Fostering language awareness through Citizen Science: results and implications of a project with Polish teenagers doing language-related research

Abstract

From 2021 to 2024, 5 linguists from the University of Opole, Poland, worked with 55 teenagers in 10 local secondary schools. The academics first trained and then supported several university students in facilitating teenager language research within the co-creative Citizen Science (CS) approach. This approach assumes that citizens who are not trained in linguistics choose the topic and implement a study on a language-oriented issue of relevance to their own community. At schools, teenagers were divided into teams and asked by facilitating university students to choose a topic related to communication, linguistic diversity, multiculturalism or language learning. They were helped to select a data collection method and find an answer to a language-oriented research question that interested them. The article lists 18 completed teenagers’ projects and explains their implementation process. It also describes the sociolinguistic context of Opole, the characteristics of Polish secondary schooling, and discusses some examples of previous studies in linguistics done with the use of CS. It finishes with information on how the project was evaluated by those who coordinated and organized it – school administrators, teachers, and university students acting as CS facilitators. Attention is paid to how such projects empower teenagers to develop new communication skills and to raise their language awareness and how these skills fit in with the Polish national curriculum for language education. Apart from the sensitivity to diverse uses of language, CS can also foster reflection on how research in linguistics is done. It may also spark teenagers to become involved, as activist citizens, in advancing issues related to language diversity and equity, although systematic reception studies on CS impact are yet to be conducted.