Language Policy in Higher Education: The Case of Medium-Sized Languages (Multilingual Matters, 158) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783092742 ISBN 13: 9781783092741

Verlag: Multilingual Matters, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

In today's increasingly interconnected, knowledge-based world, language policy in higher education is rapidly becoming a crucial area for all societies aiming to play a part in the global economy. The challenge is double faceted: how can universities retain their crucial role of creating the intellectual elites who are indispensable for the running of national affairs and, at the same time, prepare their best-educated citizens for competition in a global market? To what extent is English really pushing other languages out of the academic environment? Drawing on the experience of several medium-sized language communities, this volume provides the reader with some important insights into how language policies can be successfully implemented. The different sociolinguistic contexts under scrutiny offer an invaluable comparative standpoint to understand what position can - or could - be occupied by each language at the level of higher education.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

F. Xavier Vila is an associate professor in the Department of Catalan Philology and Director of the University Centre for Sociolinguistics and Communication at the Universitat de Barcelona. He has published widely in the areas of sociolinguistics, demolinguistics and language policy, including Survival and Development of Language Communities: Prospects and Challenges (Multilingual Matters, 2013).

Vanessa Bretxa is a researcher in the sociology of language at the University Centre for Sociolinguistics and Communication at the Universitat de Barcelona and a part-time lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the same university. She is also the co-editor of the academic journal Language, Society and Communication.

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Language Policy in Higher Education

The Case of Medium-Sized Languages

By F. Xavier Vila, Vanessa Bretxa

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2015 F. Xavier Vila, Vanessa Bretxa and the authors of individual chapters
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78309-274-1

Contents

Tables and Figures, 
Contributors, 
1 Language Policy in Higher Education in Medium-Sized Language Communities: An Introduction F. Xavier Vila, 
2 The Position of Danish, English and Other Languages at Danish Universities in the Context of Danish Society Hartmut Haberland and Bent Preisler, 
3 The Position of Czech and Other Languages at Universities in the Czech Republic: Some Initial Observations Tamah Sherman, 
4 The Position of Finnish and Swedish as well as Other Languages at Universities in Finland Sabine Ylönen, 
5 Challenges for Hebrew in Higher Education and Research Environments Drorit Ram, 
6 Challenges for South Africa's Medium-Sized Indigenous Languages in Higher Education and Research Environments Anne-Marie Beukes, 
7 The Position of Catalan in Higher Education in Catalonia Eva Pons Parera, 
8 Medium-Sized Languages as Viable Linguae Academicae F. Xavier Vila, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Language Policy in Higher Education in Medium-Sized Language Communities: An Introduction

F. Xavier Vila

The Challenge of Internationalisation for Linguae Academicae Other than English

The world of higher education is changing at a rapid pace. Universities all over the world are taking on the increasing pressures exerted by globalisation, the commodification of education and the economic crisis. As a result, in recent years, universities from both hemispheres and all continents are increasingly embarking upon the process of 'getting international', a process that, first and foremost, involves the irruption of English in contexts where it used to be absent (Arzoz, 2012a).

In truth, up to quite recently, language policy and language management issues in higher education had attracted relatively little interest from researchers. During the 19th and 20th centuries, universities abandoned Latin and transited towards the national university model (Haberland & Preisler, this volume; Mortensen & Haberland, 2012: 192), where the nation-state's language was adopted as the main medium of instruction. This was the case not only for the demographically major languages, but also for a remarkable number of medium-sized languages (Vila, 2013), especially in Europe and some central and eastern regions of Asia. Universities located in colonial and postcolonial countries followed a parallel path, except that they rarely substituted the colonial language for an indigenous one. All over the world, in fact, the lingua academica, i.e. the language used for most university functions, tended to coincide with the country's official language. It was only in very specific functions, in many ways oriented towards international diffusion, such as the production of written dissertations and the dissemination of science via scientific journals and books, that a handful of academic linguae francae competed for supremacy. Indeed, even at the beginning of the 21st century, it was the language of science, not the language of universities themselves, that was the main object of research for language policy researchers (Ammon, 2001).

But especially since the last decade of the 20th century, the ever ongoing upsurge of university internationalisation has led to the blossoming of English-medium courses in countries where this language had never been used (BrennWhite & van Rest, 2012; Wächter & Maiworm, 2008), and this development has spurred the research on multilingualism in higher education. The orientation of these studies is, as expected, variegated: a significant percentage of these studies have adopted a pedagogical or applied linguistics stance and occupy themselves with applied linguistic issues (Björkman, 2012; Doiz et al., 2013), including the development of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) methods (Fortanet-Gómez, 2013) or the introduction of bilingual education principles and techniques into higher education contexts (van der Walt, 2013). Others, like Preisler et al. (2011), have focused on the management of the learning processes in multilingual, international universities. It is impossible to summarise here the growing literature on multilingualism in higher education. But irrespective of whether it shows a more educational, pedagogical, anthropological or other approach, most research on language management in higher education puts only English at the centre of its attention (Söderlundh, 2012: 90). And this is, without doubt, a serious limitation to our understanding not only of the internationalisation of higher education, but also of language policy in higher education. While English is without doubt the language most favoured by globalisation processes, it should not be forgotten that it is all languages that are being globalised (Blommaert, 2010). There is, therefore, a real need that the analysis of the internationalisation process does not restrict its attention to just the hypercentral language (de Swaan, 2001), at least for two reasons.

On the one hand, we know at least since Haugen's (1971) seminal work that any sociolinguistic approach should be ecosystematic. The spread of any given language in one particular sphere of life is deemed to have an impact on the other languages that used to occupy it, or might have occupied it. We still know very little about the actual consequences of the spread of English on other linguae academicae. Scandinavian societies, for instance, have discussed the risk of actual 'domain loss' (e.g. Haberland & Preisler, this volume; Kangas Christiansen, 2009; Ljosland, 2007; Preisler, 2009), but it is not clear that internationalisation has actually led to the total relinquishment of any lingua academica. In fact, from the theoretical perspective of the political economy of languages, not only English, but also many other languages, could become valued linguistic capital (Heller & Duchêne, 2012). The loss of state control over education may favour access to higher education for historically minoritised languages, and higher facility for mobility and the enhanced use of information and communication technologies might, in fact, create opportunities for increased cooperation in language communities up to now separated by nation-state boundaries (Arzoz, 2012b: 230). But these prospects may be too optimistic. Not many languages seem to be enjoying the purported benefits of liberalisation and commodification. In fact, '[...], as regards traditional higher education (i.e. physical colleges and campuses), the trend appears to be rather the reduction, not the expansion, of languages of tuition' (Arzoz, 2012b: 231). Voices such as Robert Phillipson (2006, 2009) denounce the progress of English at the expense of other languages as a 'pandemic', and compare English as 'a cuckoo in the European higher education nest of languages'. In any case, too little is still known to evaluate properly the result of the process.

On the other hand, attention to the 'other' languages is also fully justifiable on a simple quantitative basis. It should never be overlooked, unless we want to fall into what we could describe as the 'English-only delusion', that, as Haberland and Mortensen (2012: 1) put it, 'English is not spoken in every corner of the world, just in more places than any other...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Multilingual Matters
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783092742
• ISBN 13: 9781783092741
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 234
• Herausgeber: Vila Moreno F. Xavier, Bretxa Vanessa
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland