From the Concept of Mother Tongue to Plurilingual Competence. Representations of Multilingual Identity and Education Based on Linguistic Biographies

Abstract

This paper focuses on some representations that Valencian students of Education have as

regards plurilingualism, language transmission and the construction of identity in linguistic

autobiographies.2 These students are learning to face the challenge of a plurilingual education.

With this in mind, the object of study here has been these learners’ perceptions of the

relationship between identity and education, the process of language acquisition, and different aspects of Valencian sociolinguistic reality. This reality is based on a bilingual educational

system (Valencian-Castilian Spanish), which is official since 1983. More specifically, this paper

centres on two extended concepts students commonly used to express their linguistic identity

as regards their first language and their second language. On the one hand, the use of the

expressions “castellanoparlante” (Castilian Spanish native speaker) and “valencianoparlante”

(Valencian native speaker) is explored. Such usage entails the existence of two unchangeable

ethnolinguistic groups. On the other hand, the different uses of the term “lengua materna”

(mother tongue) are also examined, i.e.: mother tongue as origin (the language or languages

that have been learned first), mother tongue as internal identification (the language or languages

one identifies with) or external identification (language or languages one is identified

with), and mother tongue as competence (the language or languages that one masters) or

function (the language or languages that one uses the most).