Plurilingualism, multilingualism and internationalisation in the European Higher Education Area: Challenges and perspectives at a Swiss University
Abstract The relationships between the internationalisation of higher education and language are still poorly understood. We foreground the perspective of students in order to advance our understanding of these interrelations in the context of the consolidation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Accordingly, we propose gathering answers to the questions: What, from students' perspectives, are their experiences and perceptions of pluri- and multilingualism in the context of the internationalisation of higher education? And how are they dealing with these experiences and perceptions? Existing studies confirm that local specificities pertaining to languages and education systems impact substantially on the answers to these emerging questions. Thus, an overall picture of the interactions between language and internationalisation that shape the EHEA require the integration of findings from localised investigations that bring to light these particularities. Here we present an overview of findings from a mixed methods study in a medium-sized, historically German-language university in multilingual Switzerland. Our findings confirm that students are making considerable efforts to ensure that their plurilingualism extends beyond English. Notwithstanding attempts by the university to respond to their needs, students however still struggle with the tensions between what they can actually do, what they report they would like to do, and what they perceive is expected of them concerning language competencies during their studies and after. On the basis of these reflections, lecturers at the Language Centre developed a four-language course Communication training in multilingual settings that uses French, Italian, English, and German. This course is briefly introduced as an example of a language training intervention which seeks to move beyond the persistent constraints of a compartmentalised approach to pluri- and multilingualism in higher education.
Language and power: background to the debate on linguistic rights
This article reviews the four contributions included in this issue of the International Journal on Multicultural Societies and discusses the political and social context within which the recognition of linguistic rights for regional or minority language groups has to be addressed. The authors of the other contributions come from a legal background or are actors in the recognition of rights issue. Their articles are either state of the art, giving the latest facts and opinions on the topic, or discuss the legal dimension of the problem, either in the past or the present. This article attempts to link the four papers by drawing out the socio-political themes forming and informing the issue. It focuses, particularly, on the interplay between power and language and the implications of this for linguistic diversity.
Language ecology and language teaching for translators
In the age of globalization, there are fears that the overwhelming presence of dominant world languages such as English and French will have serious repercussions for ethnic cultures and languages. Supporters of the language-ecology paradigm for language teaching see it as the responsibility of teachers of first-world languages to examine these repercussions through forms of representation they use to teach world languages. The ecological paradigm, with its insistence on boundary-crossing and on observation of inter-language and inter-cultural relationships, has proven to be a rich avenue of exploration for translation students. The exploration of cultural and linguistic assumptions in the multicultural language learning classrooms of the new millennium provides translation students with frameworks for understanding the profound holism of the act of translation.