Abstract
The Italian province of South Tyrol is known for being trilingual, officially recognizing the languages German, Italian and Ladin. However, individual linguistic repertoires of secondary school students in the area were shown to be more complex (Engel & Hoffmann, 2016). Nevertheless, most research in South Tyrol has focused on German and Italian and has failed to tend to language ideologies and the emotional experience of language, who profoundly shape linguistic repertoires (Busch, 2015).
In my project, I will investigate how students of secondary schools (age 12-18) in South Tyrol perceive and experience their linguistic repertoires. I have conducted qualitative interviews with 24 students selected from 240 students who also took part in a larger project on linguistic repertoires. The participants were asked to colour a language portrait (Busch, 2018), serving as an opening for an interview on their language biographies. I will analyze these interviews using a framework for the reconstruction of narrative identities developed by Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann (2004) on the basis of central tenets of discursive psychology, conversation analysis and positioning analysis. I thus aim to shed light on the students’ positionings towards the linguistic resources that make up their repertoires, and on the role that emotional experience and language ideologies play in these positionings.
References
Busch, B. (2015). Expanding the Notion of the Linguistic Repertoire : On the Concept of Spracherleben — The Lived Experience of Language. Applied Linguistics, 1–20.
Busch, B. (2018). Das Sprachenportrait in der Mehrsprachigkeitsforschung. Osnabrücker Beiträge Zur Sprachtheorie.
Engel, D., & Hoffmann, M. (2016). Zum Umgang mit Sprachenvielfalt an Südtiroler Schulen - Das Südtiroler Kooperationsprojekt “Sprachenvielfalt macht Schule” stellt sich vor. In H. Drumbl, G. de Carvalho, & J. Klinner (Eds.), IDT 2013: Sprachenpolitik und Sprachenvielfalt (pp. 7–20). Bozen: bu,press.
Lucius-Hoene, G., & Deppermann, A. (2004). Rekonstruktion narrativer Identität: ein Arbeitsbuch zur Analyse narrativer Interviews (2nd ed.). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.