With classrooms becoming ever more multilingual, there is a growing need to understand the relationship between multilingualism and educational achievement. We report on a longitudinal, mixed-methods study tracking this relationship to further our understanding of the role of multilingual identity in the learning and teaching of adolescents.
Like many other countries, the United Kingdom is becoming ever more multilingual as a result of individuals crossing geographical, social and linguistic boundaries. There is a growing need to understand the extent to which a reciprocal relationship exists between multilingualism and educational achievement. Both "monolingual" and "multilingual" are terms that are commonly deployed by a range of stakeholders in educational settings, as well as in wider social contexts more broadly. However, little attention tends to be paid to issues of who is identifying or being identified in a given way. In this presentation, we report on a study which investigates how adolescents' multilingualism, and the extent to which one identifies as multilingual, influences academic achievement across a range of subjects, including languages. Using school-reported and student-reported data from five secondary schools in South East England and over 800 students aged 15-16, we disentangle the complexity of multilingualism in schools by contrasting self- and other-ascriptions of multilingualism, as well as investigating indicators of 'multilingualism' and 'multilingual identity'. Our findings reveal meaningful differences between how students are identified and identify themselves as 'multilingual', and foregrounds 'multilingual identity' as a potentially more meaningful indicator for understanding academic attainment than multilingualism indicators traditionally used in UK schools. On the basis of our findings, we conclude by arguing for the inclusion of 'multilingual identity work' in secondary classrooms as a way to enhance adolescents' engagement and achievement in school-based learning.
