Postgraduate students as plurilingual social actors in UK higher education

ABSTRACT

This paper sets out to develop a finer-grained understanding of the ‘plurilingual social actor’ within an Anglophone higher educational setting. Drawing on data collected as part of The Multilingual University project, I examine how a group of plurilingual postgraduate students taking modules in applied linguistics at a university in London viewed their linguistic repertoires as a resource for the taught curriculum and what their experiences can tell us about the plurilingual social actor. The study opened an institutional space for making linguistic diversity visible and for considering how it was a resource for the curriculum. The findings indicate that multilingual resources play an important role in supporting learning at postgraduate level and reveal ways in which familiarity with English medium education shapes how postgraduate students mobilise their multilingual resources in relation to the taught curriculum. Importantly, the study shows how the plurilingual social actor offers a dynamic, powerful and affirmative identity position that is well aligned with the teaching and learning agenda in higher education. It is my contention that a better understanding of this alignment will allow us to raise awareness of language-as-resource and advance plurilingual pedagogies in the sector.

KEYWORDS:

• Plurilingual pedagogies
• higher education
• United Kingdom
• postgraduate students
• linguistic repertoires
• multilingualism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The original ‘un acteur social’ has been translated as ‘social actor’ and ‘social agent’ (e.g. Council of Europe, 2001; Coste & Simon, 2009). This paper uses ‘social actor’.

2 The Multilingual University seminar series was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

3 See North and Piccardo (2016) for a thorough and updated account of mediation in relation to the CEFR and the development of plurilingual and pluricultural competences.