Multilingual vs. Multilingually Aware? Exploring language students’ views of their multilingualism

The current study is a follow-up study belonging to a research project, which investigates questions regarding Finnish advanced (third study year or more) university students of languages other than English as a major or a minor. In our previous study, under the title “Me as a language user”, students were asked to report about the visibility of different languages in their lives. 51 students of German, French, and Swedish participated in this study, answering open questions via an electronic form. Students mentioned knowing between three and thirteen languages. Our analysis of the data gave a surprising result: Students were well aware of their language competence, their language use in various contexts, emotional aspects, and identity issues in their various L2s; however, they were self-critical and evaluated their language proficiency in a monolingual manner. References to anything that could be interpreted as multilingual awareness (Jessner-Schmid & Kramsch 2015) or multilingual identity (Henry 2017) were rare. Based on these results, we assumed that students’ lack of multilingual awareness might have its source in 1) the lack of awareness of being multilingual, which in turn might be caused by 2) a still common, monolingual, way of teaching foreign languages in schools and at university level, even in study subjects educating future language experts. To explore this assumption, we planned a follow-up study focusing on advanced university language students. Data collection will be carried out between September and November 2019 by means of a voluntary anonymous electronic questionnaire with semi-open questions. We are especially interested in finding out why students see themselves as multilingual (or not), and in how they themselves define multilingualism. At the AILA conference, the first results of this follow-up study will be presented.