Attitudes toward trilingualism: a survey study of Chinese Mongolian university students

ABSTRACT

Trilingualism is a powerful fact of life in many parts of the world, including most autonomous regions inhabited by minority ethnic groups in China. Although much research has been conducted on the language attitudes of stakeholders from minority ethnic groups, the attitudinal object is usually an individual language (e.g. the ethnic language, the national language, or a foreign language). Few empirical studies have investigated ‘trilingualism’ as an attitudinal object. Aiming to narrow this gap, the present study examined the attitudes toward trilingualism of students from four Chinese universities and the influence of selected sociobiographical variables on their attitudes. An exploratory factor analysis showed the ‘trilingualism attitudes’ scale, developed for use in the present study and possibly beyond, to be unidimensional, with sufficient reliability (Cronbach alpha = .83). On this scale, the participants (N = 310) achieved a mean score of 4.52 (out of five), reflecting very favourable attitudes toward trilingualism. Furthermore, regression analyses identified ‘attitudes toward non-ethnic languages (viz. Putonghua and English)’, ‘attitudes toward the ethnic language (viz. Mongolian)’, and gender as statistically significant predictors for attitudes toward trilingualism, respectively explaining 20%, 5.5%, and 1.3% of the trilingualism attitudes variance. Policy and research implications were also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Language attitudes
• attitudes toward trilingualism
• ethnic minorities
• additive trilingualism
• Chinese Mongolians
• effect size

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to extend their thanks to the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper. All remaining inadequacies are the authors’ responsibility. The writing of this paper was supported by the Educational Science Research Fund of Jiangsu Province (D/2018/01/18).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 There is some overlap between the second and third lines of research. It appears that the former tends to employ more well-established instruments, although this is not explicitly acknowledged by Ianos et al. (2017).

2 Dewaele and Li’s (2013) definition of ‘multilingualism’ is so flexible that it encompasses bilingualism, trilingualism, and other variants. We are aware that some researchers underscore the difference between bilingualism and trilingualism, because the mechanism of ‘multilingual acquisition’ (Cenoz 1997, 278), which involve three or more languages, is more diverse and complex than that of bilingual acquisition (see also Jessner 2006; Pfenninger 2014).

3 In Web of Science, as of November 2018, a search with the keyword/theme ‘attitude(s) toward(s) trilingualism/multilingualism’ returned only five papers, and search with the keyword/theme ‘belief(s) about trilingualism/multilingualism’ returned only two papers. This literature search was not meant to be exhaustive, as other useful academic databases (e.g. Scopus) were not covered. Exhaustive literature search is useful for meta-analytic reviews.

4 For obvious reasons, studies (e.g. Wei 2011; Ng and Zhao 2015) targeting majority-language Han Chinese are not included in this review.

5 According to the history of their languages’ writing systems, China’s minorities can be categorised into three types. Type 1 includes the Korean, Kazak, Mongolian, Tibetan and Uygur that had functional writing systems broadly used before the founding of China in 1949. Type 2 comprises the Dai, Jingpo, Kisu, Lahu, Miao, Naxi, Va and Yi, all of whom had functional writing systems of limited usage before 1949. The remaining 42 groups belong to Type 3, who had no fully functional writing systems prior to 1949 (Zhou 2000; Yang 2005).

6 They are Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR), Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Tibetan Autonomous Region, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Each autonomous region is equivalent to a province in China. ‘Autonomous’ primarily means that there is increased local control over the administration of resources, tax, birth planning, education, legal jurisdiction, and religious expression; in addition to these five autonomous regions, there are 32 autonomous prefectures, 96 autonomous counties and banners, and numerous autonomous villages within the Han-dominant provinces (Lin 1997, 193).

7 Following Dewaele and Li (2013), in most parts of this paper we use the terms ‘multilingualism and multilingual’ ‘in a broad, inclusive sense, in such a way that they include the concepts of bilingualism and bilingual within their respective ambits’ (Aronin and Singleton 2012, 7). But in several of places in this paper, ‘bilingual’ is inevitable because the authors of the cited sources use this wording.

8 In addition to the Chinese Mongolians, the other ethnic groups that receive regular bilingual education provision include Korans, Tibetans, Uyghurs and Kazaks; some minority groups (e.g. Dai, Jingpo, and Lisu) receive occasional bilingual education provision whereas others receive (e.g. Dong, Yao, and Tujia) limited or none bilingual education provision (Zhou 2000; Yang 2005).

Additional information

Funding

The writing of this paper was supported by the Educational Science Research Fund of Jiangsu Province [grant number D/2018/01/18].