A language portrait study of the language awareness of speech therapy and audiology professionals in South Africa

For this study, Pfeiffer collected 20 language portraits from multilingual participants who are speech therapy or speech audiology professionals in South Africa with the portrait-corpus instrument. Within the Dynamic Model of Multilingualism (DMM), it is argued that the communicative needs of people drive the development of their multilingual system. Speech therapists and audiologists in South Africa engage in complex multilingual professional communication, and they receive linguistic training. The aim of the study is to evaluate the usefulness of the portrait-corpus instrument to garner information about the meta- and crosslinguistic awareness of multilingual participants. Evidence from using the portrait-corpus instrument indicates that for the participants in this study (language professionals), references to metalinguistic awareness are not prominent, and references to crosslinguistic awareness are very prominent, similar to other studies with multilingual students. Within the context of this small sample of multilingual clinicians, the cautious conclusion is that the written portrait narratives elicited few explicit metalinguistic reflections, suggesting that the portrait-corpus approach might not be the most effective instrument for investigating metalinguistic awareness.