Tzu-Hsuan/Carol Liu School of Education, University of Manchester

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

2. My Study • Research focuson the perspectives of local and expatriate TESOL practitioners participating in the Taiwanese FETR project in rural primary schools. • Explored via narrative interviews conducted in English or Chinese at four points throughout the year in question.

3. Processing the teachers’ stories • On data generation: • unintentional discrepancy in interviewing them created different storytelling contexts • being a non-nativeEnglish speaker, I asked native speaker’s assistance of critical reading to increase readability of the NESTs’ stories • On data analysis / interpretation : • the distinction between English and Chinese became blurred, • the generation of coding possibilities involved both languages • I began to translate some of the Chinese narratives into English when doing the analysis (i.e. when producing commentaries of codes). • I did not think such switching between the two languages had had any significant implications for my study ... [however, this] translation involved me interpretatively, and since my translation of the Chinese narratives embedded my interpretation of their experiences … it needed to be explicitly accounted for with transparency.

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