-based Internet research proliferates in applied linguistics, more varieties of traditional offline research methods have been piloted in cyberspace in other disciplines, especially in the social sciences. For instance, conducting focus group discussions on the Web has turned out to be an appropriate research method partly because it enables participants to “remain anonymous and in the comforts of their own homes” (Murray & Fisher, 2002, p. 13), even though the size of virtual focus groups needs to be larger than that of offline focus groups to stimulate and sustain online discussions (Bloor et al., 2001; Murray, 1997). Online ethnography has also emerged as a legitimate research strategy as

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the distance between virtual subjects and researchers creates opportunities for researchers to easily “lurk” around naturally occurring interactions in which ethnographers become a “fly on the wall” while their subjects are observed or videotaped with minimal disruption (Sveningsson, 2004, p. 49; also see Hine, 2000; Smith, 2004). In short, the Internet has been transformed into a channel of participant recruitment (e.g., questionnaires), a source of obtaining authentic data (e.g., Web forums), and an environment where research is carried out (Buchanan & Williams, 2010). The extensive exploration of the Internet for text-based applied linguistic research may be driven by the convenience and accessibility that it brings to researchers, and sometimes to participants as well, regardless of whether the study is qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-method. Though text-based online exchanges may be fragmented and need to be sorted out for research, the Internet helps generate valuable data that do not need to be transcribed, unlike traditional offline methods such as interview and observation (Robson & Robson, 2002). Another convenience lies in the “fast and easy access” to electronic data in a vast array of social domains that are readily available for corpora compilation to conduct applied linguistics studies (e.g., critical discourse analysis [CDA]) (Koteyko, 2010, pp. 658–659). The Internet has also proved to be a boon to quantitative researchers who used to spend a huge amount of time on data input. Web-based questionnaires, for example, can automatically generate psychometric properties of a given instrument or results of t- or chi-square tests (Holmes, 2009). Consequently, text-based Internet research activities are much less costly, an attractive feature for researchers in institutional settings who have to compete for research funds. As for participants, they particularly enjoy the flexibility of time and place that the Internet offers so that their schedules do not have to accommodate those of others; it is also reasonable to argue that online respondents are more motivated and interested in completing tasks related to data collection, as they usually “seek out” studies in which to participate (Murray & Fisher, 2002, p. 11). Apart from accelerating data collection and processing, the Internet can also help reach research participants who are dispersed geographically and are difficult to contact (Madge, 2007). In addition to boundless space, the virtue of being free and “invisible” offered by the Internet encourages potential participants or Internet citizens (“netizens”) to produce sensitive data related to issues such as HIV, drug addiction, and juvenile delinquency, etc. In other words, minorities such as stigmatized and specialized parts of populations are more likely to cooperate in research because of a more comfortable “third space” and of the enhanced confidentiality afforded by Internet-based research, which face-to-face contact can hardly achieve (Graber & Graber, 2013). As a result, text-based Internet research is appealing for both researchers and respondents, as the Internet orients the research process to be “more transparent, democratic and informal” (Gill & Elder, 2012, p. 274).

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Like other methods, the Internet as a methodological alternative in research also has its limitations and problems. One important issue that impedes the validity of text-based online inquiries is associated with the biases of Internet users. Though the number of Internet users increases each year, computer-literate participants are generally constricted by their age, race, and socioeconomic status. The 2012 online demographic report showed that 67% of U.S. social media users are female adults aged 18–29 years (Duggan & Brenner, 2013). As observed by Beddows (2008), extensive sharing by a particular group of people implicates online sampling that “skew[s] [the] demographic representation . . . [of ] a wider population” (p. 126). In addition, nonverbal cues such as tone, eye contact, and facial expression are minimal at best but can nevertheless shape researchers’ interpretations. Therefore the absence of paralinguistic and kinetic cues in online data may undermine the “richness and depth of communication” and researchers’ understanding, even though more emoticons and stickers are being invented and used (Beddows, 2008, p. 128). For these reasons, researchers have also been drawn to conduct audio- and video-based online research, which may not enjoy the ease of data collection as in text-based online research (e.g., Chun, 2013). While the methodological problems of conducting text-based Internet research are admittedly worthy of serious consideration, we agree with Jones (2004), who called for a “renewed thought about . . . ethics” as well (p. 180, italics added). As researchers increasingly utilize the Internet as the research site and medium, ethical research behavior has become an important but overlooked issue. Therefore, it is necessary to discuss whether researchers can apply ethical principles followed in traditional offline research directly to text-based online applied linguistics research and how researchers deploy textual data collected from the Internet.

Ethical Issues in Text-Based Internet Research Internet-based research varies in what and how data are collected, triggering a wide variety of ethical concerns. Given the first author’s (Gao’s) research experience in conducting text-based online research, we focus on ethical issues associated with text-based online research. Ethical considerations in the case of offline research require researchers to obtain informed consent from potential participants, to respect their privacy, and to protect their identity from being revealed in the research process so as to avoid any possible harm to them. Researchers are also traditionally expected to reciprocate the assistance of research participants when conducting their research (Barnes, 2004; Madge, 2007; Robson & Robson, 2002). In general, almost every researcher has to deal with the following questions throughout the research process: 1. 2.

Shall we obtain informed consent from the research participants? How can such consent be distributed and obtained?

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Shall we take measures to protect the participants’ online identities in reporting? How can we ensure reciprocity in Internet-based inquiries?

These questions may yield straightforward answers in offline research but they constitute enormous challenges for researchers who conduct text-based Internet research as “the computer stands ‘between and betwixt’ categories of alive/not alive, public/private, published/non-published, writing/speech, interpersonal/ mass communication and identified/anonymous” (Madge, 2007, p. 656). No consensus has been reached over the issue as to whether informed consent is needed for conducting research on the Web. Consent waiver of some online data collection can be justified in that Web forums can be regarded as public spaces (Denzin, 1999) and social networking sites are “not private” (Shapiro & Ossorio, 2013, p. 145). A similar line of argument points out that “chat rooms and message boards by nature are public discourse,” and for this reason, researchers can be exempted from ethical review or consent form elicitation (Flicker et al., 2004, p. 130). In addition, since whatever people post online (e.g., comments, pictures, video clips) is generally out of their own free will, it is assumed that they would not mind sharing the postings with others and are aware of the possibility of “public consumption” (Beddows, 2008, p. 130). Although they are subject to the risk of scrutiny and criticism, Internet users are protected by a username, which is again of their own choosing. As a result, the responsibility of anonymity and confidentiality shifts to individuals’ shoulders in that whoever can be identified by their screen names probably want to engage publicly and would like to be known (Beddows, 2008). In contrast, it has also been contended that informed consent is necessary for online research because of the blurred boundaries between public and private in the cyber world (Bruckman, 2004). While posts are available to the public, quite a number of Internet users regard what they posted online as “relatively private and personal” and intend to have them circulated only within a small group of friends they know in the real world (Murray & Fisher, 2002, pp. 15–16). For example, bloggers who treat their blogs as a diary may feel hurt if their “online diaries” are subject to public scrutiny and critiques without their permission. For this reason, the possibility that a blogger’s “perception of privacy may be greater than is actually the case” (Buchanan & Williams, 2010, p. 257) cannot be ignored. Even though bloggers or netizens are fully aware of the accessibility of their online posts to massive populations, they may not expect that what they posted would be used for academic research on social, health, and educational issues. In other words, individual bloggers or netizens may have intentions that are significantly different from those of researchers who want to study their online posts (Beddows, 2008). In some cases, researchers need to register to be part of the forum or community in order to access the online data. If researchers hide their real identities

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and do not inform participants of their real purposes, they risk deceiving participants (Beddows, 2008). Because of such deception, researchers may lose “public trust and support,” which, in turn, may weaken the credibility of their scholarship (2nd World Conference on Research Integrity, http://www.wcri2010.org). A lack of informed consent may also pose hazards to both online participants and researchers as a result of different perceptions of privacy, intentions of online activities, and potential misunderstandings. Furthermore, the cohesion of an online community may be jeopardized as members may refrain from speaking when they become aware of researchers’ presence in and/or after the research process. The decision as to whether consent forms can be waived may be made on the basis of how relevant websites address the issue of data accessibility and usage in relation to the terms to which users must agree upon account creation. Their website policies, however, are divided. More often than not, social media that prioritize information sharing like Twitter and YouTube state explicitly that by posting anything on the websites, users are assumed to authorize “a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license” (Twitter Terms of Service, https://twitter. com/tos) to the websites and other users. In other words, netizens, including researchers, are permitted to utilize whatever is posted on those websites without sending any prior notification to posters. However, Facebook users are allowed to have more privacy. They can choose to whom their posts and comments are open to in customized settings. Only when the Public setting is chosen can all users access relevant content. Put simply, ethical issues are more complicated for researchers if they choose to collect and use data from Facebook. Even if informed consent is considered necessary, researchers have to cope with a series of challenges subsequently: They have to consider whether consent needs to be obtained from each online participant and how such consent can be obtained given the fact that many participants have multiple online identities (Madge, 2007). Since many online communities have fluid memberships, it is uncommon to find some members “going to, visiting, [contributing a simple response to a thread], and [then] being in or out of forum” either temporarily or permanently (Bassett & O’Riordan, 2002, p. 241). The fluidity of online communities makes it extremely challenging for researchers to keep asking “new visitors” for consent in these communities (Barnes, 2004). In addition, researchers need to avoid any act that violates netiquette in order to seek consent from potential participants in a given community (Smith, 2004). For instance, the accusation of abusing Internet users’ personal email addresses may arise when researchers are perceived of keeping sending unsolicited mass emails to them (Robson & Robson, 2002). As for reporting findings, researchers may also encounter the dilemma of deciding whether to include whole sections of exchanges directly from the computer screen, including their Internet identities and emoticons they use. The inclusion of Internet identities can be justified as a way to acknowledge authors who contribute the materials as we do in the case of academic scholars

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(Buchanan & Williams, 2010). Inevitably, however, user confidence is at risk of being compromised. For example, even if screen names are not acknowledged, direct quotes can reveal personal information about online contributors if an online search is conducted. Therefore, researchers are advised to paraphrase online data to protect participants from being identified (Bradley & Carter, 2012; Stebbins, 2010). Furthermore, text-based online researchers have varied concerns about any possible repercussions of eliciting informed consent from online participants. Such researchers are afraid of contacting each member and ask for consent lest they “disrupt the natural flow of an online discussion group or chat room” (Murray & Fisher, 2002, pp. 15–16). Furthermore, informed consent procedures may pose a threat to the “unobtrusive and naturalistic” settings that researchers value. In addition, researchers are wary of an “over-surveying effect,” which occurred in telephone-based research and may get transplanted to online studies. Not surprisingly, netizens become impolite, uncooperative, and indifferent when they find themselves receiving more spam-labeled emails containing participation invitations and consent forms (Wang & Doong, 2010). Next, even if researchers successfully obtain consent from some discussion group members, there is still the question of whether they should erase the part written by contributors who did not agree to participate. In principle, they should do so even if it means compromising the context and coherence of a conversation (Flicker et al., 2004). Ethical challenges may become much more complex if various characteristics of different text-based Internet research sites are considered. For instance, a study examining exchanges in a private discussion forum will have different ethical considerations in comparison with an inquiry that seeks to analyze reposted email messages from private email addresses. Research in a text-based Web forum also differs in its ethical requirements from exploring social interactions in a three-dimensional online environment where individuals use avatars to represent themselves in the virtual world (Williams, 2007). To some extent, Internet settings also shape participant selection. For example, one of the practical questions often raised is how one would deal with youth participants. Given these ethical challenges, the nature of Internet settings for a particular inquiry needs to be determined before researchers proceed to discuss what ethical issues are at stake. With this note, we turn to the first author’s (Gao’s) experiences of conducting text-based online applied linguistics research.

Conducting Internet-Based Research: A Confessional Account by Xuesong (Andy) Gao Drawing upon the above discussion of ethical issues in Internet-based research, we now recount Andy’s experiences in addressing ethical dilemmas when conducting Internet-based applied linguistics research (Gao, 2007, 2008, 2012). Andy was drawn to conduct Internet-based research because of the excitement

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and convenience of doing research online. It must be noted that there had not been much discussion of ethical issues related to text-based applied linguistics research when he was doing research. He only became aware of the ethical problems when we reflected on and examined his research practices in light of an extensive search of the relevant literature on ethics. Since each of the three studies presented unique ethical challenges, we recount what he did in each study before we reflect on his efforts to fulfill his ethical obligations. The first study (Gao, 2007) focused on a Web forum in which a group of autonomous English learners participated; these learners used to go to the same English-learning club in a Chinese coastal city. In the study, he analyzed a strand of online discussion messages titled “A Tale of Blue Rain Cafe” in the forum. The strand of messages was part of the collective reflection made of the participants during their participation in the same English club. Although the forum was open to all visitors, these members had indisputable ownership of their experiences as reported in the forum. For this reason, he initially wanted to seek individual participants’ consent by contacting them through their registered emails. However, most of them had not put valid email addresses in their online profiles for several possible reasons: (1) they did not expect to be contacted that way, (2) they were afraid that their email addresses could be used for commercial purposes, (3) they just did not want to disclose any personal information to the public, and (4) some of them did not use emails and they simply used email addresses to register as members of the Web forum. In order to seek consent from the participants, a message was posted in the forum about the proposed research, explaining that Andy was interested in documenting and analyzing their narratives for an academic journal. As many participants invested efforts in coconstructing a narrative about the English club, it might have appealed to them that the stories of their English-learning experiences have a chance to appear in print. However, Andy still failed to obtain all individual participants’ endorsement in the forum until the community leaders, speaking on behalf of the community, granted him the permission (Sveningsson, 2004). In reporting the findings, online identities of participants were altered by giving them online pseudonyms. When the paper was published, Andy sent a soft copy to the community leaders. It seems that he fulfilled his ethical obligations as best as he could. The second study (Gao, 2008) was an inquiry into a group of unidentified Chinese netizens’ discussions on what constitutes the best way to learn English in China. Though this study also took place in a public Web forum like the one in Gao (2007), this forum has a wider, much more geographically dispersed audience, and it also has a highly fluid membership. For years, Andy had been daily browsing different threads of discussion, occasionally participating in discussions in the forum like many other participants. Unlike the forum in the first study, most of the discussions in the second forum are related to current affairs in China and the world. That is why he was particularly struck by a newly posted thread

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of discussion on what constitutes the best ways to learn English in China. Like many other discussions in the forum, this one lasted no more than 4 days and quickly retreated to the Internet forum archives. By the time he decided to analyze the discussion, it had already been abandoned by the participants. Having none of the participants’ email addresses, he did not have the means to contact them to obtain their consent. Also, there were no community leaders to contact, as the discussion was not moderated. For this reason, his ethical considerations were largely related to questions as to whether the forum could be considered a public space and whether a scholarly presentation of their views on learning English was likely to undermine their interests. Though none of them intended their messages to be used in academic research, they did make an effort to find the best ways to learn English in China in a public space. An analysis of these views was expected to help language teachers and researchers support such language learners in the learning process. In this sense, these participants shared aims similar to Andy’s. The third study (Gao, 2012) was devoted to studying Chinese netizens who participated in the “Protecting Cantonese Movement” (the “movement” hereafter) by making their voices heard in academia. The materials were collected from several online discussion forums where netizens discussed the status of Cantonese after street protests. The protests were held for defending the use of Cantonese as the regional lingua franca in response to a local government officer’s proposal of replacing Cantonese with Putonghua—or Standard Spoken Chinese—as the language on a local television channel in Guangzhou. During the initial stage of data collection, Andy attempted to contact one of the active online participants, Tom (a pseudonym), and invited him for a face-to-face informal interview in the hope of eliciting more information about the movement. However, this was not successful in that Tom remained dubious about Andy’s intention and talked little about the relevant issues throughout the dinner meeting. As Andy reflected upon the unsuccessful meeting, it subsequently became clear that this participant was not in a position to offer more information about the movement in Guangzhou. Andy also learned from the contact person who had introduced him to Tom that a few of his colleagues responsible for the movement had been tracked and interviewed by the State Security Office after the public demonstrations. It was not surprising that these activists learned to be more cautious, particularly in front of academics with whom they were not familiar. Tom probably also wondered why Andy did not elect to interview him a year earlier when the movement had just started. In contrast, hundreds of netizens had articulated their views on the Internet forum and wanted them to be conveyed to as many as possible readers. To some extent, it is more appropriate to examine these online comments so that the research itself would respect individuals’ concerns of privacy and security. In other words, to some extent a text-based Internet study has become the best available option for academics to make these netizens’ voices heard in the academy with minimal risk to them.

