Page 63 - Compétences plurilingues : perspectives et actions / Plurilingual competencies: perspectives and actions

Perception of Language Interaction

Perception of Language Interaction

As evident from their language backgrounds, both participants had ample experience in
acquiring at least three foreign languages. The inquiry into PPLI prompted Ella to draw
upon her extensive linguistic repertoire, concisely captured in the following paragraph:
I think when I started learning Czech, […] I realized how different Czech is from French and English. […] French and
English are pretty similar, so many words, the grammar structure, vocabulary, it really made it smoother to learn
it, and so then learning Czech was like, “Oh, this is very different! There are no helpful hints for you to realize, okay,
confortable is comfortable, wow, easy.” […] No, they’re very different. And pronunciation, too, is harder. It’s sometimes
like saying a sentence in Czech is like doing a tongue twister, whereas in French, […] the accent is not perfect, but it’s
somehow smoother to transition into. And the same thing with German – just from looking at some basic vocabulary
words and even listening to my friend speak with her mom, […] I can kind of guess what, if it’s simple, […] because so
many of their words and grammar are similar to English.
This re lective excerpt summarizes her comparisons across languages, illuminating how she
navigated her linguistic journey, offering a wide potential for plurilingual approach in her
learning experience.
Adding to the discourse, she pointed out that even though she had only studied Spanish for
a year, it gave her insights into shared linguistic traits among these languages. She proposed
that a reasonable pro iciency level in French might enable her to decipher basic sentences
in Spanish. Similarly, she speculated that familiarity with English and German in terms of
structure and vocabulary could facilitate a smoother learning process compared to Czech.
Conversely, her encounter with Czech revealed a distinct linguistic paradigm, diverging sig-
ni icantly from her prior language experiences.
Aneta, on the other hand, seemed to perceive the languages she learned more isolated when
she studied them at school:
At that time, the connection just wasn’t there; I didn’t realize it because [my] English wasn’t that good, I didn’t even
look for it [the interaction of languages] because it seems to me that when we were learning French, the teacher never
mentioned: Here it’s similar to English, or here it’s different in English. It was just English only – French only.

Despite disparities in teaching styles, she recognized that her grasp of French positively im-
pacted her learning Spanish. She emphasized the signi icance of tandem sessions with Ella
in enhancing her ability to discern differences and similarities. Through this collaborative
exchange, she gained insights by learning French through English, with Ella adeptly pointing
out linguistic nuances:

I just feel like I was more aware of that [interaction of languages] with Ella. She said to me, for example, […] that there
may be a sentence similar to English in some way. That English people would say it similarly, but only in English […],
so it was only through her and our tandems that I became more aware of it because I was learning French through
English with Ella, I think.
The references to the perceived lack of language interaction highlight the signi icance of
educators’ role in fostering awareness of plurilingual education.
While Aneta acknowledged that her awareness of positive language interaction had devel-
oped relatively recently through her tandem sessions, she also underscored the constructive
impact of her prior language learning experiences on her approach and strategies. She ex-
pressed that her pro iciency in acquiring languages in the past had a favourable in luence
on her current language learning methods, suggesting that the achievements she attained

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