Page 61 - Compétences plurilingues : perspectives et actions / Plurilingual competencies: perspectives and actions

Data Collection and Analysis

Data Collection and Analysis

Participants were asked to maintain a learner diary throughout the language tandem course
and write a re lection at the end. Learner diaries documented activities and the length of
their sessions. Semi-structured interviews were conducted individually with each partici-
pant. The interviews delved into their language background, language learning journey, and
perceptions of positive language interaction. The open-ended interview questions aimed
to elicit narratives about the participants’ motivations, experiences, and feelings related to
plurilingualism and tandem language learning. Moreover, a forty- ive-minute recording of
their tandem session documented the communication dynamics throughout the tandem in-
teractions. A thorough conversation analysis of all the submitted recordings surpasses the
current scope of this paper and will be discussed in a forthcoming study. Table 1 summa-
rizes the data sources.

Tab. 1. Data sources
Final Re lection Learner Diary Interview Lesson
Recording
Ella 312 words in Czech 374 words in Czech 20 minutes in English 45 minutes
2920 words (incl. questions)
Aneta 376 words in Czech 382 words in English 22 minutes in Czech
3815 words (incl. questions)
Participantssubmittedtheir coursere lectionsand learnerdiariesinWorddocuments. Sub-
sequently, the interviews were transcribed. All the supplied data were anonymized before
̌
́
being securely archived within the Zenodo database (Prevratilova, 2023), where they can
́
be retrieved for future research.
The data analysis focused on examining the central elements of investigation: participants’
motivation to embrace plurilingualism and their PPLI, along with the emergence of various
languages during their tandem sessions. The origins of PPLI and motivation were evident in
the interview transcripts, where the questions addressed them directly. Conversely, scru-
tinizing the diaries indicated speci ic plurilingual approaches that warrant further explo-
ration in the conversation analysis of lesson recordings. For the preliminary analysis, two
sessions were transcribed (those that focused on Czech). A timeline of languages used in
the sessions demonstrated the low of languages, showcasing the transitions and dynamic
exchanges between them.
Results

Participants’ Language Background and Tandem Organisation

Ella’s language background was rich, as shown in Table 2 below. She was born in Toronto,
and her native language was English, the only language they spoke at home. At a low age,
in kindergarten, she started learning French as the second of icial language in Canada. Her
family moved to the USA when she was seven years old. As a part of the US school curricu-
lum, she took one year of Spanish in addition to French. In the seventh grade (aged 11),
she opted for French when choosing between French and Spanish due to her family in the

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