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It is a common practice that whenever online participants are directly quoted, their screen names are substituted by pseudonyms (Bradley & Carter, 2012). Andy followed this practice in all three of his studies, but the situation has become more complicated. As increasingly sophisticated Internet search engines such as Google reduce the confidentiality of online data, drawing on direct quotes has become somewhat taboo in Web-based research (Walther, 2002). In this context, Andy was initially worried about the danger posed to netizens by quoting them directly. He was fortunate to have translations to buffer himself from this dilemma. As the materials the researcher gathered from the Web were written in Chinese, they needed to be translated into English. Though translation cannot fully reflect the nuances embedded in the original text, it can offset the use of directly quoting online data. Translation not only better preserves the authenticity of the data than paraphrasing does, it also prevents the quoted authors from being located through Internet search engines. Importantly, the original texts were not appended to any of the papers. Yet, such a solution also has its limitations in that it only applies to online materials in a language that is different from that of the publishing medium. While Andy made various efforts to cope with ethical challenges in the three studies, it is noteworthy that he still failed to address a few important ethical issues when conducting research. In the case of Gao (2008), he justified his research with an assertion that the netizens shared his intentions to support learners by giving them good advice. While netizens in the discussion did support each other with different suggestions on how best they could learn English, the assertion could never be fully verified and it remained an assumption of these netizens made by Andy. Even though he made efforts to conceal their Internet identities in writing, he may still be criticized for violating basic offline ethical research principles due to his failure to elicit consent from the online participants. Furthermore, even with all the efforts he undertook to receive consent from the online participants in Gao (2007), it remains questionable whether he achieved some level of reciprocity with the related netizens in conducting this research. While the study may have generated insights into Chinese learners’ autonomous language learning, which may inform the development of language pedagogy to benefit similar language learners, it is unclear whether these netizens were fully aware of the contributions they had made by being participants in this Internet-based study (Gao, 2007). In retrospect, one thing he would have done is post a message on the study’s significance so that these netizens could be made aware of their significant contributions. In contrast, it can be contended that a greater degree of reciprocity was achieved in the case of Gao (2012), as it became risky for individuals involved in the movement to share their views with researchers and have their views documented in publications. However, the risk can be significantly reduced or minimized if the researcher investigates thousands of individual netizens’ comments online following procedures such as substituting netizens’ online identities

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with pseudonyms and translating their original comments. Even though the influences of an academic article are limited, it still contributes to a worthy goal shared by the netizens. In short, even though Gao’s (2012) research conduct may appear to violate major ethical principles, it can still be regarded “ethical” in that participants’ identities were protected and reciprocity was achieved.

Towards a Collegial Discussion While text-based Internet research has become a viable methodological alternative in applied linguistics, the concomitant ethical concerns are rarely addressed and have become a serious issue that warrants attention. By recounting some of the ethical challenges in conducting Internet-based research in this chapter, we hope to raise awareness of ethical issues among applied linguists and stimulate some critical discussion. However, by undertaking an ethical discussion in text-based Internet inquiries, we do not mean to either raise an “alarm among institutional review board members” (Jones, 2004, p. 180) or advance a new set of procedural ethical principles that applied linguists need to comply with when undertaking text-based Internet research. Though there are many advantages in having a set of procedural ethical guidelines to promote ethical research behavior, ethical guidelines are often subject to interpretation in specific research contexts by researchers holding different philosophical positions (Hammersley, 2006). In fact, researchers nowadays are under stringent regulatory scrutiny in terms of maintaining adherence to ethical practices in their respective institutions, and this has become a widely shared complaint in the research community (Jones, 2004; Madge, 2007). Consequently, advocating another set of prescriptive ethical guidelines to regulate research behavior online is unlikely to do much good. Moreover, prescribed regulations should not be idealized but reconfigured for researchers to meet our moral responsibilities. In addition to “increasing . . . our commitment to established ethical principles” (Thomas, 2004, p. 188), what is most probably needed is a collegial and ongoing discussion that aims to deepen our understanding of characteristics of cyberspace that pose a series of unique ethical challenges, heighten our critical awareness of the consequences of research activities for online participants, and encourage us to take action whenever necessary. In sum, text-based Internet research is not immune to ethical problems even though the Internet circumvents any physical contact. In fact, the blurring of private and public domains and fluidity of online membership with ensuing ethical quandaries demands the exercise of an enhanced scholarly responsibility throughout the research process. To meet such rigorous demands, we need to anticipate potential ethical problems before undertaking any research action, protect online participants proactively and have solutions in stock should issues arise during data collection, and report and respond to each unique situation when conducting Internet-based research in applied linguistics.

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PRYING INTO SAFE HOUSES Suresh Canagarajah

Ethical concerns go well beyond issues in the research procedure, such as obtaining informed consent, gaining institutional review board (IRB) approval, and ensuring the well-being of subjects. They extend to issues more integral to the study. Researchers are now compelled to ask more fundamental questions about the purposes, outcomes, and objectives of their research. They have to consider questions such as the following: Whose knowledge is being represented? Whose interests does this study serve? What social and educational ends does this study lead to? The traditional considerations of research ethics will be recast in the light of these new considerations. Kubaniyova (2013) summarizes as follows: the three core principles that serve as moral standards for research involving humans: respect for persons, which binds researchers to protect the well-being of the research participants and avoid harm or potential risks or both; beneficence, that is, ensuring that the research project yields benefits while minimizing harm; and justice, or in other words, a fair distribution of research benefits. (p. 1) There are broader ethical implications surrounding respect, beneficence, and justice, beyond the issues relating to the research procedure. Consider questions such as the following, as they relate to Kubaniyova’s three criteria: •

Respect : Do the researchers acknowledge the agency of the subjects to construct knowledge and initiate social change in their own terms? How do researchers negotiate the power inequalities in the research context, and construct knowledge without objectifying the subjects?

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Beneficence: How do researchers respect the knowledge of the subjects, which might go against the disciplinary interests and constructs in determining benefits for them? How does the research contribute to structural and attitudinal changes that address the needs and interests of subjects and their communities? Justice: How do the research findings lead to reconstructing social and educational institutions in a manner that is empowering and just for the subjects and other communities?

Such questions have traditionally been the province of critical researchers from an antifoundationalist and social constructionist perspective (see Cameron, Frazer, Harvey, Rampton, & Richardson, 1992; Canagarajah, 1996; Smith, 1999). However, in the emerging orientation to ethics in research, these questions should concern all of us, regardless of our theoretical leanings. While what I have outlined above is a significant shift in perspectives on ethics in research, it raises many challenges and dilemmas that need more discussion. Though obtaining IRB approval or designing a risk-averse study can be accomplished nonchalantly, this deepened orientation to research ethics poses ongoing personal dilemmas that need to be resolved with more sensitivity. For example, the knowledge and interests of the subjects may conflict with what researchers consider as fair and just for them, based on their own “enlightened” academic ideologies and professional training. Or, what is a just and fair educational arrangement for the subjects may turn out to be unjust for some other communities. Or, our attempt to obtain an insider perspective on the knowledge and concerns of the subjects, in an effort to respect their own perspectives, may be resisted by the subjects themselves, who might wish to protect their knowledge and develop it in their own way, without intervention by outsiders. How do researchers resolve such dilemmas? Kubaniyova (2013) has recently articulated two microlevel ethical constructs that would help negotiate these dilemmas. Her two considerations for decision making are the ethics of care and virtue ethics. She defines them as follows: The ethics of care model’s underlying premise is that research is primarily a relational activity demanding the researcher’s sensitivity to, and emotional identification and solidarity with, the people under study. . . . Virtue ethics theory, on the other hand, originates in Aristotelian ethics and stresses the researcher’s ability to recognize microethical dilemmas as they arise in the concrete research practice. It does not place an emphasis on following principles but rather on the development of the moral character of the researcher, their ability, and willingness to discern situations with potential ethical ramifications as they arise in the research practice, and their ability to make decisions that are informed by both macroethics of principles and microethics of care. (p. 5; emphasis in original)

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These considerations are valuable as they encourage a situated negotiation of research ethics. They are defined in personal and relational terms that one has to develop in engagement with the subjects, in actual interactions, and in specific research contexts. In this sense, these constructs motivate an ongoing negotiation of ethical dilemmas, leading to constant reconfiguration of one’s research design and objectives. Ideally, they will lead to a research process that is coconstructed by the researcher and the subjects in a manner that addresses the ethical concerns to mutual satisfaction. I will apply the microethics of care to a particular research experience to demonstrate how I negotiated the ethical dilemmas I faced in my study. I will show how the microethics of care will actually lead to broader changes in the researcher’s own positioning, leading to relevant attitudinal and values changes. I will also go on to show how the macroethical objectives I initially defined for my study had to be renegotiated and reconfigured in the light of the microethics of care I adopted to resolve my dilemmas. In this sense, I will connect the microethics of care to macroethical principles. In the following section, I articulate the educational significance of my research on safe houses. I will discuss how safe houses relate to my vision of macroethical objectives for minority and multilingual students. After that introduction, I will narrate my research experience to demonstrate how I negotiated my ethical dilemmas. I will conclude by discussing the implications of my research process and ethical decisions for other researchers in related contexts.

The Significance of Safe Houses There has been considerable interest in qualitative studies in obtaining insider knowledge on the life of the subjects. Adopting the emic/etic distinction, qualitative researchers have discussed the greater validity of emic orientations in understanding the views and practices of research subjects (Heath & Street, 2008). Interpreting the life and knowledge of the community from broader (etic) templates may provide a distorted representation of its social and educational life. Therefore, qualitative researchers go to great lengths to obtain insider knowledge. They adopt methods such as participant observation to minimize observers’ paradox. The always elusive objective is to capture insider life as it would proceed without outsider gaze. However, since researcher observation is important for academic inquiry and knowledge construction, scholars attempt to minimize their presence and intervention as they adopt emic research approaches. It is from this perspective that I consider classroom safe houses as providing a vantage point for understanding students’ own learning styles, values, needs, and agendas in order to develop pedagogies that are both fair to them and effective for instructors and institutions. I define safe houses as social and learning spaces that are constructed by the subjects themselves and relatively free of outsider and authority control. I say “relatively free” because all social spaces are embedded

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in other larger social formations and are shaped and mediated by diverse outside concerns and interests. No social space is absolutely free of mediation. Safe houses are not exclusively constructed in educational domains and are not separated from social life outside schools. I draw from scholarship in diverse social contexts to outline the value of safe houses for education, highlighting the implications for minority/multilingual students in particular. Some social scientists have argued that holding back certain areas of our life from public view is an important process of identity development. As Goffman (1961) has argued in his insightful work on Asylums, “The practice of reserving something of oneself from the clutch of an institution . . . this recalcitrance is not an incidental mechanism of defense but rather an essential constitution of the self” (p. 319). In removing themselves from the public sites, subjects temporarily escape or resist imposed identities. Those in subjugated contexts find a space to enjoy their dignity and autonomy. Furthermore, they find the space to develop or perform alternate identities. They may even find the creative freedom to reconstruct new identities that are positioned between institutional expectations and personal desires. Away from the glare of institutional impositions, subjects also get the space to reflect on the dominant values and develop resources and identities for renegotiating them in their own terms. If Goffman provides a perspective from social psychology, practice-based models provide other explanations for the value of safe houses. The notion of legitimate peripheral participation in the communities of practice model (Wenger, 1998) suggests how safe houses can be learning sites. It is important for apprentices to have some measure of protection to try out things in their own terms, as they get socialized into professional practices. Such safe spaces provide a measure of protection to develop certain competencies and identities without threat or penalization. It can also be a creative site where apprentices can merge values and practices from diverse communities (their “multimembership”) with the dominant practices of their profession to reconfigure both their identity and their work. Thus peripherality matters for creative and effective learning. The implications of safe houses for resistance in oppressive conditions have also been well studied by ethnographers. James Scott (1985), in his research among peasant communities in Malaysia, found that poor peasants would hold back the harvest or engage in lying, foot dragging (to affect the work or retain a measure of control over their work schedule), and speaking behind the backs of their masters (sharing jokes about them, bad mouthing them, insulting them, or making up names for them) as a form of one-upmanship. Scott refers to these practices as “weapons of the weak” and considers them as part of their vibrant underlife. In his later theoretical work, he illustrates from diverse communities to show how the marginalized adopt such hidden sites to seek refuge from oppression, conscientize themselves, develop networks and communities based on alternate values, and mobilize themselves for resistance at a more public and

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mass level at a later time. Based on such considerations, Scott calls such spaces as constituting a form of “infrapolitics”—labeled so for not only being hidden, but also for being deep. Scott (1990) states: Infrapolitics is the building block for the more elaborate institutionalized political action that cannot exist without it. . . . When the rare civilities of open political life are curtailed or destroyed, as they often are, the elementary form of infrapolitics remain as a defense in depth of the powerless. (p. 201) From this perspective, safe houses help develop alternate values and community that deviate from the oppressive ideologies and identities imposed by dominant communities and groups. These alternate forms of community and ideology come to the foreground when the marginalized are ready for direct confrontation of the powerful and the dominant structures. Mary Louise Pratt (1991) brings out the role of safe houses in establishing ingroup solidarity in contact zones of intercommunity relations. She defines safe houses as “social and intellectual spaces where groups can constitute themselves as horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, temporary protection from legacies of oppression” (Pratt, 1991, p. 40). In educational contexts, she sees classrooms as contact zones where students from diverse communities interact with each other and with texts and codes from diverse (even if be dominant) communities. The value of safe houses in contact zones for minority community students is that they are able to retreat to the safe houses to enjoy in-group solidarity, temporary relief from the stresses and pressures of engaging with dominant/alien discourses and groups, and develop their own community discourses and identities. While Pratt’s definition makes it appear that these sites are of therapeutic value (as in providing protection and relief from the imposition of dominant community’s norms and values), we must note that safe houses can also be active sites for the construction of resistant values and knowledge, as in Scott’s theorization. Students may reframe the classroom texts, discourses, and agendas in their own terms, in contexts and knowledge of importance to them. They may develop alternate interpretations with the ability to critique dominant forms of knowledge (as I illustrate in Canagarajah, 1997). In applied linguistics, researchers have identified the implications of classroom safe houses for practicing languages and discourses censored in educational institutions and their curricular policies. Though many of them don’t theorize these sites extensively, they note these sites in passing in their own research. The following are some metaphors educational researchers have adopted: • •

classroom underlife (Brooke, 1987) institutional interstices (Martin-Jones & Heller, 1996)

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safe spaces (Giroux, 1992) off-stage discourse (Rampton, 1995) in-group, off-task student interactions (Lucas & Katz, 1994)

From such research, we gather that safe houses can be located in diverse spatial and temporal contexts in educational domains. The following are some of them: In the classroom: Spatial domains: Asides between students, passing of notes, small group interactions, peer activities, marginalia in textbooks and notebooks. Temporal domains: Transition from one teacher to another between classes, before school begins, after classes are officially over. Outside the class: The lounge, library, dorms, playgrounds, and computer labs. In digital space: Email, online discussions/chat. In some sense, these are liminal spaces that don’t fall into the established instructional routines and regimen (hence, “institutional interstices” in the words of Martin-Jones and Heller, 1996). Therefore, students take advantage of their scope for being somewhat free of teacher or authority surveillance to practice discourses and codes that are unofficial. Based on the picture emerging from the research in diverse contexts and disciplinary orientations, I highlight the important implications for minority students for language and literacy learning in order to articulate the macroethical principles motivating my research of safe houses. The following are some of the important functions of safe houses for minority students: a. They are able to preserve and develop their own codes and discourses, even if they are censored by dominant educational institutions and authority figures. b. They are able to adopt their own learning strategies to engage with the texts and discourses in the curriculum to make sense of them and construct knowledge in their own way. c. They are able to develop a reflexive awareness of the differences in the competing discourses of their home and school. d. They are able to fashion resistant discourses and strategies to deal with the dominant ideologies of education. e. They are able to continue their own learning agendas without intervention from the authority figures, drawing from texts and discourses they prefer. f. They are able to reconstruct hybrid identities, texts, and discourses that draw from the competing discourses of home and school to resolve their conflicts for identity, knowledge, and values. From this perspective, safe houses can help teachers construct more ethical learning spaces and practices for minority/multilingual students. Research on

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these learning sites then are motivated by such macroethical concerns as the following: a. By studying these sites, teachers are able to understand the learning agendas of the students in educational institutions. In some ways, a peek into the safe houses constitutes a “needs analysis.” They show what students value in schooling or literacy. Though students might be uncomfortable discussing their actual interests and agendas in surveys or interviews, the safe house discourses and practices often reveal what is important for them. An understanding of students’ own learning agendas and needs can help bring into relief the “hidden curriculum” of our own. b. Teachers are able to understand the languages and discourse practices students bring with them. We can understand how to build a transition from their own preferred language practices to the ones privileged by schools and our courses. c. Teachers can learn about the values, learning strategies, and knowledge resources students bring from their communities, families, and neighborhoods outside the environment of the educational institutions. As scholars in the “funds of knowledge” model have demonstrated, there are valuable intellectual resources from homes and communities that students from minority backgrounds bring with them (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005). Because many teachers and scholars consider underprivileged communities as deficient, they are often misinformed about the value of these funds of knowledge. Safe houses often serve as a site where these funds of knowledge are practiced, maintained, and nurtured. d. Teachers can understand the strategies that enable students to renegotiate dominant forms of knowledge and discourses in their favor. How students themselves negotiate the conflicts and tensions in their educational experience will provide perspectives to teachers on what learning strategies can be cultivated in the classroom to negotiate school and home discourses. Understanding all these aspects would help us design courses that are relevant and fair to these students. We are able to accommodate their strengths and expectations in our teaching agendas. More importantly, we are able to make learning more rewarding and successful for them by drawing from their preferred learning strategies, values, and resources. Furthermore, research in these sites can also serve as a critique of dominant discourses and practices in education. Scholars and researchers who are influenced by dominant models often lack alternative vantage points to assess the relevance or effectiveness of their assumptions. Therefore, safe houses can help scholars and teachers critique their own practice and devise pedagogies that are more effective. Thus, in my case, this research was motivated by certain important macroethical principles. Foremost was the need to empower the students and communities who are compelled to resort to safe houses to enjoy their own discourses and practices. It was also

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motivated by the need for self-critique—that is, the need to understand the limitations of my own assumptions and practices in teaching.

