Migrant Students' Attitudes to Trilingualism and Diversity

Migration processes are contributing to shaping multilingual classrooms in Europe. This study presents the case of lower-secondary migrant students in France for whom French is a second language (FSL), English a foreign language (EFL), Moroccan Arabic mainly their L1 and Italian mostly their first language of schooling (LSchool1). Moroccan Arabic and Italian are both vehicular languages in FLS classes. In this plurilingual context, the present study had the twofold aim of assessing students’ attitude towards multiple language acquisition and diversity, in addition to fostering diversity as endorsed by the CEFR, also in terms of homoparentality. The hypothesis was that acceptance of diversity may be enhanced when learners’ linguistic repertoires and cultures are constructively exploited by adopting an intercultural point of view. This, in turn, could be sup- ported by a critical discourse analysis of trilingual texts (French, Italian, English). To this end, data on attitudes to trilingualism and diversity were collected using an open-ended questionnaire. Two translation tasks designed to gauge intercultural and plurilingual competences with a focus on homoparentality were also administered. Questionnaire results revealed motivation in learning more languages, positive awareness of plurilingual competence while diversity was not perceived as a problem. No difficulties or reactions towards homoparentality were recorded in the first translation-based task designed in a trilingual version of a non-mainstream children’s picture book; difficulties in the second task were mainly due to the processing of two French idiomatic multi-word expressions (MWEs) resulting from the author’s biased choice of specialized lexis. Even in this case, no negative reactions towards homoparentality were recorded.