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Foreign Language Education in Multilingual Classrooms
Edited by Andreas Bonnet and Peter Siemund
[Hamburg Studies on Linguistic Diversity 7] 2018
► pp. 359–380

English as a lingua franca at the multilingual university

A comparison of monolingually and multilingually raised students and instructors

| University of Hamburg, Germany

Through an explorative study, we have begun to examine what other languages can be found at the University of Hamburg and what roles these languages play alongside German and English in university instruction. In the first portion of the data collection process, 1454 students and 341 instructors shared information about their multilingual resources, their attitudes and motivation regarding English as a lingua franca, multilingualism and German as a foreign language via an online questionnaire. Initial results show that multilingually raised participants tended to report higher levels of language proficiency in more languages and exhibit important differences related to their attitudes towards and motivations for learning English compared to their monolingually raised peers.

Keywords: attitudes, English as a lingua franca, motivation, multilingualism, university instruction
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research to date
  • 3.Hypotheses
  • 4.Methods
    • 4.1Procedure
    • 4.2Participants
      • 4.2.1Students
      • 4.2.2Instructors
    • 4.3Instruments
    • 4.4Statistical analysis
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Mother tongues
      • 5.1.1Students
      • 5.1.2Instructors
    • 5.2Self-assessment of language competencies and skills
      • 5.2.1Students vs. instructors
      • 5.2.2Comparisons: Trends amongst multilingually raised vs. monolingually raised participants
    • 5.3Instructors’ teaching-related English skills
  • 6.Discussion
  • Note
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 24 October 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hsld.7.16mue
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