Journal
JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUAL AND MULTICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
Volume 42, Issue 2, Pages 137-151Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2020.1715988
Keywords
Adolescent speech; language proficiency; self-assessment; multilingual adolescents; referee design; audience design
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Swedish adolescents reflect upon and self-assess their language proficiencies through different reference points, such as comparing their own proficiency with others and formal grading in school. When assessing Swedish, they focus on 'good' and 'bad' language as well as standard language ideologies and their speech community, while reflecting on other languages is more influenced by peer group and speech community.
Standard language cultures are characterised by beliefs in idealised standard forms of the language in question. In this paper, these beliefs are connected to the concepts of referee design and speech community, through analysis of how Swedish adolescents reflect upon and self-assess their language proficiencies. The data consist of interviews where 111 participants self-assess their Swedish, English and additional home languages. During the self-assessment, participants use different points of reference when reflecting on the different languages in their repertoires. Four main categories of answers are found, all relating to an absent referee in some manner: the participants' evaluations of other people's language proficiency compared to their own; their proficiency in other languages; their evaluation of their proficiency in relation to formal grading and feedback given in school; and their own experiences of their limitations and abilities in different situations. When assessing Swedish, participants display attitudes towards 'good' and 'bad' language and contextualise their proficiency in a way that focuses on standard language ideologies and their speech community. The same pattern does not occur when participants reflect on their other languages, indicating the important role that the peer group and speech community have in creating and facilitating these ideologies.
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