The Languaging of Research: Ecological Perspectives on Researcher Praxis

This article reports a qualitative study that explored researcher thinking and practice (i.e., praxis) regarding the language dimension of doing research (i.e., researching multilingually). The study drew on a large interdisciplinary research project which explicitly foregrounded language considerations and problematised the languaging of research. We used an ecological lens to analyse end‐of‐project researcher reflections to explore the shaping influences on the researchers’ multilingual praxis through every stage of the research process. The language‐foregrounded project focus was a major shaping influence, but so too were the researchers’ own linguistic resources and the pulls and pushes of their home disciplines, professions, methodologies and contexts. These resources and pushes and pulls had the potential to either constrain or enable intentional, transformative action central to language‐orientated researcher praxis. The findings suggest that by foregrounding language in research in language‐focused disciplines and more widely, researchers may become more attuned to their own language‐orientated practices and the action possibilities available to them, thus enabling more informed choices about language use at each and every stage of the research process.