Understanding multilingual self for language minority students from Asia and Europe

What is it about?

Despite the extant literature, studies on how multilingual learners' motivations for L1, L2, and L3 co-evolve and shape a multilingual self is scant. Drawing on the L2 Motivational Self System and dynamic-ecological perspectives, we make an attempt to fill this research gap. We conceptualize motivation as emergent from interactions among ideal/ought-to selves, lived experiences, and contextual affordances. Interviews with 15 language-minority learners from Thailand, Europe, and Hong Kong reveal coupled motivational dynamics: L2 English often forms a stable attractor in high-capital ecologies (e.g., Hong Kong), while L3 (Japanese/Chinese) tends to remain vulnerable unless identity relevance, utility, and participation intensify. In Thailand, rising instrumental value of Chinese perturbs Ought-to-dominated English trajectories, enabling L3 stabilization. European learners in China face participation constraints that keep L3 Chinese peripheral despite immersion, whereas typological proximity (e.g., English-French) supports co-stability via metalinguistic transfer. We propose the Multilingual Self as a Coupled Attractor System, detailing stability gradients and capital/linguistic/participation couplings, and offer suggestions for pedagogical interventions to deepen vulnerable basins and sustain balanced multilingual development.

Featured Image

Photo by Ling App on Unsplash

Photo by Ling App on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Despite the extant literature, studies on how multilingual learners' motivations for L1, L2, and L3 co-evolve and shape a multilingual self is scant. Drawing on the L2 Motivational Self System and dynamic-ecological perspectives, we make an attempt to fill this research gap. We conceptualize motivation as emergent from interactions among ideal/ought-to selves, lived experiences, and contextual affordances. Interviews with 15 language-minority learners from Thailand, Europe, and Hong Kong reveal coupled motivational dynamics: L2 English often forms a stable attractor in high-capital ecologies (e.g., Hong Kong), while L3 (Japanese/Chinese) tends to remain vulnerable unless identity relevance, utility, and participation intensify. In Thailand, rising instrumental value of Chinese perturbs Ought-to-dominated English trajectories, enabling L3 stabilization. European learners in China face participation constraints that keep L3 Chinese peripheral despite immersion, whereas typological proximity (e.g., English-French) supports co-stability via metalinguistic transfer. We propose the Multilingual Self as a Coupled Attractor System, detailing stability gradients and capital/linguistic/participation couplings, and offer suggestions for pedagogical interventions to deepen vulnerable basins and sustain balanced multilingual development.

Perspectives