“Do I Have to Sign My Real Name?” Ethical and Methodological Challenges in Multilingual Research with Adult SLIFE Learning French as a Second Language

Abstract

In 2017, Quebec’s Auditor General reported several major issues regarding government-funded French as a second language (FSL) courses, especially those intended for adult students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE). To this day, no official framework or program exists for this specific population, a situation that the government of Quebec wishes to resolve. Our research team was thereby mandated by the Ministry of Immigration to conduct a large-scale multilingual study with the objective of gaining a better understanding of the realities and needs of the various stakeholders involved in low-literate FSL classes. We met 42 teachers, 24 French learning center directors, and 10 pedagogical advisors in individual interviews; we also led 107 group interviews with SLIFE in 26 languages, allowing us to meet 464 adult SLIFE enrolled in low-literate FSL classes from 11 regions of the province of Quebec, most of them being refugees. This article reports on the decision-making process in which we engaged to overcome the ethical and methodological challenges we faced at various stages of the data collection with SLIFE participants: recruitment, informed consent, confidentiality, interview protocol design, instrument piloting, data collection, and data translation and transcription. To make informed decisions, we had to turn to literature outside SLA (i.e., refugee research and translation/interpreting literature) for guidance. In this article we discuss the limitations and contributions of our research to guide researchers who will conduct studies with similar non-academic samples/populations.