Upper secondary school students’ plurilingual identity in the trilingual province of South Tyrol

This study aims to explore the plurilingual identity of upper secondary school students in the trilingual Italian province of South Tyrol. While previous research on South Tyrolean schools has mainly explored students’ and teachers’ bilingual practices, competencies and beliefs involving Italian and German, recent studies have increasingly focused on plurilingualism in the classroom. However, no research has yet investigated upper secondary school students’ ideal plurilingual self, their open-mindedness, or how individual factors may influence these aspects. To address this gap, a questionnaire was administered to 42 upper secondary school students in South Tyrol. The questionnaire examined students’ beliefs about the benefits of plurilingualism, open-mindedness, and ideal plurilingual self by employing three 5-point Likert scales from the Ungspråk questionnaire (Haukås et al., 2021b). Individual factors were assessed through items adapted from both the Ungspråk questionnaire (Haukås et al., 2021b) and the SMS Online Questionnaire on Plurilingual Education (Guarda et al., forthcoming). Findings indicate that students’ perceptions to the three scales are generally positive with the Open-Mindedness scale receiving the highest average scores. Among the individual factors examined, the type of upper secondary school was the only significant variable associated with both the Beliefs About the Benefits of Plurilingualism and Ideal Plurilingual Self scales, with students enrolled in the linguistic track reporting higher scores. Moreover, self-identification as plurilingual significantly influenced responses on the Ideal Plurilingual Self scale. Finally, the study provides qualitative insights into students’ diverse linguistic repertoires and their definitions of plurilingualism, which were found to be linked to both their self-identification as plurilingual individuals and to the reasons they provided for identifying, or not identifying, as such.