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My Study Though safe houses have important macroethical implications for education, they present significant challenges for research. Since the safe house is by definition an in-group and protected site, it is difficult for outsiders to gain access to them. Not only would insiders have a vested interest in keeping others excluded from their private spaces, the site stops being a safe house if anyone else participates in them. If the membership changes due to the presence of a newcomer (say a researcher), the dynamic of the community would alter, and the nature and functions deviate from those of safe houses. In addition to the difficulties in gaining access to safe houses, there are ethical concerns in observing these sites. Whether with or without the permission of the participants, researchers have to reflect on the ethics of analyzing and discussing discourses and practices that are private to a group. In this sense, such research is analogous to prying into the personal spaces of others. Many would consider such private spaces as lying outside the boundaries of observation, analysis, or research. In some ways, this kind of research is similar to the operations of security or intelligence personnel conducting surveillance on one’s email and telephone conversations for government’s agendas. I revisit a classroom ethnography I conducted on the literacy practices of African American students in a computer-mediated course. I have reported the implications for literacy in previous publications (see Canagarajah, 1997, 1999). However, I have not had an opportunity to discuss the ethical challenges in the research process in those reports. Mention of the IRB approval and human subjects approval sufficed for previous publishers. Such treatment of ethical considerations was typical of conventions in research reporting at that time. As we deepen our orientation to ethical objectives now, it is possible to represent more fully the challenges I faced and the ways I negotiated them. I initially designed my study as a classroom ethnography. While the writing course I taught was meant for students in remedial writing, it had a majority of African American students (11 out of 15 students). Since the course was computer-mediated, it provided opportunities to collect diverse forms of data saved on the local access network (LAN). These included students’ serial drafts of essays, outlines, peer review, class discussion and activities, and email correspondence with me and their peers. Typical of ethnographies, this study was hypothesis generating. Therefore, I aimed to gather all types of classroom artifacts and activities possible, in order to triangulate findings for grounded theorization. The IRB approval covered all classroom artifacts and interactions. Similarly, in my signed human consent, I obtained permission to use all forms of classroom data for my study. The blanket approval and broad research purview turned out

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to be beneficial. As my study proceeded, I fell into unexpected sources of data in newly discovered safe houses that turned out to be critical for my interpretation. My research objective at the beginning of the study was to analyze the students’ attitudes and responses to a pedagogy that accommodated their codes and discourses as a means of transitioning them to academic discourses (which I labeled the code switching model). In this model, I encouraged students to maintain their codes and discourses in informal sites—such as their communities, peer groups, casual interactions, and low-stakes classroom exercises (i.e., class discussion or journals). However, students were expected to switch to “standard English” and academic conventions for formal and high-stakes assignments. I considered this a just and fair approach to validate the codes of minority students while transitioning them to the privileged codes of the school and social mainstream. Initially, the surface spaces of classroom interactions turned out to be uneventful. The students displayed a positive attitude to academic readings and literacy activities, adopted academic conventions in their own writing, and demonstrated high motivation for obtaining good grades. As the semester proceeded, I discovered certain “hidden” interactions and conversations in relatively protected class discussions and communication that suggested different attitudes and communicative practices. They suggested a possible resistance to my code switching pedagogy. I gradually started focusing on these safe houses as the study progressed. Some of the less controversial forms in which I gained access to in-group communication were through self-reported data. I gave students assignments to transcribe in-group speech events (particularly arguments, as the course focused on argumentative discourse) and literacy practices for classroom analysis and discussion. Students brought to me reports of their collaborative reading/writing practices and insult routines they engaged in at their dorms. Though it was evident in some cases that the “transcripts” had been embellished slightly to provide dramatic and expressive effect, it was useful to consider what the students wanted outsiders to know about their discourse. Another mode of access was computer-mediated discussions that were initiated by the students themselves. In the program that we used, Daedalus, students can start an alternate discussion forum for their own interactions, abandoning (or in parallel with) the forum/topic that I had initiated (in my capacity as the instructor). There were many instances where the African American students left the general discussion forum that I had initiated and constructed their own forum. These forums had a safe house effect, as it was mostly students in the African American group who were the participants. They engaged in topics that mattered to them, and adopted in-group discourse conventions. In conversations that seemed to move away from the prompts of the instructor, the students still addressed the pedagogical implications in a way that was reframed to suit their own values and interests. We have to acknowledge that students were aware that others in the course (including the instructor) could either join or at least

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eavesdrop on their conversation. In some cases, their safe house discourse was framed in relation to this unintended audience. Such awareness actually provided even more significance to their discourse, not less. Thus students could resist the pedagogical agendas or critique institutional norms without fear of penalization, as they assumed that this was communication within the in-group and not meant for outsiders. Consider the following example of an in-group discussion forum. The class was asked to discuss a reading on recent revisions in history textbooks (see Clegg, 1998, pp. 406–412). Though the author presents many details on the manner in which specific information and modes of presentation have been changed to correct the biases in previous texts, she doesn’t favor these changes. After providing some text-based information on the author’s position in the general discussion forum, the African American students constructed an in-group forum where they discussed the topic differently: 47 (3) David Smith: I have noticed that in watchin tv that the indians are always considered the bad guys while the cowboys were considered the good guys. 48 (5) Sonny Tippens: Weren’t most of the people who started civilization from Africa? Are not most Africans black? This is the biggest misconception of them all in my view. When I was young I thought that Cleopatra and all of the Pharoahs were white. 49 (10) Ray Wright: That reminds me of the movie Moses, Sonny, that Pharoah was a Ramseses (the character that was played by Yul Brenner) He definitely wasn’t black. 50 (11) Amos Manor Jr.: i see too that they show all the egyptians as whites they do this because they won’t get very vood reviews picturing them as they actually were “africans” 51 (12) David Smith: Yea you know it is weird how the people who write most of the histroy books we read in school are white. Why is that? And why does it seem that the white man in those history books are portrayed as being the better of the races? 52 (17) Sonny Tippens: Exactly, Ray. Have you heard the song by BDP (I think) that talks about the black people of the Bible? 53 (19) Dexter Bomar: i feel the reason for the distortion is because whites want to portray themselves as doing the right thing to their children since they are the majority.1

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What we see is that the students are drawing from their oral history and popular culture to adopt a different position on the reading. Thus the forum features alternate sources of history compared to the academic sources in the public discussion site. The students are also reframing the discussion in their own terms, as relevant to their interests; that is, students shared how their communities celebrated events that were important to their history although outsiders were not aware of them; they ruminated on the reasons why their history was not represented fairly; they considered the ulterior motivations of the dominant communities in representing their history differently; and they pooled together oral history, rap, and music to inform each other of alternate sources of history. Though some of these topics might have been considered irrelevant to the agendas of the course (which focused on the conventions of writing in the field of history, in the tradition of “Writing across the Curriculum”), they mattered to the students. However, the instructor cannot challenge students on the relevance of this discussion because the students might argue that this is an off-task and in-group discussion that is different from that assigned by the teacher for the public site. At the same time, since the site is not totally blocked from the view of others, the participants are also making a statement about their thoughts and feelings on racism in society and history to the others in the class. The most ethically challenging site was the private email messages students sent each other. Students could block access to unintended recipients by marking the message protected. There were some special conditions governing this feature. In Daedalus (at that time, in the 1990s), the email system was used during class time and was restricted to participants of that class. Therefore, the email system was defined as restricted to pedagogical sites and purposes. Furthermore, the protection for the messages is taken off when the whole course is archived at the end of the semester. The students were made aware of this. What this means is that the protection of the email is not removed for research purposes only. It is a routine feature of the Daedalus instructional system as it was originally designed. Moreover, the fact that it is at the end of the semester that one has access to all the email messages prevents a conflict of interest for the instructor. The awareness of the content in the email messages would have no implications for the grades of the students. The information also doesn’t affect the instructor’s relationship with the students, as they would have already completed the course when the protection is removed. Despite being informed of the removal of protection at the end of the course and granting me signed consent to use these messages as data, students gradually dropped their caution and engaged in private conversations in the email forum. This site then turned out to provide relatively deeper insider perspective on safe houses. For example, it provided a good sample of the preferred discourses of the students. There were insult routines, arguments, rhyme, and capping interactions in the email. There was also criticism of the curriculum and pedagogy. Often, these interactions seemed to have taken place when the class was supposed to be discussing important academic topics or doing serious pedagogical activities. The safe house discourse suggested the level of involvement or investment the students

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had in the agendas of the course. For example, when I gave a final test to be written in the class as a timed essay, two students had the following exchange: From: ANDREW HUBBARD

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To: ANYBODY Subject: THIS 8/19 aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, sssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhiiiiiiiiiiittttt! From: SONNY TIPPENS To: ANDREW HUBBARD Subject: R) THIS

8/19

ANDREW it’s AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH shit! Thus students are able to share their anger or frustrations with this assignment. It is clear that the topic didn’t interest them. In some ways, this medium turns out to be a space for catharsis. Despite the expression of frustration (or because of the benefit of being able to do so in this site), both these students ended up writing a decent essay and completing the course with a good grade (above B+). In addition to the expression of anger or frustration, we must also note the play with graphics. I found such multimodal creativity a lot in the safe houses. Is this activity providing them a measure of playfulness that they might lack in other activities in the class? Is this a way of distracting themselves, impressing each other, or finding opportunities for bonding? There were also email messages meant to encourage each other through the course and the college career. As students cheered each other up, there was an undercurrent of resistance to racism in their messages. Consider an exchange at the end of the semester when the students bid farewell to each other: From: SONNY TIPPENS To: ALL Subject: IS BERN GERT 8/19 . . . stay close to each other. we are all gonna need help to get through, and i’d like to

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say all of us minorities make it. do it for your family, community, and culture, but most of all do it for yourself. . . . good luck everyone and remember, you on scholarshirp!!!!!

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Sonny Tippens (S.T!) From: RHONDA NICHOLAS To: ALL Subject: FIGHT THE POWER

8/19

Hello everyone, this is a reminder to everyone: “STAY BLACK” I LOVE YA’LL, RHONDA (MOOKY) As we can see, students are conscious of perceived threats to their identities and values. The safe house emerges as a site that helps them enjoy their community solidarity, protected somewhat from the gaze or impositions of the dominant institutions and discourses. It also serves to preserve in-group solidarity. The subject line (“fight the power”) actually suggests an ongoing conversation (or an email trail) of messages on this topic. It also suggests possibilities of affirmation, agency, and resistance as students’ positioning towards dominant institutions. The spelling of “Is bern gert” and “scholarshirp” are parodies of non-Black ways of talking. Though students rarely had opportunities for this kind of discourse in public sites of the classroom or college, these messages show that these feelings were hidden but ever present for them. In fact, throughout the course, students exchanged some messages of the following nature to affirm or celebrate their identity: To: DEXTER BOMAR From: S.T Subject: THE BLACK MAN

8/10

TO STRONG . . . TO BLACK . . . TO STRONG . . . TO BLACK . . . FFFFF F FF F F IGHT THE POWER

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To: SONNY TIPPENS From: DEXTER BOMAR

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Subject: FIGHT THE POWER

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stay black, fight the power, support your people. PEACE HO! Here, again, we see the role of playful font and spacing to perhaps distract themselves from the tedium of academic topics of reading and writing. A more controversial set of messages related to playful rhyming and insult routines. Consider an exchange such as this: From: DONNIE JONES To: RAY WRIGHT Subject: HIMSELF

8/09

Pussy ass NIGGA’!!! From: RAY WRIGHT To: DONNIE JONES Subject: A PUNK NAMED DONNIE

8/09

HOMEBOY YA’ SLIPPIN. YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS POPPIN’ THAT WACK BULLSH-T. IT’S TIME I PUT SOME HEAD OUT. DON’T PLAY ME SMALL MONIE!!! Though I used such exchanges as data in my study, I didn’t use certain other exchanges that were too personal or showed the students in an undignified manner. For example, some students shared private information about parties, drinking, relationships, and sexual activity. In data such as this, I assumed that despite the anonymity and consent, certain amount of restraint had to be observed by the researcher. We have to ask ourselves what benefit such data might serve for pedagogical outcomes. They are certainly data that will be sensational. However, the researcher stands to lose his or her credibility among the community concerned when the data presents students in an undignified manner. Furthermore, if the purpose of the researcher is the affirmation of the community’s

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interests and advancement of their values and education, data of this nature will go against those objectives. Therefore, I kept such data out of the study. Data from the safe houses in my course provided a nuanced perspective on the literacy challenge for minority students in the academy. It appeared that students were caught in a dilemma: They had to affirm the norms and conventions of the academic discourse in on-task and public sites of classroom interactions in order to get good grades; however, they also sensed some conflicts to their identities, preferred discourses, and community solidarity in adopting academic conventions. How they resolved this was to keep their preferred discourses and identities in safe houses. In fact, safe houses provided them a space to nurture these discourses right in the heart of educational institutions. The shuttling between normative discourses in the public sites and alternate discourses in safe houses developed skills of code switching that these students were already familiar with. However, I found some of these alternate discourses gradually creeping into the texts and discourses in the public sites as well. They suggested to me that the students were seeking ways to merge their preferred discourses into the dominant academic norms, rather than keeping them separate as demanded by my code switching pedagogy.

My Approach I will now highlight the ethical dilemmas I experienced and the ways I renegotiated them in a situated manner. The main concern for me was becoming privy to the discourses and interactions of students’ safe house life. We must remember that not all safe houses are protected and private to the same degree. The qualified access provided to outsiders is an important consideration in deciding the degree to which we can be invasive in gathering data. To begin with, in seeking students’ help to collect data from their safe houses, I was getting their collaboration in revealing insider discourses. In this case, the degree and scope of the discourse they want to make available to me are completely under their control. However, I had to compromise on the level of objectivity and accuracy required in the quality of the data. The data provided is shaped by the interests of the students. As I mentioned earlier, they could have embellished the data or suppressed details as they intend them for outsiders. Such mediation and “distortion” should not be treated as unusual, but typical of all data. It is simply the degree to which such mediation shapes the data that is different. More importantly, we should factor in the features of such mediation and shaping when we interpret the data. I therefore considered why students would present such arguments and such conventions to my attention. What did it show about their preferred arguments or the ways they wanted outsiders to think about their arguments? The other forms of safe house interactions were also not completely free of mediation. The discussion forum is not fully blocked from outsiders. While students discuss certain topics and discussions by themselves, establishing the

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discussion forum collectively, they cannot be blocked from outsiders. As I mentioned above, students factored in their awareness of outsiders peeking into their interactions to make some statements to them as well. Therefore, this partial access to outsiders is integral to the nature of this discourse. While there is nothing to prevent me from lurking in this site, I sometimes made my presence felt gently. The challenge was not to interfere too much with their own topic and discussion, while also not deceiving them as to my presence. It is the third form of safe house interaction that provided the most ethically challenging dilemma. Since the email exchanges are protected, students clearly didn’t intend others to read them (until perhaps at the end of the semester when they are archived). It is possible that some students didn’t care if I or the IT professionals who archive the course read them when they were archived. They might have been open to such possibility as they were aware that the protection comes off at the end of the course. I repeated this eventuality many times during the course. Students themselves often asked me about the archival conventions for their confirmation. In this sense, this data was also relatively mediated by the awareness that it was going to be read at some point by others. It was also shaped by the awareness that this is an email system dedicated to this course—that is, for the members in this class (and not others)—and restricted in access. Though students may have forgotten that others may gain access to the data later, I reminded them of this periodically in order to prevent them from writing things they might regret later. As I mentioned above, my ethical responsibility didn’t end when I gained access to email data at the end of the course. I still chose judiciously which data to present in academic publications. The larger ends of the research and respect for the subjects had a bearing on these decisions.

