Seeing brokering in bright colours: Participatory artwork elicitation in CLB research

A recurrent issue in child language brokering (CLB) research is how to best adjust ethnographic methodologies in order to collect data from young children. There are a number of practical considerations in addition to the necessary ethical aspects. Questionnaires and other methods relying on the written word may prove inadequate for first- and second-graders, and even for older bilingual or multilingual children who may not have the same level of literacy in all their languages. Methods relying on the spoken word, such as interviews, focus groups or participant observation, may prove similarly problematic when groups of respondents have mixed language proficiency levels. Artwork elicitation, on the contrary, can be an effective and inclusive way to collect qualitative data about young children’s feelings and perceptions about CLB. It has the potential to elicit visual narratives from large groups of children (e.g. entire classes or schools), while leaving them free to include aspects of the phenomenon being investigated that would otherwise be difficult for them to describe in words. This chapter explores primary school children’s experience of CLB as it emerges from artwork submitted for the “Budding translators” competition described by Antonini (this volume), and proposes an analysis that draws mainly on visual and social semiotics.