As working life across the world is increasingly multilingual, multicultural and multidisciplinary, higher education language teaching is faced with a challenge of how to prepare students for it. Many universities have recently developed multilingual pedagogies but central to their success is learners' perceptions of these practices. To fill this gap, this article explores first year university students' language learner biographies to gain insight into how learners construct their linguistic realities. The biographies were studied with discourse analytical methods to examine the participants' beliefs about language learning and their sense of agency in it. The results reveal that participants tend not to portray themselves as agentive learners but rather position agency as an outside factor affecting their language learning. In addition, the participants' discourses differed in terms of languages, which adds to previous studies noting the complexity of learner beliefs. Understanding these dynamics can help teachers address students' beliefs in the classroom and accordingly support learners to create meaning in their language learning. The findings further suggest that beliefs should be studied from multilingual perspectives also in the future.
An increasingly multilingual working life expects university graduates to possess multilingual competences, but at the same time many European students study fewer languages than before. As they learn about field-specific linguistic practices and contemplate their future, university students negotiate their identities as language learners and future professionals. Supporting them in acquiring a multilingual identity would be beneficial as it is a strengthening factor in language learning. Since they study towards a profession, it is likely that students examine language learning from the viewpoint of a working life. From these premises, Finnish social science students were interviewed as a part of a course that supported their readiness to work in multilingual environments. The purpose was to investigate how they negotiated their multilingual and professional identities and how these negotiations intersect. The data was examined from a poststructural perspective, analysing identity negotiations by means of positioning theory. The results show that the students constructed their linguistic identities primarily in relation to English competences, often positioning themselves as “contentedly bilingual”. The data also revealed an “aspiring multilingual” identity negotiation which, however, echoed societal ideologies on language learning rather than describing the students’ internalised beliefs. Students’ certainty of their future profession was often connected to a confidence in speaking English and a critical stance towards the need for multilingual competences. Multilingual identity negotiation was hence connected to prevailing discourses and professional aspirations. The study provides new perspectives on university students’ multilingual and professional identities and suggests pedagogical solutions that can support their development in Higher Education language teaching.
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