Responding to Ethical Dilemmas What is unique to my research, unlike many of the examples provided by Kuboniyova (2013) in her research practice (and presumably those of others in more interactive situations), is that I had limited possibilities of negotiating my ongoing relationship with the subjects. Since a safe house is by definition out of bounds to outsiders, I had to keep a respectable distance from the interactions of the subjects while observing them. This research context necessitated much of my microethics of care to be negotiated differently. To some extent, my negotiation was one-sided, involving changes in my own attitudes and practices, without involving the subjects too directly. Though I didn’t attempt to shape the safe house interactions and discourses of the students directly, significant changes involved my own attitudes, pedagogical approaches, and research practices. In this sense, the microethics of care had tremendous implications for my own practices, attitudes, and values. I articulate below the type of changes I negotiated in response to the ethical dilemmas.

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Among the most important changes for me were attitudinal. In the face of safe house discourses and interactions, I had to rethink the following distinctions: Safe house discourses as not disruptive but functional: In the beginning of the course, I had considered the off-task discussion of students as disruptive of my own pedagogical agendas. As students explored some of the topics of classroom discussion in relation to their own community experiences—that is, through oral history, narrative, and popular culture—I considered these discussions as useless distractions. I even attempted to suppress these interactions, shift students’ attention from such safe house discussions, and reorient them to the issues as defined in my prompts. My bias may have been shaped by the ideology that communitybased and popular discourses (i.e., narratives, conversation, and insult routines) were irrelevant or inferior to academic discourses. However, as I considered the value of these discourses in safe houses, I started appreciating their pedagogical functionality. I began to see that the students were reframing the pedagogical agendas in their own terms, with greater relevance to their own interests and concerns, in order to explore the issues with greater engagement. Student discourses as not insulting but resistant : There is a thin line separating insult from resistance in classroom discourse, as critical educationists have pointed out (see Giroux, 1992). The moral implications behind this distinction are tremendous. What conservative authority figures may perceive as insulting to them can be interpreted as resistance, with ideological and social implications, by critical scholars and practitioners. I wavered between both positions in the face of safe house discourses. When students complained about some of my assignments in their safe houses or indirectly hinted that they found them unengaging, I felt insulted by them. Even their creativity and playfulness I considered as disrespectful, as I interpreted them as a comment on the irrelevance of my pedagogical activities for them. It took some time, effort, and attitudinal change to reinterpret them as acts of resistance that are a demonstration of the agency of the students and their critical engagement with the course to reframe the pedagogy in their own terms. Safe house activities as not lacking motivation but seeking motivation : Safe house interactions and discourses also made me think of my students initially as unmotivated for learning. I was thinking of ways to suppress the safe house interactions and attract students to the public sites through revised activities. I was also considering using participation points in the grading system to punish those who engaged in off-task activities. However, over time, I adjusted my perspectives by considering the type of motivation displayed when students engaged in safe house discourses. Students displayed a motivation to engage with the pedagogical materials and activities indirectly through their preferred discourses. It is also possible that students were seeking ways to engage with my course through their own strategies and interaction styles. These changes in my attitude had implications for my teaching practice. Rather than imposing my intended pedagogical agendas and activities, I had to reconfigure

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my pedagogy mid-course. This is not unusual in recent forms of teacher inquiry (see Lankshear & Knobel, 2004). Teacher researchers treat their classroom agendas as collaboratively negotiated with their students in an ongoing manner as their own knowledge about the students and their agendas increases. However, at the time I conducted my research it took considerable effort to consider the pedagogy as open to negotiation and revision. Here are the major changes involved: Not my pedagogical agendas, but coconstructed agendas: I had to consider how I can accommodate the needs, interests, and values of the students in the learning experience. This went against my starting position that I had adopted an enlightened pedagogy that was good for the students; that even though they might not appreciate the pedagogy, it is important for me to persuade them of its relevance; that my training and experience gave me the authority and insight to design an appropriate pedagogy for my students. Gradually, I had to develop the humility and self-criticism to appreciate the limitations of my pedagogy. I had to also acknowledge that it was difficult for me to bridge the divide between the students’ home discourses and academic discourses without an understanding of the linguistic backgrounds they were coming from. I had to also acknowledge the right of the students to appropriate academic discourses in their own way, in relevance to their own values and interests. This realization made me reposition myself in the classroom—from exercising my authority and imposing my classroom agendas to coconstructing agendas with students. Engage students’ discourses and texts in pedagogy: In order to validate the agendas and interests of the students, I began to introduce more of the texts that interested them. I introduced readings by African American scholars and articles that used or discussed vernacular black dialects and discourses. I gave them transcripts of the arguments they had collected in their safe houses for closer analysis in the classroom. However, I also had to reconcile myself to not seeing very engaged and enthusiastic participation on these texts in the public sites of the classroom. In fact, many students resisted the suggestion that they speak vernacular dialects or that such dialects were appropriate for classroom purposes. I realized that expecting all students to enthusiastically support or use vernacular dialects is to essentialize the black community. I had to leave these texts with a gentle touch for students to take them up in their own way. Create more safe houses for student interaction : Respecting the desire for students to negotiate pedagogical agendas in their own way, I had to learn to construct more spaces for students to enjoy in-group interactions. This meant that my teacher-fronted pedagogy turned out to be not the main or sole form of learning in my course. While I designed a full schedule of activities earlier in the semester to fill all the available class time, I had to now leave enough spaces for students to engage as small groups in relatively more protected safe houses. I had to accommodate more activities that were low stakes and nongraded so that students could bring their own agendas and interests in those contexts. More importantly, I had to learn how to accommodate the extra curriculum as a learning resource.

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That is, I designed activities and interactions students could undertake outside the classroom (i.e., in their own dorms, library, or student center). I had to also design activities of reading and writing that they could undertake in relation to their own topics of interest. Finally, such ethical negotiations also implied revisions in my orientation to the research process. As safe houses meant that I should respect the privacy of student interactions, keep a respectable distance, and find access only in ways that are comfortable to the students, I had to make the following changes in my research practice: Allow for contingencies to shape my research: While I started initially with the expectation of having a measure of control over my research, I had to relax this notion a bit. Procedures involved in IRB application, grants solicitation, and dissertation approval still require a research protocol that has a coherent plan, with all the stages, questions, and outcomes neatly resolved. However, research on safe houses prepared me for the serendipity of “falling into data.” That is, I couldn’t fully anticipate which sites and interactions would become available for me as data, and which of them students would make available for me, at least partially. I had to learn to take what I received. I developed the confidence to embrace this messy “mangle of practice” (Pickering, 1995) in research activity and accommodate such contingencies and practicalities into my analysis and theorization. Be content with partial access to data : I had to also resolve not to expect complete access to safe houses. As mentioned earlier, students might provide access only to bits and pieces of their inner life. Rather than treating this as insufficient, or being so invasive as to demand greater control over these sites, I had to learn to be satisfied with partial glimpses. I had to also realize that such partial access is sometimes provided for good reasons and that I have to theorize their social implications for their own sake rather than discard them as incomplete, distorted, or irrelevant for research. In fact, tips of the iceberg can still be insightful as to what lies beneath them. Accept mediation, without seeking unfiltered inside knowledge: My gradually evolving position that all sites are mediated and that there is no unmediated access to insider knowledge or social spaces required some shifts in the epistemological assumptions motivating my research. In fact, such relative mediation of safe houses by outsiders and the performativity of the students themselves (on the types of safe house discourses they wanted to display to outsiders) provided a way out of the ethical dilemmas in gaining access to private spaces. The fact that most sites, spaces, and interactions are mediated socially gave me more confidence to seek information on sites that were relatively more accessible to outsiders. However, by the same token, I couldn’t claim the same types of validity social scientists make for emic and insider knowledge. I had to acknowledge the levels of mediation involved when I analyzed my findings. Make my presence visible, and do not strive to be unobtrusive : Acknowledging mediation allowed me to make my presence visible when I gained access to safe

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houses. I resisted the temptation to be a lurker or voyeur in these interactions to gain knowledge without the observer’s paradox. Though the email exchanges were more private, I reminded the students frequently that the protection would be removed at the end of the course. I also answered their questions about access after archival honestly and elaborated how I would use the email as data in my research at the end of the course. In discussion forums that the students set up as safe houses, I threw in a comment or two to make them aware of my presence. While these reorientations demonstrate what I could do at the level of microethical consideration with reflexivity and sensitivity to modify my teaching and research process, I still had to return to the macroethical level to validate my research. A key consideration was catalytic validity (Lankshear & Knobel, 2004). I valued the research not on the basis of the objective and pure access to truth about student motivations and values. I valued it for the ways it changed my own orientation to pedagogy and helped fashion new pedagogical orientations that would help other teachers and empower these students. The microethics of care helped reshape the macroethical principles I had initially envisioned for this study. I started this study with the understanding that the pedagogical model of code switching would be the most ethical and fair for minority students. That is, students would use their vernacular to transition to “standard English,” but keep it reserved for home and informal contexts only. My study was intended to explore what practices and attitudes would make this pedagogical model more efficient. The discovery and interpretation of safe house practices helped me understand the limitations of the code switching model and move to what I later labeled the code meshing model (Canagarajah, 1997, 2006). In the code meshing pedagogy, teachers would encourage minority students to merge their preferred discourses with the dominant codes and conventions of academic discourse, rather than keeping them separated for separate contexts. I considered this hybrid option as the one my students and their safe houses discourses were hinting at. Merging their codes would facilitate their voice and identity in academic communication, while also developing African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a suitable medium for serious contexts. I understood the code meshing approach as addressing the issue of justice for minority communities, ensuring that there were more benefits than costs to their social and educational life, and respecting their cultural and intellectual traditions in the academy. This research experience has led to advocacy for code meshing as a more ethical and just pedagogical approach for language minority students, which has gained considerable uptake from other scholars in literacy and language teaching (see Horner, Lu, Royster, & Trimbur, 2011; Young & Martinez, 2011).

Implications My research and the ethical negotiations have broader relevance. To begin with, the experience has implications for those using Internet-based pedagogies and interactional contexts for their research purposes. Though many sites on the

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Internet can be intrusive, and there is a temptation for subjects to be lulled into a false sense of protection and privacy on the Internet, we must realize that there are different types of online spaces with different levels of protection and privacy. We have to identify the types of protection presumed by participants in deciding what level of access and permission is required for research. McKee and Porter (2012) offer a heuristic for making such decisions based on the following factors: whether the site is public or private; whether the data is identified or not; the degree of interaction with the researcher; topic sensitivity; and subject vulnerability. For instance, very public chat sites, with participants using pseudonyms in many cases, lend themselves to research without permission. In fact, trying to unveil the identities of participants for the sake of obtaining permission would be needlessly invasive. The data is not identified, the researcher is not manipulating the discussion, and the topics may not be sensitive. In contrast, a researcher’s participant observation in an Alcoholics Anonymous discussion forum would require permission, as the subjects are vulnerable, the topic is sensitive, the forum is relatively more private, and the researcher may interact with the participants (having to declare his or her identity). Teachers can adopt the heuristic McKee and Porter offer to figure out which spaces are open to what types of research with what levels of consent. Classroom ethnographies and teacher research can also benefit from the microethics of care. The classroom is not a single public site. It has many layers and levels of social interaction, moving from the very direct teacher–student interaction to various levels of collaborative, peripheral, off-task, and hidden interactions. Teachers have to identify the level of protection assumed by the students in deciding what types of access they can gain to those sites and what kind of permission is required. In other studies, I have analyzed the anonymous marginalia students write on textbooks without permission (Canagarajah, 1993a, 1993b). Other teachers have studied pedagogical safe houses they coconstructed with their students for mentoring purposes (as in the case of the study by Samimy, Kim, Lee, & Kasai, 2011), where they enjoyed in-group status. However, audio recording small group discussions in classrooms may require consent, as these interactions can be meant to be private by some students (or they might be lulled by their camaraderie to sharing sensitive information). Eventually, the ethical dilemmas and the ways of negotiating them should be decided in situ. Internet sites and classroom spaces are very diverse, with different conventions and interactions. The research subjects themselves might be behaving differently in these sites, based on their level of community feeling and familiarity with each other and the teacher. Therefore, the decisions relating to ethics and research need to be negotiated in a context-specific manner. Such negotiations have to be marked by researcher sensitivity and reflexivity, leading to transformation of the broader macroethical principles motivating the study and the social and educational structures that may impede justice and fairness for the subjects.

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Note 1. Transcripts from the discussion forum and email are not edited.

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References Brooke, R. (1987). Underlife and writing instruction. College Composition and Communication, 38 (2), 141–153. Cameron, D., Frazer, E., Harvey, P., Rampton, M.B.H., & Richardson, K. (1992). Researching language: Issues of power and method. London: Routledge. Canagarajah, A. S. (1993a). Critical ethnography of a Sri Lankan classroom: Ambiguities in opposition to reproduction through ESOL. TESOL Quarterly, 27(4), 601–626. Canagarajah, A. S. (1993b). American textbooks and Tamil students: A clash of discourses in the ESL classroom. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 6 (2), 143–156. Canagarajah, A. S. (1996). From critical research practice to critical research reporting. TESOL Quarterly, 29 (2), 320–330. Canagarajah, A. S. (1997). Safe houses in the contact zone: Coping strategies of African American students in the academy. College Composition and Communication, 48 (2), 173–196. Canagarajah, A. S. (1999). Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Canagarajah, A. S. (2006). The place of World Englishes in composition: Pluralization continued. College Composition and Communication, 57(4), 586–619. Clegg, C. S. (1988). Critical reading and writing across the disciplines. New York: Holt. Giroux, H. A. (1992). Border crossings: Cultural workers and the politics of education. New York: Routledge. Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. New York: Anchor. Gonzalez, N., Moll, L. C., & Amanti, C. (Eds.). (2005). Funds of knowledge. New York: Routledge. Heath, S. B., & Street, B. V. (2008). On ethnography: Approaches to language and literacy research. New York: Teachers College Press. Horner, B., Lu, M-Z., Royster, J. J., & Trimbur, J. (2011). Language difference in writing: Toward a translingual approach. College English, 73(3), 303–321. Kubaniyova, M. (2013). Ethical debates in research on language and interaction. In C. Chapelle (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 1–7). London: Blackwell. Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2004). A handbook for teacher research. Berkshire: McGraw-Hill. Lucas, T., & Katz, A. (1994). Reframing the debate: The roles of native languages in English-only programs for language minority students. TESOL Quarterly, 28 (4), 537–562. Martin-Jones, M., & Heller, M. (1996). Introduction to the special issues on education in multilingual settings: Discourse, identities, and power: Part 1: Constructing legitimacy. Linguistics and Education, 8 (1), 3–16. McKee, H., & Porter, J. (2012). The ethics of conducting writing research on the Internet: How heuristics help. In L. Nickoson & M. P. Sheridan (Eds.), Writing studies research in practice (pp. 245–260). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Pickering, A. (1995). The mangle of practice: Time, agency, and science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Pratt, M. L. (1991). Arts of the contact zone. Profession, 91, 33–40. Rampton, B. (1995). Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. London: Longman. Samimy, K., Kim, S., Lee, J., & Kasai, M. (2011). A participative inquiry in a TESOL program: Development of three NNES graduate students’ legitimate peripheral participation to fuller participation. Modern Language Journal, 95(4), 558–574. Scott, J. C. (1985). Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, V., & Martinez, A. (Eds.), (2011). Code-meshing as World English: Pedagogy, policy, performance. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

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ETHICS IN ACTIVIST SCHOLARSHIP Media/Policy Analyses of Seattle’s Homeless Encampment “Sweeps” Sandra Silberstein

The last several decades have seen calls within the academy for public scholarship (e.g., Said, 1993, 1994; Giroux, 1988, 2006) and ethical engagement (e.g., Boyte & Hollander, 1999). This paper contributes to ongoing discussions of ethics in applied linguistics through the case of an activist research study, specifically a media analysis commissioned by a local advocacy group. Assessed through existing guidelines for ethical research and public scholarship, the study was in many ways exemplary in its response to calls for socially engaged scholarship. However, elements of the research enterprise can be seen retrospectively as deeply problematic, an observation that destabilizes a genre of bulleted ethical codes as insufficiently querying who gains from our work and how. To provide concrete grounding, I describe the study and its findings in some detail in the first part of the paper, then review frameworks for ethical assessment. The paper ends with a series of questions that resist easy responses and demonstrate the criticality of what I term a praxis of questioning.

