An exploration of doctoral students' reflections on researching multilingually.

This paper examines the profiles of five doctoral researchers posted on the Researching Multilingually website in order to identify key elements in the multilingual research process which these researchers individually emphasize. We selected three current and two recently-graduated PhD students from different linguistic backgrounds (Greek, Italian, and Mandarin). All of these researchers: a) have experience in researching multilingually; b) work in UK university context; and c) in most cases were supervised monolingually in English. To help them produce their online reflections, we provided them with the following guiding questions: 1) What is you experience of doing research multilingually? and 2) What is your experience of becoming aware of the complexities in this area? Having selected these five profiles, our first move was to analyze the answers they provided to these two questions especially in relation to the aspects of multilingual research design and practice they identified. We then examined commonalities between researcher reflections on experience with regard to these questions. We believe that the awareness and articulation of these experiences may lead researchers to identify for themselves what aspects of their research practice they are confident with and what they want to further work on. In this respect, articulating their experiences forms part of their researcher self-development in the context of multilingual research design. We also wish to indentify key moments in developing researcher competence vis-à-vis researching multilingually. This identification of key moments will contribute, we hope, to the growing sense of the types of focus and process which can and should be included in researcher education provision.