Transnational students’ language ideologies and practices across social spaces in multilingual university settings

This paper explores multilingual students' perceptions of language use in Swedish higher education. While the status of the official languages, Swedish and English, has been widely debated, the role of other languages used by students and staff has been neglected. At the same time, Swedish universities are required to actively work for recruiting students with diverse backgrounds, including students who came to Sweden with prior formal education in different languages. The paper addresses this gap and examines the lived experiences of such transnational students, and their perceptions of their language use relating to their studies at a Swedish university. To illustrate the diversity of educational and linguistic backgrounds, the paper draws on interviews around the participants' texts and writing logs from two students. The study focuses on writing in relation to language use, as this is central to learning and assessment practices at university. It reveals how various languages can be relevant for learning. The students aligned with institutional language ideologies regarding assignment writing. They reported the use of their wider linguistic repertoire for meaning-making in backstage settings, such as note taking. The results further highlight the role of previous academic knowledge and the ability to recontextualize this knowledge for the success in their current university studies. This knowledge includes ways of acting, beliefs and value systems and constitutes cultural capital if it resonates with the dominant expectations and values of the students' study programmes. Based on these insights, the paper considers the spatio-temporal dimensions of the linguistic repertoire and their relevance for student participation in higher education.