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Ethical Issues in Applied Linguistics Scholarship
Edited by Peter I. De Costa, Amr Rabie-Ahmed and Carlo Cinaglia
[Research Methods in Applied Linguistics 7] 2024
► pp. 87–109

Chapter 6
Transcription as ethics

(Re)Presenting young children’s complex communicative repertoires in Applied Linguistics research

| Arizona State University
| University of Georgia
| Stanford University
What are a researcher’s ethical obligations when creating transcripts that represent young children’s complex communicative repertoires? How do those obligations shape transcription choices, such as which codes and modes are represented and how? In this chapter, we draw on our collective years of ethnographic research with young children in diverse language settings to argue for viewing transcription choices as ethical considerations. We share three vignettes from our own research with young children with complex communicative repertoires, including multilingualism, signed languages, and augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices. In each case, we share our transcription dilemmas, the decisions we ultimately made, and the ideas that informed those decisions. We end with guiding questions to help researchers make transcription decisions that are not just technically and theoretically sound, but also ethically sound.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • What do we mean by research ethics?
  • Transcription
    • Transcription as technique
    • Transcription as theory
    • Transcription as ethics
  • Transcription as ethics (of care)-in-practice: Three vignettes
    • Vignette 1: Why transcribe multilingual, multimodal repertoires in a study of English learning? (Katie A. Bernstein)
      • Recording decisions
      • Perceiving decisions
      • Representing decisions
    • Vignette 2: Transcribing co-participation and embodied layers
      of sign-speech in classroom interactions between deaf and hearing children (Jennifer Johnson)
      • Recording decisions
      • Perceiving decisions
      • Representing decisions
    • Vignette 3: Transcribing multimodal speech in a significant disability/rare disease context (Usree Bhattacharya)
  • Discussion: What do these three cases reflect?
  • (Some) reflection questions to guide ethical transcription
  • Conclusion
  • References
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