engleski

I participate, therefore I am (and I learn): researching learners' multilingual identity in the multilingual school context

This study examines the relationship among bi/multilingual students’ participation in the L3 classroom and their third language identities. Participation, a key concept of the study, is seen as a form of students’ investment in language learning that can lead both to enhanced language learning and to a change in the students’ social identity (Norton-Peirce, 1995). It allows the description of two concurrent, complex and interdependent processes: learning a language and expressing and constructing students’ social identity. A survey was conducted in an international multilingual school in Croatia with eight 5th grade students studying French as L3. Twelve video recordings of French as a third language lessons of a total length of approx. 480 minutes were qualitatively analysed with respect to the students’ participation in the L3 classroom. According to the chosen theoretical approach students also learn a new language in order to acquire the symbolic power connected to it, which can be then transformed into social power (Darvin & Norton, 2015). The analysis of the data collected in the study presented in this paper reveals that the identity of a third language learner can be described as a dynamic combination of some of the following identity positions: the position of a symbolically powerful student, the position of a student symbolically more powerful than others, the position of a student not symbolically powerful enough, the position of a student eager to gain symbolical power and the position of a student not eager to gain symbolical power. The results of this study are in line with the main assumptions on language learners’ identity put forward by other socially oriented authors in SLA (such as Norton-Peirce, 1995 ; Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004), according to which a language learners’ identity is multiple, changeable and discursively shaped. Finally, the insights of the empirical study are connected to a theoretical model of multilingual identity (cf. Kresić 2006, 2016).

multilingual education ; French ; international school ; participation ; learners’ identity ; additional language acquisition ; power relations

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