Willingness to identify: an exploration of the factors that influence secondary school students’ willingness to identify as multilingual

For decades researchers have debated the criteria for identifying someone as multilingual; however, little is known about how individuals, and particularly school-aged students, subjectively identify themselves as multilingual. In this paper, we therefore seek to explore students’ willingness to identify as multilingual and the factors that influence this. We include demographic factors (i.e. gender and English as an additional language status), contextual factors (i.e. school, year group and whether they are currently studying a language) and, crucially, also factors reported by the students themselves. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected through questionnaires completed by 1,280 Year 8 (age 12-13) and Year 10 (age 14-15) students from seven state-funded secondary schools in England. From the findings we propose a preliminary model of willingness to identify as multilingual, which we suggest is primarily an experiential and evaluative state and an important precursor to fully claiming a multilingual identity. This is underpinned by the crucial role played by home and particularly school contexts in developing students’ language knowledge and the mediating role of students’ evaluations of their language proficiency. We end by reflecting on the possible links between willingness to identify as multilingual and multilingual identity more broadly.