Marie-Françoise Narcy-Combes

From multilingualism to plurilingualism: university students’ beliefs about language learning in a monolingual context

The study aims to highlight the representations that university students have about plurilingualism, in order to research how they can develop plurilingual competences in an essentially monolingual French academic setting. It is based on a survey of 684 students enrolled in two foreign language programmes across two year levels (first and fourth years) at the University of Nantes (France). The questionnaire we have designed includes 26 items which explicitly refer to, on the one hand, a plurilingual posture and, on the other hand, a monolingual posture. The path analysis shows that advanced students who learn several languages have a more plurilingual posture than beginners or those who learn fewer languages. Differences about the two investigated programmes are discussed.

Implementing a plurilingual programme in a university in France

ABSTRACT This contribution gives an account of the results of an action research in which a task-based plurilingual programme was implemented with postgraduate students of Foreign Languages and International Business. Using a mixed-methods approach, combining questionnaire, interview and observation data, we sought to explore the degree to which the programme was accepted by the students; how it may have modified the representations they have of languages, language learning and plurilingualism; and how it contributed to their language development. The results of the study allowed us to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats involved in implementing a plurilingual programme for university students in a predominately monolingual area. The strengths include the theoretical validity of the programme design and the choice of the sample; the weakness inherent in the task design was the lack of necessity for collaborative learning techniques; the threats are sociocultural and contextual in nature in that French students generally do not appreciate teamwork and prefer to work individually; and the opportunities for further development lie in positive student representations of the social value of the programme, the intercultural dimension and their representations of language acquisition and plurilingualism which, for the majority, align with current theories.