Tracey Costley

Tracey is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex. Her work draws on ethnography to explore and understand students’ and teachers’ language and literacies practices in multilingual classrooms and language policies in practice.

Seminar Three Provocation: Coming to Terms with Not Knowing - Honesty, Accountability and Welcoming Others in Ethnography

In this provocation I reflect on uses of language in ethnography. After many years of thinking of myself as someone who does ethnographic work, I have recently begun to reflect more on, and hold myself to account for, the ways in which I have engaged with language and multilingualism within my research. Although my research has often focused on multilingual practices, my own research practices have been largely monolingual.  In this provocation myself and colleagues share our experiences of how we have engaged with researching multilingually, reflecting on how our methodological training and linguistic profiles have shaped and influenced the work we have done, and what these have helped or hindered us in doing.