Englanti on ”tapa matkustaa. Suomi on lähtöasema tai määränpää”: kielikäsityksistä diskursiivisesti ja pitkittäisesti

Abstract

This article is about holding beliefs about (or assigning subjective meanings to) two languages, L1 (Finnish) and L2 (English). The study was carried out as part of a larger project, and it is discursive in its starting points and longitudinal in its research design. A group of university students, English majors or minors, were asked to do sentence completion tasks twice, while they were studying on a five-year MA degree programme: at the beginning of their studies and just before or after graduation. Overall, the students resorted to a total of four interpretative repertoires in comparing and contrasting the two languages: 1) Affection, 2) Aesthetics, 3) Vitality, and 4) Challenge repertoires, and some dilemmas (or controversies) especially within Repertoires 3 and 4 were resolved over a period of four or five years.