Online Contact, Face-to-Face Contact, and Multilingualism: Young Swedish-Speaking Finns Develop Trilingual Identities

Abstract

Based on the tenets of the social context model of second language acquisition, the present paper examined the combined effect of online and face-to-face contact in developing multilingual skills and identities among young Swedish-speaking Finns (N = 304). The hypotheses were tested for Finnish as a second language, and English as a third language using parallel models. The results were largely identical for both languages. Specifically, online contact enhanced language confidence, which, in turn, contributed to language identity. However, online contact had a more substantial effect on confidence as well as identity among those who had little face-to-face contact with speakers of the given language. Findings and their implications are discussed.

Languages and identity constructions in multilingual students’ digital literacy practices

“…In a Nordic context, Rusk (2019) shows in a classroom study in a Swedish-speaking Finnish context how a group of students' multilingual identities are negotiated in their interaction through texting on their mobile phones simultaneously to other classroom activities, hidden from the teacher and other students. Vincze and Joyce (2018) find similar results in a survey study which also took place in a Finnish context and which compared Swedish-speaking Finns' face-to-face interaction in one of the informants' second language (Finnish) with their online interaction in English. Their results suggest that "online contact enhanced language confidence, which in turn contributed to language identity".…”

“…Our findings show that translanguaging becomes a natural and useful tool for moving between these digital literacy practices and a part of the students' linguistic identity work. As Han's (2021) also shows, multilingual youths can utilise their linguistic repertoires to "negotiate dynamic and multifaceted identities" (p. 41) by participating in digital literacy practices that can lead to a sense of "global citizenship" (p. 37), which also the findings of Vincze and Joyce (2018) suggest. This is true for our participants as well, but to different degrees between the participants in our study.…”

“…In Sweden, between 99 and 100% of young people (born in 1990-2000) use the Internet on a daily basis (Swedish Internet Foundation [Internetstiftelsen], 2021), so claiming that digital resources have an impact on daily social practices is hardly an exaggeration. Digital resources create new arenas for young people's identity construction and for their participation in different social and linguistic practices (Kumpulainen & Mikkola, 2014;Vincze & Joyce, 2018). Constant access to mobile devices has been shown to change schools as sites for students' identity constructions and learning lives in the digital age (Erstad & Sefton-Green, 2013), somewhere in between on-and off-line with other people physically and/or digitally present (Nelson, Perry, & Rogers, 2020;Sahlström, Tanner, & Valasmo, 2019).…”

How to Do Things with Emojis: The Pragmatic Functions of Emojis in Teacher-Student Interaction through Wechat

“…In order to answer the question, we collected data in Mandarin Chinese through Wechat that is an interactive multimodal platform where users send texts, audios, videos, photos, and other files. Specifically, the data are collected from teacher-student interaction in Wechat for two reasons: 1) The use of language in the online contact is different from the face-to-face contact (Vincze & Joyce, 2018). For example, Walther (1996) believed that online interactions can exceed the potency of faceto-face interactions.…”

Countering Subtractive Bilingualism with Additive Bilingualism in the Albanian Language

“…The ethnolinguistic vitality (EV) of the ethnic identity is "that which makes a group likely to behave as a distinctive and active collective entity in intergroup situations" (Giles, Bourhis & Taylor, 1977, as cited in Landry & Allard, 1993, p. 7). However, today the ethnic identity is threatened (Pavlenko 2003) by EV reduction on a global scale due to Anglicization (King, 2017) delivered mostly via the internet (Vincze & Joyce, 2017). Thus, the primary purpose of this essay is to increase the awareness of such an influence on the Albanian language.…”