7 Researching Adolescents’ Linguistic Repertoires in Multilingual Areas: Case Studies from South Tyrol and Finland

Abstract

In this chapter we present and compare two research experiences in the domain of linguistic repertoires (LRs) applied to the field of education. Our aim is to elucidate how we used different combinations of methods for data generation in the trilingual (German, Italian and Ladin) Italian province of South Tyrol and the bilingual (Finnish and Swedish) coastal regions of Finland in order to map the LRs of young multilingual participants aged 10 to 19. We investigated different aspects of their LRs (representations, use and trajectories) with multiple methods, ranging from more traditional sociolinguistic surveys such as questionnaires and interviews to multimodal and task-based methods such as language portraits, photographs and simulated contexts for multilingual interaction. We describe these methods and share some of the insights they enabled us to gain into the LRs of adolescents in two multilingual contexts in Europe.