Fear, shame, and the multilingual repertoire: What students’ language maps reveal about the lived experience of language

Research on the affective dimensions of multilingual experience has focused predominantly on language anxiety as a measurable individual trait located in the target language and studied through self-report surveys and interviews. These verbal methods capture what students can articulate but not how they materialise emotion through semiotic design, and the embodied, socially produced character of fear and shame across the wider repertoire has received comparatively little attention. This paper addresses both gaps through a multimodal social semiotic analysis of eight language mapping artefacts produced by Year 11 EAL/D students with refugee and migrant backgrounds in a Melbourne secondary school. Drawing on Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) visual grammar, Busch’s (2017, 2018) lived experience of language, and Ahmed’s (2004) affect theory, it examines how design choices, colour, spatial composition, drawn bodies, and textual-visual orchestration, materialise fear and shame across students’ repertoires. Fear and shame circulate across the whole repertoire, produced wherever linguistic norms are enforced by interlocutors with evaluative authority, and students construct them as spatially distributed, embodied, and repertoire-wide in ways verbal data alone rarely makes visible. The paper extends multimodal social semiotics into the affective domain and demonstrates the value of language mapping for accessing the lived experience of language in education.