DISSECTing multilingual research in the field of language education: a framework for researcher development

Abstract

Our contribution presents the DISSECT framework we have developed in order to foster the reflexive education of plurilingual researchers regarding contexts, approaches and opportunities of multilingual research. The framework focusses on multilingual social contexts, within which research takes place, and on plurilingual researchers and their individual linguistic resources. We discuss the scope and dimensions of multilingual research approaches and systematise six language-related aspects of decision-making during the research process. We then consider the systemic perspective, extend our considerations to the international research community and discuss the opportunities and challenges of multilingual research approaches with regard to the hegemonic role of English in academic contexts. Our examples illustrate specific language-related choices in the research process and possible consequences. We discuss how plurilingual researchers can be encouraged to systematically reflect on language-related aspects of their research process as a way of not only supporting multilingual research approaches, but also social justice aspects that are related to this. While our considerations take the field of language education research as their starting point, the proposed framework is also applicable to other disciplines.