While interest in multilingualism is growing, in the field of motivation little research has examined the role played by learners' multilingual selves in constructing their motivation to learn a foreign language other than English (LOTE). Based on a dynamic model of the L2 Motivational Self System, this study explores how Chinese undergraduates'…

In the geographies where various languages are spoken, individuals may have to experience learning one or more languages to fulfil their needs. When societies who live together and use various language groups make contact with people who use other language groups and cultures, they have to interact with each other. This mutual effect is then…

Multilingual perspectives have become the mainstream research paradigm in language motivation studies lately. The motivational interplay between English and French, as two important foreign languages in China, has received little academic attention, but this topic is becoming increasingly significant for language education in the era of global…

This article reports on an empirical study of L3 Mandarin, aiming to shed light on transfer effects and their interaction with other factors throughout the L3 acquisition trajectory. A fill-in-the-blank task was employed to examine L2 and L3 acquisition of three types of Mandarin sentence-final particle clusters. Participants in the study were…

Most speakers' first language (L1) in Hong Kong and Guangdong China is Cantonese. Even though the L1 of both Guangdong Cantonese speakers and Hong Kong Cantonese speakers is the same, their second languages (L2) belong to different language families. Previous studies have pointed out that L2 status in third language (L3) acquisition is a salient…

In recent years, language portraits (LPs) have emerged as a valuable tool for visually representing multilingual learners' linguistic repertoires. However, previous studies have primarily relied on traditional methods of inviting participants to sketch their language portraits on paper using pens and crayons. In this paper, we propose the use of…

To date the research narrative about L2 identities has been dominated by studies on English language learning in the Anglosphere and very little existing empirical work situates the Global South as a point of departure to explore aspirations for learning languages other than English amongst international students and migrants. This article adopts…

Previous studies of affordance have not explored in detail how a special type of affordance -- institutional affordance -- worked in multilingualism. By drawing empirical voices of students, this study investigates how institutional affordance supplied by a collegiate multilingual education policy was perceived and utilised by students. A thematic…

This study explored the language learning motivation of a small group of five university students in the UK through the constructs of Dornyei's L2 Motivational Self System and Henry's notion of 'the ideal multilingual self'. The five participants, all successful language learners at school, chose to specialise in modern languages at university and…

While the relationship between language experience and foreign language aptitude (FLA) has been studied extensively, little is known about the underlying intermediate link between them. This study investigates whether multilingual learning experience is correlated with FLA and whether working memory (WM) mediates this relationship. A total of 93…

This study employs a mixed-methods design to explore the attitudes and expressed beliefs of Chinese postgraduate students regarding the strategic use of their entire range of languages in English academic writing (EAW). The survey findings suggest that while students generally accept the idea of mixing languages during the writing process, they…

As a topic of rising interest, language teacher motivation has been studied through various lenses and across different contexts over recent years. Yet, relatively scant attention has been paid to Chinese language teachers teaching overseas. Using Q methodology and supplementary interview data, this study investigated the motivational profiles of…

This paper reports on a study that investigates the impact of learning multiple foreign languages on learners' social emotional competence development as mediated by the number of foreign languages and the recency of the learning experience. A questionnaire survey that involved 465 Chinese learners of foreign languages was administered that…

Whilst the existing literature on multilingual learning in curriculum has properly addressed a variety of instructional factors, few studies have been dedicated to investigating the influence of institutionalisation as a contextual, power-laden factor on multilingual curriculum which in turn influences multilingual learning. To fill this gap, this…

Due to the current status of English as a lingua franca in numerous domains, increasing attention has been directed toward the economic potential of English. However, research on languages other than English from an economic perspective remains limited. This study aims to address this gap by examining the labor market demand for Japanese language…