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.
Curricular Insights into Translingualism as a Communicative Competence
Translingual communicative competence remains underreported within recent research on multilingualism and plurilingualism. The outcomes of the MULTICOM curriculum development project, a European thematic network in multilingual communication aimed at providing university students with the translingual and transcultural skills needed to operate effectively at an international professional level, provide insights into the profile of translingualism as a communicative competence. The teaching and learning materials created to accompany the proposed curriculum framework reveal a significant departure from academic traditions in which language teaching has tended to neglect translingualism and the impact of multilingual settings in the interpretation of information. As discussed throughout the paper, rethinking the purpose of tasks and materials allows for awareness training, without which translingual communicative competence cannot be achieved. However, the implementation of an ecology-of-language approach to enhance plurilingualism and pluriculturalism requires rethinking the strategies that make for successful communication in multilingual settings and the definition of a translingual CEF in which partial competence and semilingualism is addressed.
Thirty-three yes or no questions about mappings, measures, and metrics
Most problems in the ensuing list are of fairly recent origin. None of them seem easy and some are likely to be very difficult. The formulation of each problem is such that it can be answered by one word only: either yes or no. (Strictly speaking, it is conceivable that within the same question, the answer sometimes depends on the dimension.) We offer no conjectures or guesses. In many cases, the particular question is just a chosen concise representative from a whole group of related open problems. Whenever known, we shall point out the original source of a question. Otherwise, the question is either a folk question, a modification of a folk question, or suggested by one or both of the authors. We apologize in advance for all omissions and misquotes. Practically all the problems require some background definitions; many concepts that are being used have only recently been introduced, and are perhaps not so widely known. Typically, the question is stated first, and the relevant definitions and references are given right afterwords. To keep this essay brief, we give little or no motivation here. For this purpose, we kindly invite the reader to consult the literature as referred to in the text. This list of questions was born at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in August 1996. The choices we made were necessarily partial but still somewhat arbitrary. There certainly are many more problems around these topics that we deem equally worthy.