‘I don’t feel like I’m studying languages anymore’. Exploring change in higher education students’ learner beliefs during multilingual language studies

Abstract

To educate multilingual global citizens and follow the multilingual turn in language education, universities are faced with the challenge of developing their language pedagogies. This article reports on a study conducted in the context of university language studies that take a multilingual perspective to learning languages for academic and professional purposes. Although multilingual pedagogies have been widely developed in what could be traditionally considered as bilingual education, practical implementations are rarer when considering students that generally have one home language but study multiple foreign languages. To assess the effects of multilingual teaching in this kind of context, the present longitudinal, discursive study examines changes in university students’ beliefs about language learning during their studies. The findings show a shift towards perceiving language more as a means of communication rather than a school subject during the research period, although this shift was clearest for English. In addition, there were small signs of multilingual perspectives towards language learning. The study indicates that there are advantages to multilingual pedagogies in higher education. The article discusses challenges in university language pedagogies and gives suggestions for further development of multilingual teaching.