Narrating non-nativeness: the experience of learning English as an Italian university student

Today, as most English speakers around the world are so-called ‘non-natives’ (NNS), the experience of learning English is practically ubiquitous for younger generations of Italian students. ‘Native’ speakers (NS) are still accorded greater prestige compared to NNS (Dragojevic et al., 2021) in a variety of situations where NS are frequently seen as an ideal benchmark for language competence (see Holliday’s native-speakerism, 2006). Speaking ‘good English’ thus overlaps with the perceived need to achieve ‘native-like’ proficiency (Piller, 2002), which often requires developing a ‘native’ accent (Jenkins, 2009). However, people have different goals when learning English, which could correspond in turn to multiple needs and attitudes concerning the ‘sounding native’ ideal. This awareness of specific objectives begins to appear more clearly at university level, where the use of English for Academic Purposes and English as a Medium of Instruction shifts learners’ attention from general to specialised language, and towards more practical and domain-oriented uses of English. In order to explore the complex relationship that Italian university students and PhD candidates have with English as it is used and learned in an academic environment, 18 narratives were collected through interviews. Narratives allow participants “to express and negotiate both individual and collective identities” (De Fina, 2015, p. 351). The corpus thus obtained underwent Thematic Analysis of Elementary Contexts through the T-Lab Plus software (Lancia, 2004), in order a) to observe the recurring themes, b) relate them to subjects' changing self-positioning according to Harré’s Positioning Theory (especially concerning the use of pronouns; Harré & van Langenhove, 1998) and c) link the textual dimension with social practices and ideological implications (Fairclough, 1995; Van Dijk, 1993).