Transdisciplinary qualitative paradigm in applied linguistics: autoethnography, participatory action research and minority language teaching and learning^*

Abstract

The paper emphasizes the crucial importance of transdisciplinary approach to qualitative research methodology in teaching and learning contexts involving highly stigmatized minority languages. Autoethnography and participatory action research are herein employed as constructive, critical, qualitative methodological procedures relevant to transdisciplinary research on minority languages in applied linguistics. An international project on teaching and learning Romani, QUALIROM, is used as a case study in order to emphasize the fact that mere theoretical knowledge and professional expertise are important but not sufficient for successful implementation and sustainability of outcomes in this field of linguistic research. The analysis suggests that socially engaged minority language learning and teaching projects should be understood as transdisciplinary, collaborative activities that transcend academic boundaries, and in which research participants create a number of interactive contexts within project-oriented communities of practice aimed at reshaping dominant social relations and practices.

Keywords:

• Applied linguistics
• transdisciplinary qualitative research
• autoethnography
• participatory action research
• Romani

Acknowledgments

This study was completed as a part of the project number 178014 Dynamics of Structures of Contemporary Serbian, financed by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Grounded theory is understood as an epistemological orientation and a set of methodological procedures which allow researchers to learn from their own fieldwork in ways that add new theoretical dimensions to their initial hypotheses and allow for their meaningful conceptual adaptation during the research process and data analysis. (see Charmaz, 2005 for further detail).

2 Some of the Romani participants had, prior to the inclusion in the project, been exposed to some secondary education, while others had high school and/or university diplomas. None of them had any previous formal training in applied linguistics and language teaching methods. Legislative affirmative measures in Serbia allow members of Romani communities to work as teachers of their L1 without satisfying the academic criteria expected from teachers of other subjects in primary and in secondary education. (I dare say that the validity of this provision is highly debatable since it discourages Romani students from entering and completing tertiary education.) In other four countries, no formal teaching of Romani in primary or secondary education before the initiation of the project had been present. Enthusiast volunteers from Romani communities carried out all teaching activities for which no formal educational credentials were required.

3 If you visit the official QUALIROM webpage, you will easily find your way through hundreds of teaching materials that were produced and published online in free domain format, which continue to be updated and improved even upon the completion of the project. Furthermore, a proposal for a Romani teacher training module at the university level was also designed by the academic coordinators, but it awaits some future funds to be set into motion. Finally, the ECML, as an institution of the Council of Europe offered the other members of the project consortium to design a training seminar based on the QUALIROM materials which is now available to all ECML member states as one of the training activities provided by this organization. The seminar has been active for the last two years and a half (at the time of writing this paper), and member states such as Slovenia, Austria, Serbia and the Czech Republic have already benefited from it. The seminars are designed in accordance with each interested country’s specific needs and target varied audiences, such as language planners, institutions of language education policy, Romani language teachers, etc.

4 Until the present day, no reliable data on a number of teachers in Serbia who speak Romani could be found. Informal analyses carried out in 2009 indicated these numbers to be extremely low. The number of total Romani population according to unofficial and consolidated data (educated guesses based on combined unofficial and census data) range between 250,000 and even 500,000 of Roma in Serbia, while it is postulated that between 91,500 and 203,000 Romani children of preschool and elementary school age live among us (Baucal, 2012).

5 Gadjo, m./gadja, f.: Romani term for persons of non-Romani origin.

6 The Constitution of the Republic of Serbia and educational laws yield significant space and relevance to the official attitudes and opinions of councils of national minorities with respect to multiethnicity, multiculturalism and multilingualism which are publically recognized and overtly valued in all spheres of life and language use (private, educational, professional and administrative domains). In general terms, they form a part of the overall top-down infrastructure of legislative architecture in the areas of social services, administration, education and the like, having decision-making power in all cases concerning the members of those ethnolinguistic groups living in Serbia. Roma are among them.

7 The Romani standardization debate in the former Yugoslavia and in Serbia, which has been going on since 1971 (when the International Romani Union was founded in London; Matras & Reershemius, 1991, p. 109) has been dominating the Romani linguistics scene in the region, without any serious references to language education policies and real-life issues of generations of Romani children, who have been denied textbook materials in their L1 on the basis of a quasi-academic argument that no educational materials can be published in non-standardized linguistic varieties (Baucal, 2012; Filipović, 2012). The latest coordinated attempt is a product of a number of top-down and bottom-up language planning activities initiated and carried out by a number of Romani scholars from different countries created upon the break-up of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. The results of their endeavour is a document published in Sarajevo in 2012 titled Standardizacija romskog jezika (Standardization of the Romani language). The general conclusions of the document are that both macro and micro language planning need to be addressed, meaning that (1) cooperation with authorities and policy makers on a state level need to be approached and legislation regarding the status and the use of Romani in different language domains should be clarified, and (2) corpus language planning (particularly in the area of specific linguistic registers in the area of modern science and technology as well as political discourse) needs to be paid attention to. Cooperation among the scholars from the Western Balkan countries (Serbia, Slovenia, Rumania and Bosnia and Herzegovina) is a prerogative for any systemic, sustainable and long term standardization of the Romani language (Đurić, 2011, p. 9) However, details regarding the standardization process itself have still remained unspecified, since no clear objectives have been decided upon (whether the standard should be based upon a single dialect, or to what extent it should be mutually understandable to Romani speakers from other European countries.

8 This also belongs to the realm of experiences that none of us learn about when we attend courses on field methods in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. Far from ideal financial situations teach us to be extremely creative and resourceful in order to carry out some of the basic activities envisioned by different project proposals.

9 Heterarchy is defined as an emergent form of self-organization of communities of practice in which responsibility and authority are defined and assigned by establishing relationships of trust and confidence, heterogeneity and minimal hierarchy (Stark, 2001, pp. 71, 75).

10 For a detailed account of language leadership (adaptive, enabling and administrative), see Filipović (2015).

11 The variety in case is a standardized variety of Romani proposed by the Romani Union in its Warsaw declaration of 1990.

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Jelena Filipović

Dr. Jelena Filipović is a professor of Spanish and Sociolinguistics, Head of the Department of Iberian Studies, and Vice Dean for Scientific Development of the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. She has been a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Purdue University, USA, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, at the University of Graz, Austria, and University of Tulsa, USA. Her research interests are in the areas of critical sociolinguistics, language policy and planning, gender studies, Sephardic studies, Hispanic and applied linguistics. She has authored and co-authored several books and several dozens of articles in academic journals and monographic publications. She has been engaged in a number of national and international projects in the areas of language education policies, gender sensitive language policies, foreign and second language teaching curriculum design and development, and language maintenance and revitalization. She is an international expert of the European Center for Modern Languages and a member of two Boards of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Board of Education and Board for Research of Life and Traditions of the Romani People).