Undertaking narrative inquiry bilingually against a monolingual backdrop

Against a backdrop of increasingly international and internationalised higher education and doctoral studies in particular, in this paper we reflect on some of the complexities we have encountered and negotiated as Xiaowei and Tzu-Hsuan have undertaken their individual narratively-oriented research projects as supervised by Richard. Both of these studies involve significant English and Mandarin Chinese bilingual elements, specifically in the literature consulted, the contexts explored, the participants involved, the data generated, processed and analysed, and the report of the study in the thesis. However, the studies have been supervised and are being examined monolingually in English. Such bilingual complexities are not well discussed in the narrative research literature or more generally in the research methods literature. When they are referred to, in our experience, the tenor of the discussion is often that of a problem or obstacle to be overcome rather than that of a richness to be transparently managed. In this paper, we will briefly outline the narrative parameters of the two studies concerned and then explore in more detail the bilingual complexities that we, as researchers and supervisor, have encountered and negotiated.