Abstract
From the perspective of language-as-a-resource it seems logical that multilingual students would use their available languages to engage with conceptually challenging academic texts and contexts. Hornberger’s continua of biliteracy model provides a framework within which the use of more than one academic language can be described. This model is used as a possible heuristic to investigate students’ language practices at higher education level. Building on an earlier study conducted with South African students by van der Walt and Dornbrack, this chapter reports on five multilingual students who study at a German university and who volunteered to be interviewed about their learning practices. This qualitative study makes no claims for multilingual students in general but speculates on the possibility of ‘active biliteracy’ as a prerequisite for multilinguals to use their languages for learning purposes. In the context of the continua of biliteracy model, the concept of active biliteracy is fleshed out as a notion that could prove useful in explaining why some students maintain an almost diglossic separation between academic and social language use.
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Notes
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Descendants of ethnic Germans who emigrated to Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mostly to the Lower Volga. Many of them were sent to Kazakhstan by Stalin during WWII. Since the 1980s they were allowed to leave the Soviet Union and its successor states and many of them repatriated to Germany.
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Appendix
Appendix
Semi-structured Interview Schedule: Bilingual Learning
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1.
Language background:
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(a)
Home
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(b)
Language use at school – school exit examination results
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(c)
Language use at university
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(a)
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2.
What kind of student are you? What is your average score across modules?
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3.
Growing up:
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(a)
Parents’/extended family’s use of language?
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(b)
Were you read to? Encouraged to read? Did this happen in different languages?
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(c)
What did you read? In which languages?
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(d)
Your earliest memory of another language/different languages?
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(a)
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4.
Parents’/adults’ influence on reading? Was there easy access to books in your home?
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5.
Study habits: parents helped with homework?
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6.
How do you study? Summarise? Memorise?
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7.
If you struggled to understand difficult academic texts, what did you do?
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8.
Do you have different patterns of study in different languages?
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9.
Do you find some texts more difficult than others? Why? How do you cope?
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10.
Do you translate when reading/studying/writing?
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11.
Your advice to first year students in your position:
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(a)
The best way to deal with complex texts/assignments?
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(b)
Best way to study material not in L1 or best language?
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(a)
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van der Walt, C. (2013). Active Biliteracy? Students Taking Decisions About Using Languages for Academic Purposes. In: Haberland, H., Lønsmann, D., Preisler, B. (eds) Language Alternation, Language Choice and Language Encounter in International Tertiary Education. Multilingual Education, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6476-7_5
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