Receptive multilingualism at school: an uneven playing ground?

ABSTRACT

In this article, we present an analysis of individual factors that influence how well a person can read and understand a text in an unfamiliar, but closely related language – the basis of the so-called teaching of intercomprehension. Our work analyzes these relations from two normally separate perspectives. The first perspective focuses on how individual linguistic profiles affect skills in receptive multilingualism, while the second examines the influence of personality traits on these abilities, an aspect that has not yet been studied in relation to receptive multilingualism. It also discusses the effect of a student's educational background, a major factor for success at school. 180 lower secondary students were asked to perform a task in receptive multilingualism; this task was followed by a psychometric personality test and questions designed to ascertain the linguistic background of the students, their attitude toward language learning, and their interest in the task. The results permit us to identify individual factors that exert more (and less) influence on the processes at work in receptive multilingualism, including personality traits (in particular extroversion and openness to new experiences) and attitudes toward language learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching of intercomprehension
• receptive multilingualism
• big five personality traits
• individual differences

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Thomas Studer (University of Fribourg) for his advices all along the project, Raphael Berthele and Jan Vanhove (University of Fribourg) for sharing their expertise on receptive multilingualism, and Phillipe Genoud (University of Fribourg) for his help on personality questionnaires and test construction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. It could be argued that the participants did not differentiate the theme and the task itself in their ratings, merging both dimensions of evaluation. This explanation is, however, not convincing, as the results of the SEM models show that these questions measured two different constructs.