Metalinguistic Awareness and Multilingualism in the Norwegian EFL Classroom: An Untapped Resource?

Abstract

Norway’s linguistic diversity has increased at a rapid pace over the past several decades. Many students who speak minority languages at home begin school already bilingual in Norwegian and their home language(s), which has implications for language instruction. Speaking two or more languages can be a resource in acquiring additional languages, and previous research has shown that bilinguals can be at an advantage compared with monolingual peers. In the English classroom in Norway, students’ knowledge of other languages has the potential to be a resource, but many teachers are not yet sure how best to draw on this prior linguistic knowledge. Despite positive views about multilingualism, they may feel that they lack more detailed knowledge about multilingualism or other languages that would help them make use of students’ full linguistic repertoires. This article-based doctoral thesis, part of the project Acquisition of English in the Multilingual Classroom funded by the Research Council of Norway (2018–2023), considers multilingualism in the EFL classroom in Norway in grades 5–7, the final three years of primary school. The main research question the thesis investigates is: How does the linguistic and metalinguistic knowledge of multilingual students acquiring English as a third language (L3) compare to that of their peers with a majoritylanguage background acquiring English as a second language (L2)? The three articles examine linguistic knowledge of specific grammatical properties of English as well as metalinguistic awareness, comparing multilingual students (the Multilingual group) to bilingual students with an L1 Norwegian background (the L1 Norwegian group) to see if the Multilingual students show any advantages. A third linguistic group was included in Articles 1 and 2 in order to accurately reflect the linguistic makeup of the classrooms: an English group comprised of students who reported English as one of their home languages. Article 1 assessed linguistic knowledge of verbal morphosyntax in English through a written test, with 110 participants. The study contributed to the overarching goal to assess metalinguistic awareness as explicit linguistic knowledge is a component of metalinguistic awareness. I investigated two grammatical structures which have previously shown to be susceptible to non-facilitative crosslinguistic influence from Norwegian, namely, verb placement in verb second (V2) conditions and present tense subject-verb agreement. Emerging multilingual students acquiring English as an L3 have at least two potential sources of crosslinguistic influence: Norwegian and their (other) home language(s). Students’ knowledge of languages other than Norwegian can potentially lead to facilitative crosslinguistic influence of English grammatical structures. A statistical analysis of the test scores showed that comparing the group means for each linguistic group showed no significant difference between the L1 Norwegian group and the Multilingual group, but a linear regression controlling for grade level and academic achievement showed that membership in the Multilingual group significantly predicted higher performance than membership in the L1 Norwegian group after these variables were controlled for. Article 2 measured metalinguistic awareness with an adapted version of the MAT-2 by Pinto et al. (1999). The adaptation was a written test distributed to 120 participants. The test was comprised of questions measuring linguistic knowledge of English sentences as well as metalinguistic questions prompting the students to explain the responses they gave to the linguistic questions. Based on prior research which showed the importance of the testing language in assessing metalinguistic awareness among bi- and multilingual populations, I chose a bilingual approach to adapting the English translation of the MAT-2, in which the sentences presented for analysis were all in English, but all test instructions and questions were presented in both English and Norwegian, with participants being explicitly allowed to write their responses in either language. Students’ use of metalanguage was low, contributing to relatively low scores across the board. A statistical analysis of the test scores showed that a comparison of group means for each linguistic group showed no significant differences, but a linear regression controlling for grade level and academic achievement showed that membership in the Multilingual group significantly predicted a higher score compared to membership in the L1 Norwegian group after these variables were controlled for. Article 3 drew on both tests to explore metalinguistic awareness among 12 students in grade 6 through the use of oral tasks with a think-aloud protocol. Six of the students belonged to the Multilingual group (called the “L1 Other” group in the article) and the other six belonged to the L1 Norwegian group. Students worked together in pairs on two different tasks: one targeting phonological awareness and another targeting grammatical awareness. The materials for the phonological awareness task were adapted from the phonemic segmentation task of the MAT-2. Students were shown six different pairs of words in English in sequence and were asked to discuss the similarities and differences between each word pair. The second task was comprised of four sentences in English taken from the test of morphosyntax developed for Article 1, two of which were grammatical and two of which were ungrammatical. They were instructed to discuss whether the sentences were grammatical or not, and what they would change if they thought the sentences were ungrammatical. Comparing the performance of the three L1 Other (Multilingual) pairs to the L1 Norwegian pairs, there was no difference in performance on the phonological awareness task, but the L1 Other (Multilingual) group outperformed the L1 Norwegian group on the grammatical awareness task. As in Article 2, students’ use of metalanguage was low. The studies presented in the articles show that multilingual students significantly outperformed bilingual L1 Norwegian students on some of the task types, but not all, and only after grade level and academic achievement were controlled for. Students’ knowledge of metalanguage was low, regardless of which linguistic group they belonged to. The thesis discusses the implications for classroom practice and teacher education, including how incorporating multilingual pedagogies into English instruction has the potential to help all students develop greater metalinguistic awareness on the path to becoming speakers of more than one language.