This paper uses reflective drawing (Molinié 2009) to explore visual representations of multilingualism among Filipino migrants in New Zealand and Anglophone migrants in Luxembourg. This method asks participants to draw their language experiences and reflect on these in interview, eliciting especially the emotional aspects of people’s relationships to language (Busch 2012). While the 24 participants are all first generation migrants, they differ in an important respect: the Filipino participants have migrated from a multilingual to a (dominantly) monolingual society, and the Anglophone participants (with a mix of Canadian, New Zealand and British backgrounds) from a monolingual to a multilingual society. Discourse analysis of the drawings and interviews (Rose 2016) reveals ease and fluidity among the Filipino participants in using their multiple language resources in New Zealand. The participants’ representations of translanguaging (Canagarajah 2011) recall the societal multilingualism of the Philippines and question the continued impact of monolingual norms that have historically restricted migrant language use in New Zealand. Data collection currently underway with the Anglophone participants suggests they paint a strikingly different picture of multilingualism, where languages are separated by interlocutor and domain, and language anxiety runs high. While these participants also use multiple languages daily, analysis is expected to reveal that their representations of multilingualism have more in common with dominant Western language ideologies, where languages are divided not only geographically but also in the minds of their speakers. The paper considers the potential relationship of these results to contrasting Western and Asian language ideologies and asks how much of our metalinguistic perspectives we bring with us when we leave, and how much we absorb when we arrive.
Busch, Brigitte (2012). The linguistic repertoire revisited. Applied Linguistics 33/5: 503–523.
Canagarajah, Suresh (2011). Codemeshing in Academic Writing: Identifying Teachable Strategies of Translanguaging. The Modern Language Journal 95(3): 401–417.
Molinié, Muriel (ed.) 2009. Le dessin réflexif: Elément pour une herméneutique du sujet plurilingue. Cergy: Université de Cergy-Pontoise.
Rose, Gillian 2016. Visual Methodologies : an Introduction to Interpretation of Visual Materials (4ed). London: Sage.
