Acceso usuarios
[1]
;
Zhang, Chenchen
[2]
;
Zheng, Yongyan
[3]
China
Cambridge District, Reino Unido
China
Drawing on the theoretical construct of investment (Darvin & Norton [2015]. Identity and a model of investment in applied linguistics. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35, 36–56) and social capital theory (Bourdieu [1986]. The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). Greenwood Press; Lin [2001]. Social capital: A theory of social structure and action. Cambridge University Press), this paper examines the divergent ways in which 10 Chinese university-level students of Arabic and English developed their social networks and capitalised on social capital, which co-shaped their multilingual investment behaviours. We collected data from multiple sources, including the Home-Country Multilingual Learning Network Questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, and supplementary sources for triangulation. The findings revealed that the students developed social networks that were either tilted, balanced, or isolated, with different values for density and structural holes. Moreover, insights from two focal students suggest that they exhibited divergent patterns of investment in Arabic and English learning across spatiotemporal scales and learning contexts due to different network resources and concomitant differences in the social capital within access. By providing a finely grained analysis of the variegated types of social capital, the study reconceptualizes the notion of multilingual investment through refined theorisation of contextual influences. The study concludes with implications for multilingual programme designs and language policy planning at large.
