Higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly affected by globalization and internationalization, with implications for language use, teaching and learning in their academic communities. As a consequence, HEIs may change their approach to multilingualism on campus, taking into account language needs as well as opportunities and challenges associated with language diversity. The book aims at discussing aspects for the design of language policies, which could support internationalization and promote multilingualism and participation of different stakeholders. By presenting a language policy model, the book provides an alternative for those engaged in language diversity in HEIs.

As a contribution to the European Year of Languages 2001, this publication contains papers by contributors to a round table debate held by the Council of Europe's Steering Committee for Higher Education and Research. These papers consider various aspects of modern language policies in higher education, including bilingual education, and two case studies on the situation in Norway and Russia.

This book offers an account of what, how and why language matters in academia by providing examples from a wide range of areas in European institutions.

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.

In a world where higher education is increasingly internationalised, questions of language use and multilingualism are central to the ways in which universities function in teaching, research and administration. Contemporary universities find themselves in complex linguistic environments that may include national level language policies, local linguistic diversity, an internationalised student body, increasing international collaboration in research, and increased demand for the use and learning of international languages, especially English. The book presents a critical analysis of how universities are responding these complexities in different contexts around the world. The contributions show that language issues in universities are complex and often contested as universities try to negotiate the national and the international in their work. In some contexts, universities’ language policies and the ways in which they are implemented may have a negative impact on their ways of working. In other contexts, however, universities have embraced multilingualism in ways that have opened up new academic possibilities for staff and students. Collectively, the chapters show that universities’ language policy and planning are a work in progress and that much further work is needed for universities to achieve their language goals. This book was originally published as a special issue of Current Issues in Language Planning.

This book examines the intersections between education, identity formation, and language in post-apartheid South Africa with specific attention to higher education. It does so against the backdrop of the core argument that the sector plays a critical role in shaping, (re)producing and perpetuating sectoral, class, sub-national and national identities, which in turn, in the peculiar South African setting, are almost invariably analogous with the historical fault lines determined and dictated by language as a marker of ethnic and racial identity. The chapters in the book grapple with the nuances related to these intersections in the understanding that higher education language policies – overt and/or covert – largely structure institutional cultures, or what has been described as curriculum in higher education institutions. Together, the chapters examine the roles played by higher education, by language policies, and by the intersections of these policies and ethnolinguistic identities in either constructing and perpetuating, or deconstructing ethnolinguistic identities upon which the sector was founded. The introductory chapter lays out the background to the entire book with an emphasis on the policy and practice perspectives on the intersections. The middle chapters describe the so-called “White Universities”, “Black Universities” and “Middle-Man Minorities Universities”. The final chapter maps out future directions of the discourses on language and identity formation in South Africa’s higher education.

This book provides an overview and evaluation of the quality of bilingual education found in internationalised higher education institutions. Its authors focus on the multifaceted roles that language(s) play in these growing multilingual spaces and analyse and identify the many factors that account for quality multilingual degree programmes. The chapters cover themes such as language policy, quality assurance tools and indicators of quality and the authors approach issues of quality from very different and complementary perspectives, adopting for example, temporal, evaluative and developmental positioning, and taking micro, meso and macro level perspectives, while still keeping sight of the local realities, practices and possibilities. The contributions are written by authors working in Brazil, Finland, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK and have implications for researchers, education coordinators, practitioners and other stakeholders who are looking to design, launch and evaluate new programmes in any higher education context worldwide.

The book discusses recycled discourses of language and nationalism in Finnish higher education, demonstrating the need to look beyond language in the study of language policies of higher education. It analyses the historical and political layeredness of language policies as well as the intertwined nature of national and international developments in understanding new nationalism. Finnish higher education language policies were fuelled by the dynamics and tensions between the national languages Finnish and Swedish until the 2000s, when English begins to catalyse post nationalist discourses of economy and competitiveness. In the 2010s, English begins to be seen as a threat to Finnish. Educational, economic and epistemic nationalism emerge as the main cycles of new nationalist language policies in Finnish higher education. The book will be of interest to language policy and higher education scholars and practitioners, as well as graduate students language policy and higher education.

This Handbook discusses the theoretical and disciplinary background to the study of English-medium instruction (EMI) in higher education worldwide. It highlights issues relating to EMI pedagogy, varying motivations for EMI education, and the delivery of EMI in diverse contexts across the world. The spread of English as a teaching medium and the lingua franca of the academic world has been the subject of various debates in recent years on the perceived hegemony of the English language and the ‘domain loss’ of non-English languages in academic communication. Encompassing a wide range of contributions to the field of EMI, the chapters of this Handbook are arranged in four distinct parts: Part I provides an overview of English-medium instruction in higher education worldwide; Part II focusses on EMI in Europe; Part III on EMI in the Middle East, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa; and Part IV on EMI in the Asian region. The overall scope and level of expertise of this Handbook provides an unrivalled overview of this field of education. It serves as an essential reference for many courses dealing with applied linguistics, English language education, multilingualism, sociolinguistics, and related subjects at many levels of education, including Master’s and PhD-level studies. This Handbook serves as a valuable edition for university libraries across the world and an essential read for many faculty, undergraduate and postgraduate students, educators, and policymakers.

This book stems from the joint effort of 25 research teams across Europe, representing a dozen disciplines from the social sciences and humanities, resulting in a radically novel perspective to the challenges of multilingualism in Europe. The various concepts and tools brought to bear on multilingualism are analytically combined in an integrative framework starting from a core insight: in its approach to multilingualism, Europe is pursuing two equally worthy, but non-converging goals, namely, the mobility of citizens across national boundaries (and hence across languages and cultures) and the preservation of Europe’s diversity, which presupposes that each locale nurtures its linguistic and cultural uniqueness, and has the means to include newcomers in its specific linguistic and cultural environment. In this book, scholars from applied linguistics, economics, the education sciences, finance, geography, history, law, political science, philosophy, psychology, sociology and translation studies apply their specific approaches to this common challenge. Without compromising the state-of-the-art analysis proposed in each chapter, particular attention is devoted to ensuring the cross-disciplinary accessibility of concepts and methods, making this book the most deeply interdisciplinary volume on language policy and planning published to date.