Good Practice

Video Transcript

Teacher: How does being plurilingual or multi lingual – being able to speak more than one language – affect your general outlook on life? Do you think it makes you more flexible, more excited in travel, more interested in otherness or not? Are you more open or confident as a result? What do you think has been the impact of your language knowledge and skills?

Student: I think it has definitely made me more interested in other cultures and travel because I’ve have had experience of two cultures as opposed to one. And then personally it made me a lot more confident as well because I went back to Italy every year. When I was here I had a different lifestyle and my experience of school was different to my experiences that I had in the holidays in Italy, and I would grow a lot more confident there and I would feel a lot more comfortable. And if I didn’t have the ability to converse with the people that I met on holiday, and the friendships that I’ve built up from where I’m from, it wouldn’t have been such a valuable experience and you wouldn’t have got as good an idea of the culture if you couldn’t really converse with the people.

Student: I’ve always found it very useful and it’s made me more flexible. For example, I did a work experience at a criminal law firm, and the client happened to be Turkish and no one in the law firm knew Turkish apart from me, so it was very useful for me to be able to translate a lot of what the client was saying for them. And it’s the same generally in communities and everything, like there’s a lot of shops that are owned by Turkish owners and it’s much easier to converse with them in Turkish, because half the time their English is really bad. And you can translate for others as well so it makes you really flexible and a much more useful person.

Student: I think it can be useful on the side of getting to know other cultures and being more open to travelling and knowing other cultures, but also it can be quite confusing as well. On the one hand I’m Bangladeshi, but on the other hand I’m British. When I go to Bangladesh I don’t feel like I’m wholly with that language or with that culture, but when I’m here I’m not English – obviously – so I think it can also be quite confusing to know where you really belong in a way.

Student: Being mixed I’ve never felt part of the Pakistani culture, even though I do speak Urdu. I think it’s something useful because I’m quite open minded towards travelling, and I have been to Pakistan and I also lived in Bangladesh for three years. So it’s made me a lot more open minded just being mixed and also knowing another language is always very helpful.

Student: Most of my family comes from Mauritius, so when I go over there I feel a lot more confident in talking to my younger cousins. Because I feel we can actually have a proper conversation, that helps me to have a closer relationship with them compared to my sisters who don’t speak Creole that well. So they find it much harder to relate to our family, whereas I find it a lot easier, so I get to enjoy my holiday a little bit more.

Teacher: That goes very nicely into the next question that we have for you, which is about identity, and several of you have touched on your identity. Zara said something about feeling a sense of confusion about identity, and I feel that myself when I'm in India or Saudi Arabia in comparison to here. We’re told in the media all the time that there’s a certain British identity, but I feel I’m British, and if someone were to ask me how I would I identify myself, I would have some difficulty. So what I want to know is, how you would identify yourselves?

Student: Because I was in Japan until I was eight, I don't really feel that I am British, even though I spent most of my life in England. I feel more like a Japanese, and I’ve never really felt that I belonged to the British community but more towards the Japanese community. So even if I am away from my homeland I still feel more part of it.

Teacher: So do you feel Japan is you home land? Do you feel that your relatives, your friends in Japan, see you as Japanese or British?

Student (continued): I don't think any of my friends see me as British Japanese, I don't think my relatives see it that way either.

Student: I normally define myself as Chinese if I'm in Britain, but if I'm in China I would normally say that I'm British because I think that’s what distinguishes me from the rest of the people.

Student: Whenever people ask me where I'm from, or ‘what nationality are you?’, I always always say I’m half Turkish Cypriot, a quarter English, a quarter Irish – because I’m proud of the mixture of cultures that I have, and I feel like it defines me and makes me a little bit different.

Student: I live here and I would say that I’m British, but I don’t consider that to be any way near part of my identity. I come from two different cultures; obviously I'm from India and I have been brought in that culture at home, but I live in England so the British culture sticks with you. Because they are so different they sometimes contradict each other, and because you come from two different cultures you kind of become critical of both. So I don't use them as a basis at all for my identity, because I don’t now whether I believe them. I identify myself as me; I don't use my culture at all as part of my identity – it’s not something I consider as part of my identity at all. When I talk about myself, half the time I forget to talk about my culture because I feel that it’s something that has been put on me as opposed to something that I’ve been able to choose.

Teacher: How do you identify yourself?

Student (continued): I identify myself as me; I don't use my culture at all as part of my identity. When I talk about myself half of the time I forget to talk about my culture at all. It’s not something that I consider as part of my identity at all, because I feel that it’s something that has been put on me as opposed to something that I’ve been able to choose.

Student: I actually agree with Silva. When I'm in England I tend to identify more as Hungarian. Because I already speak English and live in Britain, people already know that I'm British, so then Hungarian is the thing that sets me apart from everyone else. Although I don’t have any relatives in Britain – it’s just my closed family who are Hungarian, that’s what we are – when I go back to Hungary and I see my relatives, I see myself as more British. Because my Hungarian’s less and because I identify with that culture less – even though when I go back it feels like my home –it’s just my second home.

Student: When I’m asked, I always say ‘full Italian’. My mum’s half Turkish Cypriote and, it’s bad but I’ve completely disregarded that side of me, because we are not in contact with her family and there’s only a few people that we know. So I don’t know the language, I’ve never been there, so I consider myself to be Italian. Now, as well, there’s the old traditional British culture and there’s a whole new British culture evolving; there’s English culture and there’s British culture, and I find it so hard to define that I just say ‘I’m Italian’. As I’ve become older, I’ve become more Italian as it were, and now a lot of my friends are Italian, it’s just who I relate with better.

Student: I would define myself as Turkish, partly because I think that language has such a big link to identity, and partly because my parents’ English wasn’t so good. At home we always watch Turkish TV, we always speak in Turkish, and we always focus on the Turkish part of our culture. Because of that, I find it much harder to integrate into British culture because my parents themselves can’t even speak the language properly.