Decolonizing research findings in multilingual education: using multilingual (re)sources to develop a database for international research

Abstract

Based on our impression of a tremendous increase in research in L1-based multilingual education (MLE) worldwide in recent years, our small team of multilingual, multicultural researchers began a stocktaking project in 2017. Our aim was to create an open-access, searchable database of annotated references to research on policy and practice in the field. We initiated a large-scale systematic review of academic literature from 2007 to 2020. Recognizing that a ‘state of the field’ literature search could not be done using English alone, we conducted parallel literature searches in Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and French. This methodological paper describes the intentional and reflexive process of researching multilingually: identifying search terms, finding and utilizing appropriate search engines, collecting references, categorizing and annotating publications, and beginning to make use of search functions. We argue there is little guidance on how to research multilingually and note problematic ‘blind spots’ if multilingual education research is biased towards English-speaking contexts or publications written by English-speaking scholars of the Global North. We share what we have learned about engaging in a multilingual systematic literature review, and hope to facilitate the decolonization of academic work and open access to both empirical and theoretical values from a range of perspectives.

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