'I have so many things to tell you, but I don't know English': Linguistic Challenges and Language Brokering

Chatwara Suwannamai Duran

In 2009, I received a forwarded email, originally written by a volunteer, who worked with a Phoenix-based refugee resettlement agency. She wrote that she taught English to newly-arrived refugee families, predominantly from Burma, and 'help them get started in Arizona.' She hoped to recruit more volunteers to work with the families at the refugees' homes. I was excited about being a volunteer and emailed her for more details. She promptly replied:

'These refugees speak a variety of tribal languages, but also some Burmese, Lao and Thai.' (E-mail conversation, 16 September 2009)

After a few more email exchanges with her, I learned that many refugees are very homesick and in need of friends. The volunteer added, 'Just having someone to talk to them in their native language and encourage them would be a big help' and 'Some of the teenagers – they speak Thai very well but they are having difficulty learning English.' She expressed that she knew some Thai words and that 'there is a lot lost in translation' during communication with these newcomers. She believed that native Thai or Burmese speakers would be better able to help these refugees in some way.

Being a native speaker of Thai, who has had first-hand experiences of acculturation in the USA, and being a graduate student in the field of language and literacy education at the time, I enthusiastically offered my assistance without hesitation. Through the volunteer work, I was introduced to many Karenni families in town, whose multiple languages, literacy practices, and skills not only intrigued me but also augmented my understanding of the linguistic complexity of refugees from Burma. I enjoyed weekly visits and hangouts, teaching English at their homes, helping with the children's homework, accompanying the parents on errands, and giving them rides. Eventually, my volunteer work evolved into a dissertation research project. The primary goal of the project was to document and analyze the Karenni refugees' out-of-school multilingual resources (Canagarajah, 2009; Kramsch, 2009) through the lens of language socialization in bilingual and multilingual communities (Bayley & Schecter, 2003; Duff, 2011; Fogle, 2012).

In this chapter, I examine and reflect on my experiences as a researcher working in this context, the methods and approaches I used, and the challenges I encountered while working with recently-arrived Karenni families who were originally from Burma but who had lived in Thailand's fenced refugee camp for at least fifteen years prior to coming to Phoenix, Arizona. The Karenni families I worked with spoke, read and wrote languages that are considered (by applied linguists) to be Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs) in the USA. These families are underserved because of their unrecognized languages in their host nation. Lack of linguistic knowledge to communicate with marginalized populations has become an issue of linguistic inequality, and for my part, I was eager to learn from the families. In my multiple roles (e.g. as a tutor, family mentor and friend to the families), I drew on a range of linguistic resources to communicate on a regular basis. Working to negotiate meaning with each other, the participants and I relied on our multilingual repertoires and a variety of strategic communication such as translating and interpreting (converting one language to another involving a dictionary or a bi/multilingual person) and code-switching (using two or more linguistic codes). Some participants and I also communicated in English, a language that had come, over time, to serve as a lingua franca. With some of the participants' family members, I spoke Thai because they had learned Thai as an additional language when they lived in the refugee camps in Thailand. (Participants' detailed linguistic inventories are discussed below.) All of these communicative techniques and languages were used contingently among the Karenni families and me.

While working to establish relationships I began to question my role as a university-based researcher that was distant from the refugee participants in addition to my previous roles as a volunteer tutor and a friend. I had been trying to find and use transparent and culturally-sensitive approaches to understand the lived experiences and views of the multilingual participants who had been minoritized and underrepresented throughout their life trajectories. I knew that language was a key in both data and process (Green & Thorogood, 2004) and that attempting to complete the project involved unlocking multiple communicative languages. I was afraid that things wouldn't work. Therefore, I tried to recall what worked in my previous communication with the participant families so that I could use those approaches and methods in the research setting. My worries included how to present what I learned from the participants to a wider audience, who were not there with me during the data collection period.

In the literature on conducting research in/with/for minoritized and marginalized communities, researchers sometimes mention the fact that they...