ABSTRACT

As working life across the world is increasingly multilingual, multicultural and multidisciplinary, higher education language teaching is faced with a challenge of how to prepare students for it. Many universities have recently developed multilingual pedagogies but central to their success is learners’ perceptions of these practices. To fill this gap, this article explores first year university students’ language learner biographies to gain insight into how learners construct their linguistic realities. The biographies were studied with discourse analytical methods to examine the participants’ beliefs about language learning and their sense of agency in it. The results reveal that participants tend not to portray themselves as agentive learners but rather position agency as an outside factor affecting their language learning. In addition, the participants’ discourses differed in terms of languages, which adds to previous studies noting the complexity of learner beliefs. Understanding these dynamics can help teachers address students’ beliefs in the classroom and accordingly support learners to create meaning in their language learning. The findings further suggest that beliefs should be studied from multilingual perspectives also in the future.

摘要

随着世界各地的工作生活越来越多语言、多文化和多学科，高等教育语言教学面临着如何为学生做好准备的挑战。许多大学最近开发了多语言教学法，但其成功的核心是学习者对这些实践的看法。为了填补这一空白，本文探讨了一年级大学生的语言学习者传记，以深入了解学习者如何构建他们的语言现实。这些传记采用话语分析方法进行研究，以检验参与者对语言学习的信念及其在其中的能动性。结果表明，参与者倾向于不将自己描绘成能动学习者，而是将能动性定位为影响他们语言学习的外部因素。此外，参与者的话语在语言方面有所不同，这增加了先前的研究，注意到学习者信念的复杂性。了解这些动态可以帮助教师解决学生在课堂上的信念，并相应地支持学习者在语言学习中创造意义。研究结果进一步表明，未来也应该从多语言的角度研究信仰。