The Research In late summer 2008, in response to an overture by local homeless advocates, a group of scholars began a media and public policy analysis of a recent City of Seattle practice of “sweeping” encampments of homeless people on city-owned property. We called ourselves the Homeless Coverage Study Group—scholars in a variety of specialties, some based in rhetoric, some in writing studies, some in linguistics and discourse analysis, and some in communication. Collectively, we represented an array of analyses employed to examine how local media portrayed the issues associated with the encampment sweeps. Along with analysis of the media coverage, the research traced arguments and discourses that had traveled

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from national policies and local regulations through public relations campaigns to frame the ideological bases of that coverage. The majority of members were faculty (the import of which I didn’t recognize at the time): Candice Rai, working in public rhetorics and urban and spatial theory, provided an overview of the national context of homelessness and the phenomenon of Ten-Year Plans designed to address it. Using argument theory, Anis Bawarshi traced the origination and development of the city’s public relations campaign on the encampment sweeps, viewing revisions to documents created by the city to promote the policy. In a Foucauldian genealogical analysis, Gail Stygall examined the official Administrative Rule promulgated by the city, a rule that codified the public relations language of filth and contagion into city law. As a critical discourse analyst (CDA), I traced the evolution of television coverage from a ratification of the city’s position to a reclaiming of images by the homeless community. Also working in CDA, English graduate student Megan Kelly traced how information from the city made its way into print news sources that encouraged the public to accept rather than critique the city’s actions. Through a quantitative analysis, communication graduate student Amoshaun Toft and colleagues analyzed how journalistic coverage of urban camping was attached to categories of deviance and outlined the ways in which homeless activists contested the use of these categories in the public sphere. Finally, faculty member George Dillon addressed the visual representation of the homeless in scores of photographs posted by local concerned citizens that did the work of what he termed misery-fication, or miserification, that is, photographing the homeless as passive, damaged objects. This was a group project whose power came from the collective work. But to be clear, my work alone is the focus of the “troubling” presented here. Within the official documents, media coverage, and visual representations we studied, there was little critique of the ubiquitous discourses that demonized the homeless and their living conditions; this omission and the discourses themselves became our focus. I came to see it as an ethical imperative to critique the coverage of the poor by the neoliberal press. I take from Said (1993) and others that the first requirement of activist ethics is simply to do the work. I discuss the research in some detail below, in part, to encourage others toward what is, in effect, a form of community service. I begin by rehearsing my findings.

The Findings The study, commissioned in the summer of 2008, followed local television coverage (the three major network channels and Fox) between the previous December and the following September. The findings populated seven categories: the positioning of the viewer to identify with the wealthy; a focus on filth and public safety as the sweeps saved the homeless from themselves; the ventriloquizing of city government perspectives; coverage of homeless advocates that never went beyond responding to the city’s agenda; the homeless community’s media counteroffensive; the semiotic creation of the (non)citizen; and, finally, the absences:

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discussions of the underlying unaddressed issue of affordable housing and the voices of the homeless themselves. The discussion of each of these categories below begins with an epigraph comprising data representative of that aspect of media coverage.

Positioning the Viewer: Identifying with the Wealthy How would you feel if 30 homeless people, 10–15 camps, were living 200 yards from your home?. . . . The Queen Anne Community Council has seen the camps—the piles of rotting garbage and human waste. (Callahan, Q13 Fox, May 28, 2008) “Imagine you were homeless”—was not a phrase heard on mainstream television. Instead viewers were asked to imagine how they would feel if homeless people brought filth to their neighborhood. Until late spring, the homeless had been seen most often as a trace—more notable for the garbage they left behind, than for who they were. And the viewer was invited to identify with the injustice visited upon wealthy people who were forced to confront homelessness. On the day of the May Queen Anne sweeps (in a wealthy neighborhood always described as a violated “greenbelt”) ABC-affiliated KOMO TV (Dardis, Thompson, & Murcia, 2008) reported, “The greenbelt has been gathering trash for years, right next to multi-million dollar homes. A lot of these people were happy to see it go.” The coverage shifts to a sympathetic neighbor: “I just feel bad for like the people that live right there”—not those who had lost the few belongings they had and the home they had created in the camp, but the wealthy: “It’s literally, you know, 20 feet away from their house, and that’s not what they paid for.” In what has become Fox’s signature at the national level, the network sold fear. On the day of the Queen Anne sweeps, it broadcast a disembodied voice testifying, “people are fearful to come in here” (Callahan, 2008). The coverage managed to position the homeless as neither people, nor part of the public: “[The neighbor] says his neighborhood needs its public land for public use,” “And I think you have to ask yourself ‘well can I just walk through here,’ and I think it’s wrong that people can’t use this incredible space.” (Throughout, underlining in transcripts indicate emphases added by the author.) In all of this coverage, particularly in the Queen Anne sweeps, viewers learned of the desperation of fellow citizens confronting the dangers and detritus posed by a largely faceless homeless community.

Filth and Public Safety: Saving the Homeless from Themselves At first glance you might think this guy works for NASA. Instead he’s just walking into the west Queen Anne greenbelt to clean up homeless camps. (Epigraph and Figures 11.1 and 11.2 from Millman, KIRO TV, May 28, 2008)

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FIGURE 12.1 City workers enter the Queen Anne greenbelt. From “Crews Clean Up Garbage, Debris from Camp [video],” by Millman, KIRO TV, May 28, 2008. Used with permission.

FIGURE 12.2 City workers in hazmat suits. From “Crews Clean Up Garbage, Debris from Camp [video],” by Millman, KIRO TV, May 28, 2008. Used with permission.

Typically, television coverage of homeless sweeps portrayed them as saving homeless people from themselves: “Trash, rats, filthy conditions. It is what dozens of homeless people used to live in until this morning” (Dardis et al., 2008). Thanks to the sweeps, as of that morning, residents of the encampment were no longer living in these conditions, in fact, they had nowhere to live. They, like their belongings, had been “cleaned up.” In December, KING (Wilkinson, 2007)

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reported: “The city has been cleaning up homeless camps—removing tents after complaints about fires, garbage, and vermin.” Television coverage from December through the May Queen Anne sweeps focused on lurid descriptions of filth. In fact, I observed at the time that those involved in the Queen Anne sweeps looked less like astronauts (the NASA employees in the epigraph and Figures 12.1 and 12.2) than they did health workers confronting an Ebola outbreak. Here is how a neighbor appearing on CBSaffiliated KIRO TV (Millman, 2008) described the setting: “They’re absolutely filthy. I mean they’re full of human waste, and drugs, and I mean, and alcohol bottles and rotting waste . . . you, you just have to see it.” These characterizations of the homeless and the threat they posed ventriloquized the perspective that city offices had been promoting. (Earlier in our report, colleague Anis Bawarshi’s section had documented the city’s public relations campaign.)

Speaking for the Mayor: Ventriloquizing City Government Seattle city officials are going on a PR offensive to make their case against illegal homeless camps in Seattle. (Wilkinson, KING5 News, December 19, 2007) Part of that offensive was clearly effective, as local television networks systematically covered the mayor’s message, eventually presenting the city’s perspective as their own. By the time of May’s Queen Anne sweep, news outlets could be seen acting as virtual spokespeople for the mayor. In the following quotation, KIRO’s Michelle Millman reports the position of homeless advocates, but presents the city’s position. This is an important distinction. Ventriloquizing (Bakhtin, 1953/1986; Tannen, 2009) allows speakers to associate themselves with another’s position: “Well this has been a controversial subject for years. Homeless advocates saying the city really needs to be more humane in the way it goes about this. Well the city listened, and today was the first day they put into action the Mayor’s plan.” Q13 Fox’s Brian Callahan went so far as to seemingly speak for the Mayor’s office, then allowed a city official to coreport the story. Callahan: And I wanted to ask you: I know the bulldozers are rolling and whatever else. The city is trying to do this in a compassionate way. Help me with that part of the story. One piece of the city’s story, repeated by all networks, was the availability of services and beds. Coverage of outreach programs systematically suggested an unexplained nonresponsiveness by the homeless. During the Queen Anne sweep, Fox’s Q13 (Callahan, 2008) quoted one social worker: “We make contact and you know, try and line them up with services and shelter and hopefully they’ll accept

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that . . .” On the same day, KIRO (Millman, 2008) quotes an “outreach worker” who reports, “a lot of people seem to be willing to accept information . . . . I can’t guarantee every person we talk to is going to accept shelter.” Through the May Queen Anne sweep, television coverage portrayed filthy people in filthy surroundings who were unwilling to accept help from a compassionate city government. The hints that this might not be the whole story were few, and often presented through the voices of other citizens. In contrast to the Queen Anne resident who felt sorry for the nearby property owners, KOMO TV (Dardis et al., 2008) also presented someone who thought the sweep was “terrible”: “They are fine neighbors . . .” Through neighbor “Dot,” the network can hint at a deeper problem. “She sees this as a temporary fix: ‘I don’t think people choose to live down there, but try getting an apartment in Queen Anne, you know. I think it’s very expensive to live.’ ” Even an agitated neighbor who’d told KIRO News (Millman, 2008) that the greenbelt dwellers were “absolutely filthy” had to admit, “Once you’ve sunk down this far, it takes a lot. People think it’s easy to break this cycle of poverty and living and, and it’s not.” But the coverage was not monolithic, by late May, even Fox (Callahan, 2008) was willing to admit, “while many neighbors are glad to see a start to the clean up here, they’re very aware that homelessness can’t be bulldozed away.”

Views of Homeless Advocates: Responding to the City’s Agenda As early as December 2007, views of “homeless advocates” could be heard on television. These appeared most often in response to the city’s claims of health hazards and the availability of shelters if the residents of the encampments would only take advantage of them. On December 19, 2007, KING’s Eric Wilkinson had given voice to these responses: Advocates for the homeless criticize the city as inhumane. The city is continuing to tear down camps like this even though there still aren’t enough beds for all the homeless in the city. A vigil was held in downtown Seattle Wednesday to call attention to the 42 homeless people who have died from the weather or violence this year alone. That’s up from just five, 7 years ago. [Alison Eisinger (Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness)]: We know that there is a public health crisis. That health crisis is homelessness. All these discourses, however, responded to the city’s claims, and the television images of filthy encampments worked in the service of the mayor’s agenda. Arguments about whether there were enough beds were a far cry from discussions about affordable housing. And coverage of homeless advocates is a far cry from voicing the homeless.

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Taking Control of the Images: A Media Counteroffensive In the darkness of the night, volunteers and homeless moved from four locations, including two tent cities, to this new location. The pink tents you see here were donated by the Girl Scouts and will eventually be replaced with permanent structures. Those behind me tell us there will be rules here with an emphasis on safe and sanitary conditions. The plan is to eventually house as many as 1,000 people here. Now this was all done in the cover of darkness because they tell me they didn’t want the police to get tipped off. They hoped, their plan was to get so many people moved in there that once police really found them out, there’d be too many people in there to move out. We will hear more from the advocates here this morning helping them out and also from the homeless. . . . (Legeros & Millman, KIRO TV, September 22, 2008) By fall 2008, the homeless community had begun to take control of the images. Television images of hazmat suits were replaced by the pink tents of what the community called “Nickelsville” ( Figure 12.3), after Mayor Nickels, an appellation evoking the “Hoovervilles” of the depression era, which explicitly blamed the policies of President Hoover for their plight. An American flag was attached to its sign. For the first time, the focus was primarily on the homeless. TV website “updates” posted the familiar Nickels rhetoric of safety concerns and commitments to end homelessness, along with responses by homeless advocates. But the pink tents were about people. And the pushback by the homeless community seemed to have gained them new consideration. KING 5’s Elisa Hahn

FIGURE 12.3 Pink tents in “Nickelsville.” From “ ‘Nickelsville’ Homeless Camp Springs Up in South Seattle,” by KING Staff, KING TV, September 22, 2008. Used with permission.

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(Bounds & Hahn, 2008) was typical: “Out of respect for the residents of this homeless camp, we won’t shine our lights and cameras on them at this late hour. They’re sleeping just over this embankment right behind me.” And there was another change. In the wake of Nickelsville, KING itself began to speak (briefly) in the voice of the homeless. The homeless were no longer inevitably described as “evicted” from “illegal” camps. On September 22, Elisa Hahn (Bounds & Hahn, 2008) reported: “The city set aside 50 beds for people kicked out of homeless camps, but when a bed is taken, the previous occupant is forced out, and it’s usually a homeless woman.” Then she put the evidence of finite beds on camera, showing shelter beds: [Off-camera: Kathy Sather, Compass Center]: The women who would have been here at the shelter, won’t have those beds available to them. KING 5’s website termed the setting up of Nickelsville a “precision protest.” One sees here a developing respect for an activist campaign to gain real solutions to homelessness. Even this improved television coverage, however, left the homeless as “other.”

Who Is a Citizen? To return to our initial question, how would you feel if you were homeless, I posed a parallel question: What if media coverage had positioned the homeless and the viewer as fellow citizens, separated by a simple, random act of fate? I predicted that this would become more likely in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, the worst since the Great Depression—likely to create more and more telegenic poor: for example, recently middle class families in contrast to the single men more often seen on television at the time. This shift in perspective was presaged in contrasting images of the American flag: In December 2007, KING showed a tattered American flag left in a tree after a sweep of a homeless camp. In fall 2008, the “Nickelsville” sign boasted a new American flag flying above it. The question I asked: As time went on would the homeless continue to be portrayed as anti-citizens—leaving the flag in tatters? Or would we see Nickelsville flags, announcing citizen-produced safety and dignity? Arguably any flag made representative of homelessness should be seen as an alarm, announcing a failure of social policy.

What’s Missing: Structural Solutions and Voices of the Homeless By the end of the day, the homeless camp on city property was cleared and cleaned up by city crews. The new tent camp on state land will also be cleared out and cleaned up when the campers’ time is up. (KING Staff, September 22, 2008)

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Omitted in all the coverage of superficial symptoms were serious discussions of why people were homeless, why they might prefer the safety and security of an encampment to single nights in shelters, and what structural solutions might be. Nowhere were there discussions of why the encampments were “dirty,” why the city didn’t supply portable toilets and dumpsters, and why it refused to allow independently supplied toilets to be serviced on public land. And nowhere did one hear extended voices of the homeless, themselves. For this, one had to go to YouTube, where the homeless could “broadcast yourself.” One posting is “Nickelsville Talks Back to Mayor Nickels” (Harris & Smith, 2008). I’ve named the homeless voices quoted below: Burien: My house is repossessed. So I wish I could—I wish I coulda had my house now . . . I bought my house in 2003 in Burien, nice house. But like I said, things happen. . . . I think that anybody that sees a homeless person trying to make it, strive up, to get off the street and to find a warm place, and you have somebody that actually wants to kick ‘em out of a stable community and put ‘em back on the street, have a problem. Trucker: I’m homeless because of the trucking situation, because of the fuel situation, because I’m competing with every ex-fisherman for fisherman jobs that they didn’t want before the fuel prices went up. Do you think I actually want to sleep with the idea of getting arrested, or pulled over by a van saying I’m causing the city trouble? You can’t loiter downtown, you’ll get arrested. You can’t walk around anywhere, you can’t be anywhere, and the shelters are full up. I’ve sat at the Josephinium [a nightly shelter screening site] with 50 people one night, waiting for one bed. You see I’m not out here to be a pain in the mayor, but the mayor’s decisions are a pain to me. Tex: I lost everything in a house fire. How am I supposed to, you know—I barely make a living on social security. I can’t afford income, you know, for a house. Man in purple: Where are all the job training programs? Man in brown: [It’s hard] to get a start from where you can’t even find the starting line. Burien: Mayor! Could you bring somebody down to give us affordable housing, that we can afford . . . and that way we can see what you’re saying is really true. This is the elephant in the room. It fell to the homeless, themselves, to do what months of television coverage had not: call for a serious discussion of affordable housing.

Revisiting the Work The balance of this paper revisits the Homeless Project from the perspective of ethical engagement. It begins introducing ethical frames through which to assess the research. While these appear to ratify the ethics of the study, a series of more troubling questions complicate this analysis.

