Active Biliteracy? Students Taking Decisions About Using Languages for Academic Purposes

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.KeywordsHigh Education InstitutionHome LanguageAcademic TaskLanguage BackgroundLinguistic ResourceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.