‘I speak five languages’: fostering plurilingual competence through language awareness

Abstract

When considering the extent to which plurilingualism nowadays shapes ‘every facet of human life’ (Aronin & Singleton, 2008, p. 8), especially within European member states, one understands the reason why individual plurilingualism has become a benchmark in education, raising concerns in improving the quality of communication among people from different contexts, in fostering mobility, and in conserving linguistic and cultural heterogeneity. Focusing on the discourses (life narratives) of two Ukrainian students attending the third cycle of the Portuguese education system in the light of their learning process of the shelter language, in this paper we aim at (1) reflecting upon the importance of all individuals becoming aware of the asset that their lifelong plurilingual identities represent, i.e. being aware of plurilingualism; (2) discussing the role of language awareness in fostering plurilingual identity, namely by promoting the development of an effective plurilingual competence. This is done by (1) describing students' perception of their plurilingual identities and competences; (2) reconstructing the processes which intervene in the development of subjects' plurilingual identities and competences; (3) analysing how students perceive the contribution of their plurilingual repertoires in the process of learning the Portuguese language; and (4) presenting evidence of life narratives as a privileged space for raising language awareness.

Keywords:

• plurilingual identity
• plurilingual competence
• plurilingualism
• language awareness

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Ana Sofia Pinho and Sílvia Melo for earlier discussions on this paper and the two anonymous LA reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions regarding this paper.

Notes

1. PALOP is the acronym for the Portuguese-speaking African countries, which comprise Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé e Príncipe.

2. In this paper, the term ‘shelter language’ (translated from Ludi's expression ‘langue d'accueil’) is used to refer to the official/native language of the immigrants' country.

3. The concept of representations, as we understand it in this study, is at the crossroad (Pinto, 2005) of different theoretical and methodological perspectives as a result of merging the contributions of different disciplinary areas of Human Sciences such as Anthropology, Philosophy, Linguistics, Social Psychology, Sociology, Sociolinguistics, and, more recently, Didactics of Languages. In spite of being difficult to objectively and concisely define this concept (due to its nomad and crossroad nature), there are some features which are consensually attributed to representations: they may be positive, negative, or neutrally oriented; they are socially shared and constructed (Jodelet, 1989) besides being cognitive; they play an important role in the individual's mental (re)construction of the world, i.e. in how individuals organise concepts (Mannoni, 1998) and social phenomena (Abric, 1994; Jodelet, 1989); they explain and orient individual behaviour (Moscovici, 1961) and social relationships; and they are changeable in and by the means of interaction (Castellotti, Coste, & Moore, 2001). Within the scope of this study, representations function especially as an hermeneutical (but also functional) concept which allows us to account for subjects' relationships to languages and to the processes underlying their acquisition.

4. The ages of the students attending the third cycle of the Portuguese education system (from the 7th to the 9th grade) vary between the ages of 13 and 15.

5. In this paper, we adopt the term ‘plurilingualism’ as defined by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, understood as an individual's ability to use several languages, distinguishing this concept from ‘multilingualism’, which refers to the multilingual nature of a given society (Council of Europe, 2001, pp. 23–24). However, we will respect other authors' terminology whenever the English term ‘multilingualism’ encompasses the same meaning as the concept of ‘plurilingualism’ here defined.

6. By ‘exolingue communicative settings’ we mean the communicative situations in which the interlocutors do not share the same mother tongue and therefore need to use (and adjust) their socio-affective, cultural, linguistic, and strategic repertoires in order to communicate (see Melo, 2006, for a synthesis).

7. Within the scope of this study, ‘plurilinguality’ is understood as the evolving state of be(com)ing plurilingual (Stegmann, 2007, p. 80).