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Ethical Frameworks Professional codes. To begin an exploration of research ethics, this section introduces two professional codes along with the work of critical theorist and activist Edward Said on socially engaged scholarship and the role of the public intellectual. Alan Davies (2007) notes that with an increase in research addressing public concerns has come an “upsurge in interest in professional ethics” (p. 122). Codes and declarations work to perform the professionalization of our institutions and work. While considered unrealistic by some, and creating a tension between the group and the individual by others, codes nonetheless attempt to speak to the issues addressed here. For the purposes of this discussion two of these are particularly relevant: The BAAL Recommendations on Good Practice in Applied Linguistics (British Association of Applied Linguistics, 1994/2006), which speaks directly to our profession, and the Wingspread Declaration on Renewing the Civic Mission of the American Research University (Boyte & Hollander, 1999), which particularly addresses public scholarship. The latter is named for a Frank Lloyd Wright building that housed a 1998 conference of university administrators and faculty, along with members of professional associations, private foundations, and civic organizations. The document describes the meeting: The purpose of the conference was to formulate strategies for renewing the civic mission of the research university, both by preparing students for responsible citizenship in a diverse democracy and also by engaging faculty members to develop and utilize knowledge for the improvement of society [emphasis added]. In fact, “democracy” is prominently featured in both codes. For BAAL: In a changing climate of teaching and research, its suggestions are intended to help applied linguists to maintain high standards and to respond flexibly to new opportunities, acting in the spirit of good equal opportunities practice and showing due respect to all participants, to the values of truth, fairness and open democracy, and to the integrity of applied linguistics as a body of knowledge and mode of inquiry [emphasis added]. And the Wingspread Declaration expands: A more fundamental task is to renew our great mission as agents of democracy. . . . How to renew throughout our institutional life and cultures a robust sense that our work contributes to the commonwealth of our communities, our nation and the world [emphasis added]?

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Although a more fulsome analysis is beyond the scope of this paper, it may be worth noting that these codes were originally developed in the 1990s during the ascendance of neoliberalism and a growing perception of its threats to the academic enterprise and to democracy itself. In that context, both documents make space for public scholarship. Said and the Wingspread Declaration advocate such scholarship, BAAL provides guidelines for it. The BAAL recommendations detail responsibilities to a variety of stakeholders, including the profession of applied linguistics itself. Because “civic engagement is essential to a democratic society,” the Wingspread Declaration enumerates “strategies for renewing the civic mission of the American research university.” Among those relevant to the homeless project are the following (emphases added): •

•

•

Faculty members have opportunities and rewards for socially engaged scholarship through genuine civic partnerships, based on respect and recognition of different ways of knowing and different kinds of contributions, in which expertise is “on tap, not on top.” Faculties’ professional service is conceived of and valued as public work in which disciplinary and professional knowledge and expertise contributes to the welfare of society, and also can occasion the public work of many other citizens. The university similarly creates structures that generate a more porous and interactive flow of knowledge between university and communities.

Viewed through the BAAL and Wingspread codes, the Homeless Project can be taken as an ethical attempt at public scholarship. In BAAL terms, we believed we had respond[ed] flexibly to new opportunities, acting in the spirit of good equal opportunities practice and showing due respect to all participants, to the values of truth, fairness and open democracy, and to the integrity of applied linguistics as a body of knowledge and mode of inquiry. In the terms of the Wingspread Declaration, we had engaged in “socially engaged scholarship” within a “civic partnership,” using “professional knowledge and expertise [to] contribute to the welfare of society.” We had attempted a “porous and interactive flow of knowledge between university and communities.” Edward Said. Said’s career explored and exemplified the role of the academic and political responsibility. Within the frame of “othering,” his is a perspective that underlies a good deal of current scholarship on hegemonic power and inequality and as such is particularly relevant to this discussion. Using the frames of ethical and humanistic values, Said (1994) addressed the role of the intellectual in his 1993 Reith Lectures, published as Representations of the Intellectual. Reading across theorists from Gramsci to Mills along with literary figures,

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Said argues that the role of the intellectual is to resist the naturalized discourses of the media and government, to advocate for the dispossessed through universal values of freedom and justice. I am often uncomfortable with the term public intellectual (preferring public scholarship) given the self-congratulatory mantle taken up by some who self-identify with the role. But it is in Said’s discussion of the “intellectual vocation” (p. 23) that we can find discussions of the role of those who have the ability and responsibility to speak truth to power. And this is one ethical frame for the questions raised below. Particularly useful for this discussion is Said’s reading of the American sociologist C. Wright Mills. Here is Said ventriloquizing and annotating Mills: Intellectuals are of their time, herded along by the mass politics of representations embodied by the information or media industry, capable of resisting those only by disputing the images, official narratives, justifications of power circulated by an increasingly powerful media . . . that maintain the status quo . . . by providing what Mills calls unmaskings or alternative versions in which to the best of one’s ability the intellectual tries to tell the truth. . . . There is an inherent discrepancy between the powers of large organizations, from governments to corporations, and the relative weakness . . . of human beings considered to have subaltern status. . . . the intellectual belongs on the same side with the weak and unrepresented. . . . This is not always a matter of being a critic of government policy, but rather of thinking of the intellectual vocation as maintaining a state of constant alertness, of a perpetual willingness to not let half-truths or received ideas steer one along [all but the first emphasis added]. (pp. 21–23) This is not mindless advocacy or antigovernmentism. For Said, intellectual work involves “steady realism” and “an almost athletic rational energy” (p. 23). The public scholarship of the Homeless Project conformed well to the Mills description. It worked to dispute the images, official narratives, and justifications circulating at the time, representations that had been working quite successfully it seemed to maintain a status quo that demonized a subaltern homeless population and justified removing them from self-organized communities. Our praxis was also consistent with Said’s perspective. For Said, the public intellectual, propelled by commitments to ethical ideals, stands outside social institutions while doing work that is intimately relevant to society. Similarly, propelled by a deep commitment to social equity and justice, and specifically a desire to respond to the needs of the poor and homeless, we stood outside the institutions of the media, local government, and law enforcement, and in some ways even the university, operating as we did during the summer as an informal group. Finally, one might gauge our success in terms of whether the scholarship did indeed advance what Said saw as the universal values of freedom and justice.

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Put more simply: Did the report of the Homeless Project have an effect? As part of an overall campaign of push back, certainly so. A year later, Mayor Greg Nickels, after whom the tent city “Nickelsville” had been named, was defeated in the primary election in his bid for a third term as mayor. The appellation of Nickelsville was widely seen as part of his fall from the public’s grace. In stark contrast to Nickels’s aggressive attack on the homeless community, his successors have regularly attended the yearly fund-raising breakfasts hosted by the homeless advocacy community, Real Change. It is now hard to imagine a mayor electing not to attend. Real Change Executive Director Tim Harris (M. S. Brown, personal communication, May 13, 2013) regards the release of our report as the turning point of the antisweeps campaign, putting the city on notice even now that it has to be careful with the claims made in its press releases; he continues to quote the report. There were also powerful personal consequences and tributes. Shortly after the release of our report we received a rather poignant letter from a minister whose church had hosted the Nickelsville encampment, which read, in part: Despite our best attempts . . . to share the necessity and humanity of the community created by the encampment, that side was rarely if ever told [by] the media. . . . Thanks to your report, I understand some of the context around the . . . reporting . . . and the frames that were used to side with the city’s agenda. . . . I am personally very grateful for your team’s work [and] am planning on sharing the report with the board of our church. I believe the report has also been cited at public health conferences. One is tempted to say that “by all accounts” this was a highly successful example of public scholarship. But are these truly all? Are there other possible accounts, especially in the context of extending our understanding of research ethics? Below is a series of additional questions one could ask of this work.

Ethical Questions: Troubling the Work In probing the ethics of activist scholarship, I came to ask a series of more troubling questions, most resisting easy answers. And while the professional guidelines will provide important touchstones, we shall see that they are far from a blueprint for ethical practice. 1. Does advocacy undermine scholarly ethics? Is it a problem that we had such a strong leaning in advance? This is the most typical criticism leveled at advocacy research and is accordingly important to address. Invoking a historical context, the Wingspread Declaration connects socially engaged work to an earlier understanding of the role of the academy: “Whereas universities

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were once centrally involved in ‘education for democracy’ and ‘knowledge for society,’ today’s institutions have often drifted away from their civic mission.” In this view, public engagement requires no explanation. But it is fair to query the potential impact of scholarly advocacy on scholarly ethics. One category of response concerns methodology. Not entirely unknown to CDA and some other forms of qualitative research is the issue of beginning with an agenda. Our sympathies lay with the homeless, not with the mayor or the wealthy. This concern recalls Widdowson’s (1998) caution that CDA can be liable to “careful selection and partial interpretation” (p. 146). To some extent, it also references the decades-long debates between quantitative and qualitative research, the former laying claim to scientific objectivity. The response to that claim, the critique of positivist “neutral” science, has been well established: All research is deeply informed by the ontological and epistemological assumptions and stakes that underlie it. Our research was particularly transparent in that regard. It is difficult to imagine doing the kind of work reported here within another epistemological framework; axiomatic to CDA are the oft-cited Fairclough and Wodak (1997) tenets, which well describe the research presented here: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

CDA addresses social problems. Power relations are discursive. Discourse constitutes society and culture. Discourse does ideological work. Discourse is historical. The link between text and society is mediated. Discourse analysis is interpretative and explanatory. Discourse is a form of social action (pp. 271–280).

I and my colleagues understood the “interested” nature of knowledge (Pennycook, 1989). One finding was indeed to unmask the interests of those who fronted purported health risks as the major issue of the encampments. While acknowledging “interest,” there remains the necessity to confirm the integrity of the research itself. As with any ethical investigation, the trajectory of the research and its final shape were independent of its sponsors. Consistent with BAAL’s caution, we sought to “avoid uncritically partisan alignment with any one interest group.” Most important, at all times the data led. For example, I had expected to find an unqualified and unending media assault on the homeless, but I discovered that by May even Fox was willing to admit, “while many neighbors are glad to see a start to the clean up here, they’re very aware that homelessness can’t be bulldozed away.” Similarly, I expected homeless advocates to be virtually absent from media coverage. This turned out not to be the case. But homeless advocates were called on only to respond to the city’s claims, not to advance an alternate perspective, and the television images of filthy encampments that accompanied

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the voices of advocates worked in the service of the mayor’s agenda. Disputes with the city about whether there were enough beds in shelters (coverage that included advocates’ input) were a far cry from discussions about affordable housing. Taking control of the issues raised and the images proffered would be quite different. In the end, however, I regard many concerns about advocacy as misdirected. Much of my research on war and terrorism (e.g., Silberstein, 2004), for example, focuses not on whether the media contribute to particular ideological projects, but rather on how that is accomplished. In like manner, we began with an understanding that there was a media assault on the homeless. The research then explored how this assault functioned, understanding the work done by particular language and images. My own yardstick has been to hope that both parties in an ideological conflict might agree on a media analysis, and continue to disagree about whether the discourse is justified. I am a good deal more concerned about the remaining questions. 2. What responsibilities did we have to circulate our research beyond the academy? Having conducted the research at the behest of an activist community, what responsibilities did we have for its circulation, that is, to become, at least in that way, activists ourselves? We posted the report on Gail Stygall’s website, where it received more than 500 hits and more than 100 downloads. It was released at a rally that launched an overnight campout at City Hall, seeming to conform to BAAL’s observation that “the form and timing of publication is sometimes negotiated with informants and/or sponsors” and that “wherever possible, final project reports should be made available in an accessible form.” But Said’s intellectuals address their concerns to as wide a public as possible. And the Wingspread Declaration puts a great deal of responsibility on academic institutions: The university similarly creates structures that generate a more porous and interactive flow of knowledge between university and communities. These aim at making the university’s knowledge more accessible to communities, and constantly informing the university’s scholarship with experiences, knowledge and public issues that arise from the life of communities. Such structures might include public forums co-created with university partners that enliven public cultures and conversations in locales; infrastructures for support for public scholarship based on a partnership model between university and community and civic groups; and efforts to disseminate exciting scholarship and findings. In fact, there were none of these. We did not actively circulate the results in the public sphere. As public scholars, did we have responsibilities to do more? To publish editorials? To gain media coverage ourselves? To create joint events with the community? Essentially, to do more than create a resume piece?

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3. What responsibilities did we have to circulate our research within the academy? What responsibilities did we have to our graduate students? When I was invited to do a featured colloquium at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) 2011 conference, I asked Gail Stygall to cochair and brought most of our group to Chicago. Similarly, I organized a colloquium on campus. The work went no further, although it might have made an interesting methodology volume, as most papers exemplified a particular approach to discourse or rhetorical analysis. And, in many ways, it would work well as an instructive example of public scholarship. But we were all oversubscribed, and we didn’t “need” the publication. That is, none of us needed it, except the graduate students. The codes are clear on our responsibilities to students. Wingspread: A core element in the mission of a research university is to prepare students for engaged citizenship through multiple opportunities to do the work of citizenship. Such work involves real projects of impact and relevance, through which students learn the skills, develop the habits and identities, and acquire the knowledge to contribute to the general welfare. And the BAAL recommendations remind the applied linguist to “be alert to issues arising from inequalities of power between teachers and students.” Arguably, we did provide valuable training and skills to the students brought onto the project by my colleagues. But if we had found the energy, how might the project of publication have aided our students’ professionalization and careers? Did we, then, let them down? As well, I don’t find time to publish every piece of research that I deliver at conferences and circulate among colleagues. Does one let down the profession by not publishing essentially completed research? 4. What responsibilities do we have to continue to work on social issues that we research? Is it enough to be a tourist in the areas we research? Since this experience, I have occasionally attended fundraising breakfasts for the homeless (surrounded by self-congratulatory wealthy donors). Whether or not I breakfast, I now donate (quite modestly) to Real Change, and my daughter sometimes illustrates the book reviews for the newspaper. In other arenas of human rights, I publish on the issues and actively work in the community. Having done this public scholarship, is it enough to be the most minimal fellow traveler in homeless advocacy? 5. What was our relationship with the community? What does it mean that a brilliant group of homeless political activists might have been able to do a great deal of what we did, but they didn’t have the credentials? I find this perhaps most troubling. Implicit in the community’s request for a media analysis was their knowledge of where the problems lay and what was at work discursively, despite having neither the vocabulary and tools, nor the credentials we did (and certainly not a room of their own). The documents we were given demonstrated a powerful prior analysis on the part of the

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community. Its public information request to the city produced drafts, interoffice memos, and emails of the city’s public relations campaign on the homeless encampments, which enabled Anis Bawarshi’s skillful account of argument development. One could simply be impressed and wonder what members of the Real Change community could have done with credentials and training. But there are troubling implications of that kind of thinking. As Pennycook (1989) phrases it, “The knowledge produced in the central academic institutions is legitimated through a series of political relationships that privilege it over other possible forms of knowledge” (p. 596). It wasn’t only our credentials then that had led the community to us; it was the valorizing of academic ways of knowing. I discovered the powerful voices and analyses of the community when I uncovered their own YouTube contributions and included those in my analysis. But am I complicit in reproducing these unequal power relations by participating as “an academic” without real consultation with those I wrote about? Had we indeed followed the Wingspread Declaration to be “on tap, not on top”? Was the civic partnership “based on respect and recognition of different ways of knowing”? In BAAL terms, had we truly “acted in the spirit of good equal opportunities of practice showing due respect to all participants”? Had we responded to BAAL’s observation, “In consultancy and in participatory or action research, the ideas and perceptions of informants and sponsors can be given as much weight as those of academic colleagues”? And, in the end, how does one operationalize such guidelines? While the Wingspread Declaration and BAAL serve as important touchstones, they go only so far, and don’t respond to the most vexing ethical dilemmas, as we shall see in the final question, below. One helpful response to differentiations in power is provided by Said. Said (1993) asks that the cultural archive be read “not univocally but contrapuntally” (emphasis in original), as in music, privileging not a single strain (with others suppressed) but rather creating together an “organized interplay” (p. 51). Said’s well-known critique of imperialism needs only slight refocusing here to talk about power and resistance of the homeless: “The point is that contrapuntal reading must take account of both processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it” (p. 66). Within our commission, could or should we have created a more contrapuntal reading with the homeless community, simultaneously surfacing the agency, resistance, and power of the homeless and our own privilege and positionality? Arguably we were part of the inequality we reported. If our work had been more rooted in relationships and conversations with the homeless community, could we have more effectively disturbed and destabilized the systemic inequalities we reported? 6. What does it signify that there remain homeless tent cities while I was privileged to attend AILA in Australia to talk about them? This is not a comfortable contrast. Does activist scholarship by its nature lead one to benefit from writing about the misery of others? Minimally, one has the

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responsibility to combat Dillon’s miserification. In that spirit, in my research I work against reinscribing a narrative of victimhood for those who bear the burden of an inequitable society; I try to acknowledge the agency and power of those I write about. But structural hierarchies cannot be written away. And professional guidelines provide little help here. We all live daily with contradictions that manifest themselves in our work as they do in our lives. Acknowledging those contradictions is a necessary first step toward ethical practice. As illustrated here, not all uncomfortable contexts have comfortable and compact responses.

