Towards multilingual competence: examining beliefs and agency in first year university students’ language learner biographies

Abstract

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.

In-service teachers’ interpretative repertoires about language: The teacher promotion examination context

“…By examining subject positions, the agency of a discourse user can be examined, with the focus on both meaning and content as opposed to a focus on content only (Barkhuizen, 2010). In this respect, the interpretative repertoire studies by Ruohotie-Lyhty (2016) and Pirhonen (2021) are worth recalling.…”

“…All the distinguished repertoires emerged from the participants' discourses that relied on extrematization (Potter, 1996: 189), collectivization (Potter, 1996: 159), and quantification (Potter, 1996: 190). Pirhonen (2021) carried out a similar study to Ruohotie-Lyhty's (2016) but with a view to exploring the first year Finnish university students' interpretative repertoires about the factors that influenced their learning of different languages. The data were collected in the form of language learning biographies from which 4 repertoires and two subject positions emerged.…”

“…The data were collected in the form of language learning biographies from which 4 repertoires and two subject positions emerged. Within the dependent position, Pirhonen (2021) identified the affordance repertoire and the affection repertoire, whereas in the position of the learner as an independent agent the attribute repertoire and the action repertoire were found. The discursive resources were related to different examples of nouns and verbs, metaphors (Potter, Wetherell, 1987), normalisation, extrematisation and minimisation techniques (Potter, 1996).…”