Acceso usuarios
Ed Griffiths
, Heike Neumann, Sandra Zappa-Hollman, Saskia Van Viegen
While one prevailing view of multilingualism conceives all learners engaged in additional language learning as multilinguals, these learners may not always self-identify as such. The data in this paper come from a project examining the experience of students with a first language other than English at three Canadian universities. This paper focuses on the subset of respondents who did not identify as bi/multilingual in the initial project questionnaire or didn’t know if they were (n = 27 out of N = 173). This was surprising because students’ participation in the project presupposed knowledge of at least two languages, which we assumed would lead them to self-identify as bi/multilingual. We refer to these participants as ‘hesitant multilinguals’. We report on reasons behind their hesitance to self-identify as bi/multilingual through the analysis of follow-up interviews with some of these students (n = 9). Our findings suggest that for this group of students there were three main reasons that led them not to self-identify as multilingual. These reasons include self-perceptions of insufficient language competence, contextual issues specific to Quebec, and affective issues associated with their status as recent arrivals in Canada. We also report on changes to students’ self-identification as bi/multilingual after a year of university study.
