Abstract

Language repertoires have been traditionally construed as a set of chronologically determined compartments (i.e., L1, L2, Ln), a scheme which upholds several validity and ethical issues when operationalized in research and education (Larsen-Freeman, 2017; Ortega, 2019). Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (also Complexity theory, here CDST) has been hailed as one solution to these issues moving forward. Still, CDST has rarely been used to examine multiple languages within a repertoire and thus its applicability to plurilingual settings remains largely untested. This exploratory study contributes by examining whether the inherent properties of CDST manifest in the perceptions that plurilinguals have on their own language development as their language systems change over time.

This study used retrodictive qualitative modelling (Dörnyei, 2014) where the developmental trajectory of changing language systems was discerned by working backwards through data collected during an observation window. Over a three-month period, three plurilingual individuals assessed their language systems through weekly surveys and participated in open-ended interviews. A three-stage phenomenological analysis evaluated the data against CDST’s theoretical prism and allowed for the data-driven identification of five CDST properties (i.e., attractor states, phase shifts, co-adaptation, self-organization, and emergence) in the participants’ perceptions of how their repertoires changed over time. Results indicate that the components of plurilingual repertoires exhibit the aforementioned dynamics of CDST, although evidence for emergence was less certain. Importantly, this study shows that these dynamics are discernable in an individual’s perception of their own language development.