Abstract
Abstract The aim of this research was to investigate how multilinguals students from the Arab countries currently residing, studying, or studied in the UK are motivated and inspired by being multilinguals compared to other UK linked bilingual Arab students speaking English as L2. The tools used were ideal multilingual-self = IDML, and Ideal L2-self= IDL2S, and were previously developed and validated by Henry and Thorsen (2018) in Sweden. The tools were completed in English by 41 students who received an online link. Other information on age, gender, L2 and L3 languages skills and country of origin where also collected. Four participants were interviewed to provide more in-depth insight on their views and consolidate the findings in a mixed methods approach. There were more female respondents (23, 59%) than male respondents (16, 41%) out of those who declared their gender. Mean age of participants was 28.6 years with a standard deviation (SD) of 4.2 years, the minimum age was 20 years, and the maximum was 39 years. Seven participants were PhD students, 13 were doing Masters and the rest were doing a University degrees in different departments and Universities in the UK. There was a greater number of participants from Saudi Arabia (n=31, 76%) (Figure 2) among who responded. The results suggested a higher total score in ideal multilingual-self of 12 multilinguals (from Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Syria and Saudi Arabia) versus 26 participants predominately from Saudi Arabia who speak Arabic and English. The scores of Ideal L2 self of these two groups were comparable. In addition, multilinguals scored higher in the four dimensions of IDML. Overall, the quantitative data as well as the texts in the interviews suggested a strong positive view of multilingualism among multilinguals. Some of the bilinguals hold a favourable view of multilingualism but one respondent in the interview had a negative opinion on speaking more than two languages. Overall, this research shows that there is a strong and distinct ideal multilingual-self in the studied sample as was documented in different settings outside of the MENA region.