Conclusion: Beginning a Praxis of Questioning The goal of this paper has been both to urge colleagues toward what I see as an ethical imperative to public scholarship while at the same time to raise uncomfortable questions about my own work. When one lives in a profoundly inequitable society, there are no simple solutions to its inherent ethical dilemmas. While this paper engages the genre of professional codes, demonstrating their utility, it also destabilizes the genre. The codes provide important categories of concern, but ethical engagement does not entirely translate into bulleted, often procedural, solutions. Asking researchers, for example, to be “on tap, not on top” (Wingspread) is valuable, but a far cry from indicating how that might be genuinely accomplished, and from responding to more vexing issues of privilege, such as those raised in Question 6. But one should not despair at a lack of answers. What I am arguing finally is that it is the very questions themselves, rather than the guidelines that move us forward. In the spirit of Said’s “constant alertness,” an ethics of activist scholarship requires a praxis of constant questioning. That is what we have begun here.

References Bakhtin, M. M. (1953/1986). The problem of speech genres. In C. Emerson & M. Holquist (Eds.), Speech genres and other later essays (V. W. McGee, Trans., pp. 60–102). Austin: University of Texas Press. Boyte, H., & Hollander, E. (1999). Wingspread declaration on renewing the civic mission of the American research university. Retrieved from http://www.compact.org/initiatives/trucen/ wingspread-declaration-on-the-civic-responsibilities-of-research-universities/. British Association of Applied Linguistics. (2006). Recommendations on good practices in applied linguistics. (Original work published 1994). Retrieved from http://www.baal. org.uk/dox/goodpratice_full.pdf. Davies, A. (2007). An introduction to applied linguistics: From practice to theory (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fairclough, N. L., & Wodak, R. (1997). Critical discourse analysis. In T. A. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse studies: A multidisciplinary introduction: Vol. 2. Discourse as social interaction (pp. 258–284). London: Sage Publications. Giroux, H. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning. Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey.

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Giroux, H. (2006). The Giroux reader (C. G. Robbins, Ed.). Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Pennycook, A. (1989). The concept of method interested knowledge, and the politics of language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 23(4), 589–618. Said, E. W. (1993). Culture and imperialism. New York: Vintage. Said, E. W. (1994). Representations of the intellectual: The 1993 Reith lectures. New York: Vintage. Silberstein, S. (2004). War of words: Language, politics and 9/11. London: Routledge. Tannen, D. (2009, January). Abduction, dialogicality and prior text: The taking on of voices in conversational discourse. Plenary address delivered at the 84th annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Baltimore, MD. Retrieved from http://faculty.george town.edu/tannend/lsa%20plenary%20written%20version.pdf. Widdowson, H. G. (1998). The theory and practice of critical discourse analysis. Applied Linguistics, 19 (1), 136–151.

Media Data Bounds, D. (Presenter), & Hahn, E. (Reporter). (2008, September 23). KING 5 News. Retrieved from http://www.king5.com/video/index.html?nvid=285443. Callahan, B. (Presenter). (2008, May 28). Clearing out homeless camps, Q13 Fox News. Retrieved from http://www.q13fox.com/pages/main. Dardis, M., & Thompson, C. (Presenters), & Murcia, R. (Reporter). (2008, May 28). Seattle cleans out homeless camp in greenbelt [video]. KOMO News. Retrieved from http://www.komonews.com/news/local/19323904.html?tab=video&c=y. Harris, T., & Smith, R. (2008, October 26). The mayor lies. Nickelsville talks truth. [YouTube video under Nickelsville talks back to Mayor Nickels.] Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjDk2YkMSj0. KING Staff. (2008, September 22). “Nickelsville” homeless camp springs up in South Seattle. KING5 News. Retrieved from http://www.king5.com/topstories/stories/ NW_092208WAB_nickelsville_homeless_camp_LJ.a04c1daa.html#. Legeros, C. (Presenter), & Millman, M. (Reporter). (2008, September 22). Homeless hope move will be last [video]. KIRO TV News. Retrieved from http://www.kirotv. com/videos/news/video-homeless-hope-move-will-be-last/vCfh7/. Millman, M. (Reporter). (2008, May 28). Crews clean up garbage, debris from camp [video]. KIRO TV News. Retrieved from http://www.kirotv.com/videos/news/ video-crews-clean-up-garbage-debris-from-camp/vCd3n/.// Wilkinson, E. (2007, December 19). City defends practice of tearing down homeless camps. KING 5 News. Retrieved from http://www.king5.com/localnews/stories/ NW_121907WAB_homeless_camps_KS.314d3f6d.html.

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AFTERWORD

The chapter narratives of the researchers who have experienced ethical dilemmas, identified them as such, and determined how to resolve them prior to, during, and even after their research procedure is completed lead me to several questions and comments. I’ll list them here and discuss each briefly. What is the relationship between good research and ethical research? This volume amply shows that we cannot consider research good unless it is also ethical. But is ethical research necessarily good research? No. Sterling, Winke, and Gass remind us that while the two are inextricably related, they are not the same. In our concern that our research be ethical, we should not, at the same time, forget our standards for good research. We should not, for example, choose our research “simply” because it is a type that is easier than other types for gaining institutional review board (IRB) approval. Abdi’s narrative of her transnational research project (see the Duff and Abdi chapter) made clear how challenging and timeconsuming it was for her to request and receive IRB approval when a number of research sites were involved, requests needed to be made as the research unfolded, cultural differences were at play, factors led to the impossibility of video recording, etc. These challenges led Abdi to voice concern that such difficulties might lead applied linguists to shape their research by avoiding aspects (such as those Abdi listed) that could slow down or make difficult their approval process. Of course, as Abdi points out, this should be a matter of concern because needed research areas and questions will not thus be addressed. Clearly, good research and ethical research must both be covered in any research training we offer. What role and amount of time each is given will depend of course on the other curricular needs of the graduate students in their particular program. However, if the students are undertaking a research project for the research class or another class they are taking, that presents a good opportunity for the students to submit

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their projects for IRB approval. (If they will be presenting their findings outside of the class, many universities in any event require that they obtain approval.) Learning about the process and guidelines for conducting institution-approved ethical research can go hand in hand with the preparation of the proposal for approval. Again, depending on curricular needs and constraints, this focus on learning about ethical research as approved by the institution could be addressed as a section of a semester-long research methods course. Other than this section, such a course would primarily train students in what (albeit related) good research is. Hopefully, there would be curricular time and space for additional research courses that would offer training in particular paradigms, and that included both good research and ethical research focuses. What role should be given to the research paradigm in ethics training? This question directly relates to the relationship between good and ethical that I’ve just mentioned. What ethical responsibilities come with one paradigm—or approach—but not others? I’m reminded of the qualitative versus quantitative research ethics issue addressed in the Paltridge chapter, as well as Silberstein’s narrative that clearly shows not only sensitivity to the qualitative paradigm, but to particular “ethical frames” that come with specific approaches such as activist research. In the Paltridge narrative, the question of when and whether to label data as “outliers” depended on whether generalizability of the data was important. But this, in turn, as Paltridge points out, is dependent on the particular research paradigm—quantitative or qualitative—that one is following. The qualitative research paradigm does not seek generalizability as the quantitative paradigm does. Thus, it is only the quantitative paradigm that concerns itself with possible outliers. In the critical and activist-driven type of qualitative research that Silberstein conducted, its “ethical frames” meant that her researcher role was one of advocacy, from the beginning, for the underprivileged participants involved (in her research, the homeless). Moreover, it was important that any scholarship derived from the research be publicized to the community and outside, rather than staying within the academic community. And finally, also concerning ethics training, are we leaving sufficient space in our research training curriculum for all the important ethical issues one may encounter? The results of the Sterling et al. study suggest that we aren’t but need to. We’re reminded in many of the chapters (to name just a few, Canagarajah, Copland and Creese, Starfield) of the complex, micro- and macrolevel nature of many ethical dilemmas. Though Canagarajah received from the IRB a broad scope of approval for collecting data, there were a number of more microlevel ethical issues that arose for him, such as whether it was ethical for him to collect his student participants’ private email messages even when they gave their approval. For Copland and Creese, like Canagarajah, the ethical macrolevel represented the generally stated ethical procedures and approval process of the institution. When Copland, who was researching a training session, observed an emotional outburst between a trainer and a trainee, she was faced with the

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microlevel ethical issue of whether to include that data in her research (she chose not to). The macrolevel ethical issue that surrounded the international students who came to the university learning center that Starfield worked in concerned Australia’s decision to recruit many of them and their fellow countrymen. International student tuition was far higher than for local Australians, and as such, provided needed income for cash-strapped universities. This recruitment led, as Starfield shows, to microlevel ethical issues, as many of the recruited international students were not supplied with needed resources, such as language assistance, required for their success at the university. Devoting attention in our training to the macrolevel ethical realm (most commonly, the IRB procedures) might leave us with insufficient training time to address ethics at the equally important microlevel realm that many of the authors have so vividly narrated. Perhaps we need to start thinking beyond the conventional graduate research curriculum, as the reality is, we cannot simply, for all sorts of reasons, add more courses or remove others. Perhaps we could provide ethics training through more diverse means, outside as well as inside the curriculum. For example, students and faculty could learn from each other’s research experience by starting a regular research Stammtisch; that is, following what many language learners do when they meet out of class at a particular social venue in order to practice their language. At lunchtime, there could be brown-bag (i.e., bring your lunch) sessions at which students and faculty are encouraged to bring up, seek advice for, or provide help in resolving an ongoing research dilemma. Of course, attention to research ethics need not, these days, only involve face-to-face events. There are certainly a number of ways in which technology could also be used to develop the awareness, the sensitivity, the knowledge, and the skills necessary to become the kind of ethical researcher, engaged in ethical research, that this volume has provided us so many models of. Jane Zuengler

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INDEX

AAA see American Anthropology Association (AAA) AAAL see American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) AAVE see African American Vernacular English (AAVE) academic integrity 123 activist scholarship ethics 218–35; colonization, effects on 148; framework for 227–30; at work 230–5 activist scholarship research 218–19; findings on 219–26 adult-adolescent relationships 107–10 advocacy 69–70 AERA see American Educational Research Association (AERA) AERA Code of Ethics 123 African American Vernacular English (AAVE) 214 “After Reflection” 42 agency 157, 207, 211, 235; Australian aid 88; colonization and 144, 157; decision making and 148; homelessness and 234; respect of 195; in social life 131; through participatory engagement 155; Yugtun and 152 AL see applied linguistics (AL) Alaska, legacy of colonization in 155 Alaska Native Education through Computer Assisted Language Learning (ANE CALL) 142, 144, 147–50, 152 Alaska Native Language Center 151

Alaska Native Language Preservation and Advisory Council 152 Alaska Native Language Program 149 Alcoholics Anonymous 215 AL ethics 1–9; brief history of 2; from continuum perspective 3–5 (see also research ethics); interdisciplinary approach to 2–3; language researcher narratives and 5–9; reflexive approach to 2–3 Alutiiq Museum 151 American Anthropology Association (AAA) 123 American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) 1, 233 American Educational Research Association (AERA) 2, 123 American flag 224–5 American Psychological Association (APA) 31, 123 American women in UK 115–17 ANE CALL see Alaska Native Education through Computer Assisted Language Learning (ANE CALL) animal resources 17, 21 anonymity for humans 104–5 anthropology 122–3; ethnographic research and 126; linguistic 161; reflexivity and 103; research ethics and 16 APA see American Psychological Association (APA)

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Index

applied linguistics (AL) 5, 15; communication and 84; concerns within 142; ethnographic research in 121; integrity of 227–8; see also AL ethics approval for using video 134–5 argument theory 219 “Asia’s parents suffering ‘education fever’ ” (Sharma) 54, 62 assent 68, 71, 126, 134–5 audio-based online research 184 authorship 5, 17, 23–7, 32–3 autoethnographic research 129 BAAL Recommendations on Good Practice in Applied Linguistics (British Association of Applied Linguistics) 227–8, 232–4 behavioral research ethics board (BREB) 124–5, 128–31, 134–6 beneficence 123, 162, 195–6 BREB see behavioral research ethics board (BREB) British Airways 112 British Association for Applied Linguistics’ Recommendations on Good Practice in Applied Linguistics 4 British women in United States 115–17 CAF measures 74 CASAS 73 CDA see critical discourse analysis (CDA) CELTA see Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA) program Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA) program 166 citizens 54, 85, 87, 183, 219, 225 clarification requests 44–5 classroom: ethnography in 8, 202–3, 215; immigrant research ethical dilemmas studied in 71–3; LFS in 71–3; as safe houses 197–200; underlife in 199 CMC see computer-mediated communication (CMC) codes: ethics of AERA 123; of integrity 123; meshing of 214; of research ethics, professional 227; switching 203 CofPs see communities of practice (CofPs) collaboration 17, 23–4, 26, 28–9, 32–3 collaborative science 17, 23–4, 26, 28–9, 32–3 colonization 148–9, 157–8; academic scholarship, effects on 148; agency

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and 144, 157; Alaska, legacy of 155; Indigenous 155 communication: AL and 84; computermediated 182; creative tension and 165; cross-linguistic 35; identity in academic 214; in-group 203–4; intercultural, failures of 143; on Internet 181–2; language planning for resolving difficulties with 87; mass 185; technology for 182 communicative competence 74–5 communities: decision making in 143, 150; immigrant 70; relationships within 233–4; representatives in 94–6 communities of practice (CofPs) 106–8, 111 computer-mediated communication (CMC) 182 confederates 90–1 conflicts: of interest 17, 23, 32; mitigation of 92; resolution of 88; of time 27, 32 consent 126, 128–32; forms for 186; informed 70–1, 185–7; video, for using 134–5 constant alertness 235 constitution 90 constructed agendas 212 contact zones, value of 199 contested language problems 85–6 contingency-based research 213 control macro ethics 162–4 creative tension 165 critical discourse analysis (CDA) 183, 219, 231 cross-linguistic communication 35 cultural justice 92 cultures and multilingual ethnography 122–3 curriculum decision making 154 Daedalus 203, 205 data: in doctoral writing for visual and performing arts 41–3; elicited 182; ethical issues with selection of 38–48; exclusion of 40–1; inclusion of 40–1; Internet, collection on 183; lessons learned and sources of 73–7; management of 17, 23–4, 26, 29–30, 32; online 185–6; outlier 38–42, 238; in peer-reviewed journals 43–5; quantitative 110–11 decision making: agency and 148; in communities 143, 150; curriculum

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154; in democracies 91; ethical 175–6; ethics of care and 196; executive 96; internal 78; LP and 87; participatory 98; reflexivity and 7, 165; virtue ethics and 196 Declaration of Geneva 83 Decolonizing Methodologies (Smith) 157 deliberation conferencing 87–92 democracies 91, 227; decision making in 91; discursive 87; diverse 227; open 227 democratic dimension of linguistic ethnography 162 deprivation, domains of 106 Diaspora, Indigenous and Migrant Education 2 digital space 200 directions 44–6, 69, 128 discursive democracy 87 discussion organizing 89 diverse democracies 227 diversification of diversity 104 diversity: in democracies 227; diversification of 104; epistemological 18; ethnic 106; identity and 172; linguistic 77; within/outside the team 172 doctoral writing 41–3 double foreignness 115 EAs see educational assistants (EAs) Ebola outbreak 222 education: ethnographic research in 121, 127; higher 54–6; multilingual ethnographic studies in 121–40; neoliberalism and, global impact on 56; safe houses, macroethical implications for 202; students with limited or interrupted formal 6, 66; Yup’ikmedium 7, 142–4 educational assistants (EAs) 72 Education Services for Overseas Students (ESOS) Act 56 elicited data 182 engaged research 69–70 English and neoliberalism, association between 56 English for Specific Purposes 43 epistemological diversity 18 ethical behavior 16, 33 ethical decision making 175–6 ethical dilemmas 83–99, 124, 163, 169–70; deliberation conferencing 87–92; ethical quandaries in 85–6, 92–5; in expert advising 97–8; with high-stakes

language proficiency testing 59–62; Hippocratic Oath 83–5; in ideology 95–7; with IELTS 61–2; on information 95–7; on interests 95–7; with Internetbased applied linguistics research 187–8; in Internet-based research 215; in safe houses 209–10, 209–15, 215; on settings 86–7; see also immigrant research ethical dilemmas ethical frames 226, 238 ethically important moments 68–9, 168 ethical quandaries 85–6, 92–5 ethical training 5, 9, 15–16, 22, 238–9 ethical vision of responsibility 63 ethics: activist scholarship 218–35; advocacy and 230–1; AL 1–9; codification of 163; of ethnography 122; Indigenous language research, issues within 142–58; IRB, reliance on guidance of 30; linguistic ethnography and 165; in practice 18; procedural 18, 33; qualitative research 39–40; quotidian 53–63; reflexivity and, link between 122; in SLA 121; virtue 163, 196; see also specific types of ethics creep 163 ethics of care 4–5, 69, 163, 196 ethics research 33; as good research 237–8; in multilingual ethnography 121–40; negotiating protocols for 131–2; negotiation of 121–2; public scholarship and 218; see also research ethics ethnical representation 171 ethnic diversity 106 ethnographic fieldwork 124 ethnographic research 124; adultadolescent relationships in 107–10; in AL 121; anthology on 122; anthropology and 126; in education 121, 127; ethics in 122–3; interdisciplinary 126; on language ideologies 124–5 ethnography: classroom 8, 202–3, 215; essentials of 122; ethics of 122; online 182–3; qualitative research and 128; representation, as key dimension of 170–1; see also ethnographic research; linguistic ethnography; multilingual ethnography examination, concept of 164 executive decision making 96 expectations checking 90

