Pre-service teachers’ narratives about their lived experience of language

Abstract

Drawing on recent developments within sociolinguistics, the objective of the current article is to explore how six pre-service teachers (PSTs) discursively positioned themselves and ‘the multilingual’ across two narrating events focused on their lived experience of language. The narrating events were focus groups with other PSTs (N = 24) and the participants’ linguistic autobiographies (n = 6). A narrative analysis across the two events demonstrated how the six PSTs used indexical cues to discursively position themselves as monolingual speakers of Norwegian in contrast with ‘multilinguals’ as speakers of ‘other languages’. Based on these findings, the article argues that the PSTs do not have an adequate understanding or vocabulary to discuss multilingualism in education, leading them to present ‘the multilingual’ as someone radically different from themselves. However, teacher educators can take PSTs’ lived experience of language as a point of departure for discussing multilingualism in education and challenging the traditional understandings of multilingualism.