Developing multilingual identity in school – insights from two parallel studies

This paper presents findings from two parallel studies in Norway and England exploring lower secondary school learners’ multilingual identity, the development of which may be important for several reasons. First, pupils with a multilingual identity may be more likely to invest effort in the learning and maintenance of their languages, so counteracting the prevailing discourse of “English is enough” that is widespread in both contexts. Second, with increasing diversity in classrooms (in both contexts approximately 20% of pupils speak the language of education as an additional language), a multilingual identity mindset might lead to both enhanced investment in the languages previously accorded lower status and might also aid social cohesion. Most existing research to date has investigated individual learners’ multilingualism and identity. While these studies offer valuable emic perspectives on the complexity of individual identity development, there is clearly a need to try to understand whether combining qualitative case studies with quantitative approaches might extend our knowledge of the field. The two mixed-methods, parallel projects in England and in Norway, were designed to investigate pupils’ multilingualism, in particular, whether they identified as multilingual, how this related to the languages in their reported linguistic repertoires and the reasons they gave for their identifications. In the studies,a high number of participating pupils from seven schools in each country responded to a questionnaire mapping their languages, language practices, beliefs about multilingualism and several other variables. Furthermore, the pupils were asked to define multilingualism and to state whether they identified explicitly as multilinguals or not and why. We present a comparison of findings from both contexts and draw implications for policy and practice.