Publications

As our current educational system is facing the challenges of attending to the linguistic and cultural diversity of our classrooms, teacher training needs to focus precisely on providing preservice teachers with the tools to manage these multicultural and multilingual settings. In this sense, language autobiographies are excellent narrative accounts which allow pre-service students to reflect on their language trajectories as well as to reflect and evaluate on their own language learning progress (Melo-Pfeifer & Chick, 2020). Additionally, they also serve to comprehend the trajectories of multilingual selves (Molinié, 2011) and foster language teacher development (Choi, 2013; Pinho, 2019). As autobiographical reflexivity underlines how language learning is intrinsically linked to emotions (Coffey, 2015), pre-service teachers ponder on their own individual story which embraces a student-teacher centered framework (Busch, 2017; Herrera, 2016). Thus, and by using linguistic autobiographies, we can interpret language learning and teaching, power relationships within diglossic communities as well as multilingual identities and the emotions attached to those (Melo-Pfeifer & Chick, 2020). In this chapter, we present the results of an intervention held within the Primary Education Degree at the Faculty of Education and Sports in Vitoria-Gasteiz. As the Basque Autonomous Community has two official languages (Basque and Spanish) most of our students are bilingual. Proficiency in Basque is a requirement to teach at all stages of formal education, and within the education degrees students must take a course on Foreign Language and its Teaching. Amid the diverse evaluation tasks, pre-service teachers write a language autobiography where they reflect on their own language learning experiences as well as on their own identities as bilingual or multilingual selves. Despite the individual nature of this task, students are also expected to edit their peers’ writing piece in a workshop held in class. Thus, we fulfill two goals with these autobiographies: on the one hand, we encourage pre-service teachers’ reflection on their own linguistic experience; on the other, we assess their language learning process. Given the amount of information that these biographies provide, we formulated one research question: how do pre-service teachers reflect on themselves regarding their linguistic background? To answer this question, we collected and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively 65 linguistic autobiographies using SPSS and Nvivo12 Release. We categorized all the data and organized it in dimensions and categories. Results indicate that, generally speaking, pre-service teachers regard multilingualism as something beneficial for themselves. Still there are differences amid them, as many of them underline their difficulties while learning English; whether it was their lack of motivation, or the poor attitudes of their teachers and their methodologies, many of them seem to negatively relate to English. Still, some of them underline its value by establishing a utilitarian point of view. This idea goes along with the use of a minority language such as Basque. While some of them feel emotionally attached to Basque as their home and community language, some others consider it to be an academic language which will be useful in the future.