Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 907

Part of Session 197: Urban multilingualism in a context of international mobility (Other abstracts in this session)

Multilingual university students in Vancouver, Canada: Interplays between the local and the global, multilingualism, multiliteracies, and multiple identities.

Authors: Marshall, Steve (1); Moore, Daniele (1); Bemporad, Chiara (2); Spracklin, Arlene (1); Ehlert, Meilan Piao (1)
Submitted by: Marshall, Steve (Simon Fraser University, Canada)

We present data from a longitudinal, qualitative study, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, into the multilingualism and multiliteracies of university students in Vancouver, Canada. Vancouver is a highly multicultural and multilingual city, where one fifth of the people are of Chinese ethnicity and 41% speak a language other than English or French (Statistics Canada, 2008). Many multilingual, transnational students are today entering the city’s higher education institutions, challenging policies and practices in institutions historically grounded in one local language (English) and a local space (Western Canada).

We present findings from five data sets:

[i] semi-structured interviews with 55 multilingual students, in which they describe their multilingualism;

[ii] writing samples (formal, monolingual academic writing; and less formal, multilingual, digital literacies);

[iii] visual representations of multilingualism in participants’ communities (photographs taken by participants);

[iv] recordings of participants’ in-class interactions;

[v] ethnographic field notes taken during classroom observations.

We look for answers to the following research questions:

1. How do our participants understand multilingualism and use languages in the city, between home and the university?

2. To what extent do our participants’ perceptions of multilingualism/ multilingual performances fit into understandings of multilingualism as combined/hybrid rather than discrete languages?

3. What role does identity construction (perceived identities and performed identities) play in participants’ multilingual and multiliterate practices?

4. To what extent are participants’ multilingual practices discursively constructed according to broader social and institutional discourses around multilingualism?

The population movements and changing relations in time and space that have come about with globalization form the backdrop to our analysis – Giddens (1996) suggests that high modernity has brought about a separation of time and space in people’s lives, "time-space distanciation," in which the self and society can be extended globally. Accordingly, we analyze participants’ multilingual practices through several theoretical lenses: the extent to which multilingualism should be understood as combined/hybrid rather than discrete languages (García, 2009; Heller, 2006), and in terms of “translanguaging” (Canagarajah, 2009; García, 2009), in which participants mix languages as they negotiate broader social discourses of multilingualism; and identity construction, performed and negotiated in relation to powerful social and institutional discourses (Benwell & Stokoe, 2006; Canagarajah, 2004; Giddens, 1996).

References:

Benwell, B., & Stokoe, E. (2006). Discourse and identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Canagarajah, S. (2004). Multilingual writers and the struggle for voice in academic discourse. In A. Pavlenko & A. Blackledge (Eds.), Negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts (pp. 266–289). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters

Canagarajah, S. (2009). The plurilingual tradition and the English language in South Asia. AILA Review, 22(1), 5–22.

García, O. (2009). Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Giddens, A. (1996). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press

Heller,M. (2006). Linguistic minorities and modernity: A sociolinguistic ethnography (2nd ed.). New York: Continuum.

Statistics Canada. (2008). Canada’s ethnocultural mosaic, 2006. Retrieved from:

http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census06/analysis/ethnicorigin/pdf/

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Multilingual university students in Vancouver, Canada: Interplays between the local and the global, multilingualism, multiliteracies, and multiple identities.