Becoming Multilingual: Empowering College Students to Learn and Maintain Languages for Life

FAIN: HB-294814-24

Peter Ecke
Arizona Board of Regents (Tucson, AZ 85721-0073)

Research and analysis that will be used to revise an undergraduate course on multilingualism.

In this research, I will (1) analyze 650 pre- and 650 post-course questionnaire responses from students in the general education course “Becoming Multilingual: Learning and Maintaining Two or More Languages” to learn about their language backgrounds, needs, and changing understandings of bi/multilingualism. I will (2) curate humanities resources for students that match their backgrounds and that depict important aspects of bilingualism (e.g., factors affecting accent, language choice, code-switching, identities, acculturation, and family language strategies). The research findings will be used to (a) redesign this course to become better at addressing student needs and incorporating more humanities resources in lectures, discussions, assignments, and assessments and (b) produce an article, conference presentation, and online workshop to share information about the course as a resource for colleagues and their students—especially those at Hispanic serving institutions.