This chapter reports on ethnographic research carried out in an EMI course in an Italian higher education institution. The chapter starts with a brief overview of the recent, contested growth of EMI in Italy and a critical analysis of national policy documents to unveil the ideological underpinnings of EMI in this sociocultural context. This is followed by the presentation and discussion of findings of ethnographic research carried out over three years in a course designed to promote critical language awareness in an EMI context. The study looks at how students’ ideologies of language interact with those identified at the macro and meso levels, first of all by exploring the language portraits and biographies of a class of students at the beginning of their English-Taught Programme. This is followed by a more in-depth analysis of the portraits and biographies of three students who were interviewed one year later. This provides a longitudinal dimension to the research and insights into the changing nature of language ideologies and also linguistic repertoires.

This chapter deals with how children reflect upon their linguistic repertoire, their language use and their lived experience of language. It draws on art-based approaches, mainly on the presentation and discussion of children’s language portraits. Language portraits have been employed for many years in educational settings as language awareness activities, as well as in research on multilingualism, calling on multilinguals to visualize their linguistic repertoire by coloring in the template of an empty body silhouette and to comment on their drawing. A close reading of language portraits produced in different workshops by children 6 to 11 years old shows that they perceive their multilingual repertoires less in terms of competences that they ‘have’ than in terms of ‘doing’ things with language, on being able to relate with others and position themselves with regard to established, sometimes competing language ideologies present in their immediate environment.