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 policy and language choice at European Universities: Is there really a ‘choice’?
Internationalization has become a sort of mantra in higher education. European universities strive to foster the internationalization process in which English as the current lingua franca and English-medium instruction play a paramount role. This paper examines the effect of internationalization on language policies and the degree of freedom universities enjoy when it comes to making their own decisions. The analysis is carried out at four different levels: the macro level (European institutions’ initiatives), the meso level (at the state level), the micro level (at university level) and the nano level (personified by the university stakeholders). Taking Spolsky’s (2004) language policy definition as a framework, the example of one particular multilingual higher education institution, namely the University of the Basque Country in Spain, will be under scrutiny in order to examine the impact of language policy and its three main components (language ideologies, language practices and language management) on the different university bodies.
Are ‘diversity management’ and monolingualism compatible? About learning and using foreign languages in a context of globalisation
Ideologies and communication practices vary hugely in multilingual workplaces. On the one hand, many companies include Diversity Management in their corporate culture because there are theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that a company which employs a diverse workforce enhances its opportunities in a global marketplace whilst improving employee satisfaction and thus productivity. On the other hand, globally oriented companies, often the same ones, choose English preferentially as their corporate language as it has become widely accepted that this is the language of international business. Thus, diversity in general (i.e. cultural diversity) and linguistic diversity are dissociated.