Index

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expert advising 97–8 experts 96–7 fairness 16, 123, 215, 227, 228 family resemblance 43 fidelity 123 foreign dialect 115 Foucauldian genealogical analysis 219 fractal recursivity 111 functional safe houses 211 General Assembly 83 generalizability 6, 38, 47, 104, 238 “Girl from Ipanema, The” 42 Girl Scouts 224 good research 43, 46, 237–8 Google 190 Grattan Institute 56 Great Depression 225 greater good 4, 167 group identification 154–5 “Guidelines for Ethical Research in ESL” 2 guilty knowledge 18–19 Handbook of Ethnography 122 hidden curriculum 201 higher education 54–6 high-quality thesis 43 high-stakes language proficiency testing 59–62 Hippocratic Oath (horkos) 98, 105; ethical dilemmas 83–5; history of 83; modernization of 83–4 homeless: advocates for 223–4; agency and 234; saving the 220–2; structural solutions for 225–6; television coverage of sweeps of 222; tent cities for 220–3, 234–5; voices of the 225–6 Homeless Coverage Study Group 218 Homeless Project 226, 228–30 Hoover, H. 224 Hoovervilles 224 House Bill 216 152 human anonymity 104–5 human protection 17, 23–4, 26, 29, 32 human rights and dignity 123 hybridities and agency 148–9 Hygeia 83 identity: in academic communication 214; of adult-adolescent relationships 107–10; background on 105–7; development of 198; diversity and 172; formation of

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125; Internet 185–7; phonetic variation and 105–11; of quantitative data 110–11; safe houses, development and 198–9; second dialect acquisition and 114–15; teacher 18–19; of wealthy 220 ideology 91, 95–7 IELTS see International English Language Testing System (IELTS) images in media 224–5 immigrant communities 70 immigrant research ethical dilemmas 66–80; advocacy in 69–70; classroom study 71–3; data sources in 70–1, 73–7; engaged research in 69–70; ethically important moments in 68–89; informed consent in 70–1; IRB in 71–3; SIFE in 70–1; subjectivity in 77–9 Index of Multiple Deprivation 106 Indigenous colonization 155 Indigenous language research 142–58; background on 143–4; Indigensous scholars and 151–4; insider-outsider dynamics and 154–7; joint knowledge production and 154–7; overview on 143–4; in revitalization projects 144–57; teachers as advocates for 149–51 Indigenous teachers and scholars 148–9 Indigensous scholars 151–4 individual identification 154–5 information 91, 95–7 information-based LP 98 informed consent 70–1, 185–7 infrapolitics 199 in-group, off-task student interaction 200 in-group communication 203–4 insider-outsider dynamics 154–7 Institute of International Education 53 institutional interstices 199–200 institutional research ethics 123 institutional review board (IRB) 2, 16, 23, 195–6, 202, 213, 237–8; approval of 33–4; “creeping” influence of 33; ethical guidance, reliance on 30; immigrant research ethical dilemmas and 71–3; SIFE’s role in helping 68; at University of Minnesota 71–2 integrity: academic 123; of AL 227–8; code of 123; constitution and 90; research 84, 231 intellectual, role of 228–9 intercultural communication 143 interdisciplinary ethnographic research 126

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interests 91, 95–7 internal decision making 78 International English Language Testing System (IELTS) 6, 59; academic performance and, association between 61; academic requirements based on 61; ethical dilemmas with 61–2; research on raising 59–60 Internet: communication on 181–2; identities on 185–7; methodological alternative, as appealing 182–4; research on 181, 215; text-based research on 182–7 Internet-based applied linguistics research 181, 187–8 interview-based social research 129 investigation 47, 96–7, 128, 131 IRB see institutional review board (IRB) I-thou research ethics 70 “ ‘I wish he hadn’t told me that’: Methodological and ethical issues in social trauma and conflict research” (Chaitin) 40 joint knowledge production 154–7 justice 92, 123, 195–6, 229 knowledge 239; academic 97; ethnological 162; guilty 18–19; investigation and 96; joint production of 154–7; theoretical 169; valued 105 L2 see second language (L2) learning LAN see local access network (LAN) languacultures 158 language: concept of 115; contested problems with 85–6; ideologies of 124–5; Indigenous research on 142–58; problem solving with 87; in university programs, choice of 144–8; see also language policy (LP) language-culture etiologies 144–8 Language Education and Social Cohesion (LESC) project 87–8 Language Learning 38–9 language-planning theory 87 language policy (LP) 84–5; communication, for resolving difficulties with 87; decision making and 87; general nature of 85; information-based 98; languageplanning theory utilized in 87; see also LP ethical dilemmas

language researcher narratives 5–9 Learning Centre 57–9 LESC see Language Education and Social Cohesion (LESC) project LESLLA see low-educated second language and literacy acquisition (LESLLA) Leto 83 LFS see limited formal schooling (LFS) Likert-scale 23, 31 limited formal schooling (LFS) 66; advocacy and 69–70; classroom study on 71–3; data sources on 70–1, 73–7; engaged research on 69–70; ethically important moments in 68–89; immigrants with 66–80; informed consent and 70–1; IRB and 71–3; SIFE and 70–1; subjectivity in 77–9 linguistic anthropology 161 linguistic diversity 77 linguistic ethnography: defined 161; democratic dimension of 162; ethics and 165; ethnical representation and 171; influences of 161; as research methodology 162; voice in team and 171–5; see also linguistic ethnography ethical issues linguistic ethnography ethical issues 161–76; macro ethics in 162–5; micro ethics in 162–5; reflexivity in considering 165–70 linguistics research, Internet-based applied 181, 187–8 LKSD see Lower Kuskokwim School District (LKSD) local access network (LAN) 8, 202 locus of enunciation 148–9 low-educated second language and literacy acquisition (LESLLA) 66 Lower Kuskokwim School District (LKSD) 145, 149 LP see language policy (LP) LP ethical dilemmas 83–99; deliberation conferencing 87–92; ethical quandaries in 85–6, 92–5; in expert advising 97–8; Hippocratic Oath and 83–5; ideology and 95–7; information and 95–7; interests and 95–7; settings and 86–7 macro ethics 162–4, 163, 164–5; of control 162–4; micro ethics and, differentiation between 4–5; of principles 196; of research, principles

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Index

of 69; respect for individuals, principle of 68; of sensitivity 162–4; of standardization 162–4 mass communication 185 May Queen Anne sweeps 220–3 media images 224–5 mediation 213–14 mentorship 5, 17, 23–4, 26–8, 32–3 meta-consensus 87 methodological rich points 5 Michigan State University 16 microethical moments 68–9 micro ethics 162–5; of care 168–9, 196–7; considerations for 163; on control 162–4; macro ethics and, differentiation between 4–5; priorities in 4; of procedure 92; on sensitivity 162–4; on standardization 162–4 micro hegemony 175 “Mirror as metasign: Contemporary culture as mirror world” (Haley) 41–2 miserification 219, 235 missionary activism 70 Modern Language Journal, The 2, 18, 121 Mogadishu on the Mississippi 70 moral dilemmas 169–70 motivation 210–12 multi-judgement systems 61 multilingual ethnography: changing discourses and 122–3; cultures and 122–3; ethical research in 121–40; video, consent and approval for using 134–5; working with acquaintances and family members and 132–4; see also research ethics multilingualism 172 multilingual socialization 127 NASA 220, 222 national dialect 112 national unity 88 Native Language Screening Device 76 Native Ways of Knowing seminar 148 needs analysis 201 neoliberalism: defined 54; education and, global impact on 56; English and, association between 56; higher education and 54–6; organized labor and 55; proponents of 54; transformation by 55; universities and, restructuring under 55–6 neoliberal university 54; quotidian ethics in 53–63; see also neoliberalism

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neutral observer 18 Nickelsville 224–5, 230 “Nickelsville Talks Back to Mayor Nickels” (Harris & Smith) 226 NNES see non-native English-speaking (NNES) NNSs see nonnative speakers (NNSs) nonmaleficence 123, 162 non-native dialect 115 non-native English-speaking (NNES) 63 nonnative speakers (NNSs) 17–18, 39 observation of participation 103–4 Office of Research Ethics and Integrity (OREI) 84 off-stage discourse 200 online data 185–6 online ethnography 182–3 online research 184–5 open democracies 227 oral history 205 OREI see Office of Research Ethics and Integrity (OREI) organized labor 55 ORI 21 outlier data 38–42, 238 Palestinian-Israeli conflict 40 Panacea 83 participant observation 103–4 participatory decision making 98 participatory engagement 155 partnership of equals 162 PE see Piciryramta Elincungallra: Teaching Our Way of Life Through Our Language (PE) peacebuilding 88, 92 peer review 5, 17, 23–4, 26, 28, 46 peer-reviewed journals 43–5 phonetic variation 105–11; adult-adolescent relationships 107–10; background on 105–7; quantitative data, implications for 110–11 Piciryramta Elincungallra : Teaching Our Way of Life Through Our Language (PE) 142, 144, 146–7, 150, 155–8 PLC see Professional Learning Community (PLC) policy positions, elements of 91, 95–7 political relationships 233–4 praxis of questioning 218 private email messages 205 problem solving 85, 87, 91

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procedural ethics 18, 33 Professional Learning Community (PLC) 71 professional responsibility 5, 23 “Protecting Cantonese Movement” 189 publication 17, 23–7, 32–3 public consumption 185 public intellectual 227, 229; see also public scholarship public officians 96–7 public safety 220–2 public scholarship 218 QE2 113 delete qualitative research 39–40, 128 quantitative data 110–11 Queen Anne Community Council 220 Queen Anne greenbelt 220–3 quotidian ethics 53–63; high-stakes language proficiency testing 59–62; Learning Centre 57–9; see also neoliberalism RCR see responsible conduct of research (RCR) Real Change 230, 233 REC see research ethics committees (REC) recommendations 44–5 reflexivity 104, 122; AL ethics, approach to 2–3; anthropology and 103; decision-making process using 7, 165, 175; of discomfort 78; ethics and, link between 122, 168; in ethnography 176; linguistic ethnography ethical issues, in considering 165–70; as methodology 165; representation and 171; researcherparticipant dynamics and 103–5 regional dialect 112 Reith Lectures 228 reject reviews 45 relationships between adult-adolescents 107–10 relationships within communities 233–4 representation 171 Representations of the Intellectual 228 representative community 94–6 research: academy, beyond/within 231–3; activist scholarship 218–19; autoethnographic 129; engaged 69–70; good 43, 46, 237–8; IELTS, on raising 59–60; Indigenous language 142–58; integrity 84, 231; interest and integrity of 231; Internet-based applied

linguistics 181, 187–8; linguistic ethnography as methodology for 162; macro ethics, principles of 69; methodological alternative to 184; models of 122; moral standards for 195; online 184–5; paradigm of 238; qualitative 128; on safe houses 202–9; on social issues 233; Web-based 190; see also research ethics research conduct 23–4, 26 researcher-participant dynamics 103–5 researcher positionalities and limits of subjectivity 77–9 research ethics 18, 24, 33, 35; anthropology and 16; as good research 237–8; important aspects of 136; institutional 123; I-thou 70; macroethical continuum and 4–5; microethical continuum and 4–5; for negotiating 124–7; negotiation of 121–2, 127–32, 136–7; practices surrounding 122–3; professional codes of 227; public scholarship and 218; qualitative 3, 39–40; quantitative 3; situated negotiation of 197; treatment of 122; see also research ethics; research ethics training research ethics committees (REC) 163 research ethics industry 163 research ethics training 15–35; literature review on 15–19; methods of 19–22; results of 23–31 research misconduct 17, 23, 30–2 resistance 198–9 respect 195; of agency 195; for human rights and dignity 123; for individuals 68 responsibility 5, 23, 123 responsible conduct of research (RCR) 16; domains of 16–17, 21–2, 32–4; effectiveness of 18; important issues in 17; procedural ethics of 25, 33 reverse interviews 73 revitalization projects 144–57; agencies 148–9; colonization 148–9; hybridities 148–9; Indigenous teachers/scholars 148–9; language choice in university programs 144–8; language-culture etiologies 144–8 safe houses 195–216; classroom 197–200; constructed agendas in 212; in contact zones, value of 199; contingency-based research on 213; data from 209, 213; defined 199; education, macroethical

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implications for 202; ethical dilemmas in 209–10, 209–15, 215; ethical learning through 200–1; functional 211; functions of 200; identity development and 198–9; mediation and 213–14; motivation in 210–12; research on 202–9; for resistance, implications of 198–9; significance of 197–202; student discourse in 211–12; student interaction in, creation for more 212–13; teachers role in 200–1 safe spaces 200 SAT 54 Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness 223 second dialect acquisition 111–17; of American women in UK 115–17; background on 111–14; of British women in United States 115–17; defined 111–12; identity and 114–15 second language (L2) learning 125 second language acquisition (SLA) 3, 6; communication technology and 182; ethics in 121 Second Language Teacher Education (SLATE) 142, 144, 146–7, 149–50, 152, 158 Second Life 182 Senate Bill 130 152 sensitivity in macro ethics 162–4 SIFE 68, 70–1; see also limited formal schooling (LFS) SLA see second language acquisition (SLA) SLATE see Second Language Teacher Education (SLATE) SLIFE see students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE) social agreement 43 social cohesion 85, 92 socialization 125 social life, agency in 131 social research, interview-based 129 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council 122–3 sociolect 112 spatial domains 200 speech act analysis 44 standardization in macro ethics 162–4 student discourse in safe houses 211–12 student interaction in safe houses, creation for more 212–13 students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE) 6, 66 Studies in Second Language Acquisition 38–9

247

subjectivity, researcher positionalities and limits of 77–9 superdiversity 104 surveillance, concept of 164 SurveyMonkey 22 table groups 90–1 “Tale of Blue Rain Cafe, A” 188 teacher: as advocates 149–51; identity of 18–19; safe houses, role in 200–1 teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) 2, 166 team, diversity within/outside the 172 technology for communication 182 Telegraph, The 53 temporal domains 200 Ten-Year Plans 219 TESL Canada Journal 2, 18 TESOL see teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) TESOL International Association (TESOL International Association) 4 TESOL Quarterly 1–2, 38 text-based applied linguistics research 183; conducting 187–91; ethical challenges in 181–91; Internet as appealing methodological alternative 182–4; online 187 text-based Internet research 182–7; ethical challenges of 187, 191 theoretical knowledge 169 thesis 42–3, 46, 127 Third Reich 84 translation 190 transnationalism 127, 136 Twilight 107 Twitter 186 UAF see University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) unelicited texts 182 UNICEF 6, 85–7 U.S. Department of Education 143 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 16, 34 U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) 16 universities and neoliberalism, restructuring under 55–6 University of Alaska Anchorage’s Kodiak Campus 151–2 University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) 143–4, 151–3 University of Groningen 143

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University of Melbourne 84 University of Minnesota 71–3, 75 university under neoliberalism 54 unwritten assumption 60 valued knowledge 105 ventriloquizing city government 222–3 video-based online research 184 virtue ethics 163, 196 visual and performing arts 41–3 voice in team 171–5 wealthy, identity of 220 web-based questionnaires 183 Web-based research 190

Web forums 185, 188 Wingspread Declaration on Renewing the Civic Mission of the American Research University 227–8, 230–5 WMA see World Medical Association (WMA) World Café 90–1 World Medical Association (WMA) 83 YouTube 186, 226, 234 Yugtun 146, 152 Yup’ik/English Dual-Language 146 Yup’ik Immersion 146 Yup’ik Language Institute 144 Yup’ik-medium education 7, 142–4