1.1 Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century
Since the turn of the millennium, the use of English has grown unstoppably in universities across the globe. The tertiary educational sector has taken a noticeable and arguably irreversible turn towards fostering student and staff mobility, investing in international collaboration and networking for research and educational programmes, while institutions are taking steps to boost their own position in various international ranking systems. Global surveys undertaken regularly by the International Association of Universities (IAU) amongst higher education institutions (HEIs) provide ample evidence of the importance given to key factors such as a rise in international students and staff members, research collaborations, joint degree programmes and measures of language support, mainly in English (Egron-Polak & Hudson, 2010, 2014). English has thusâas a by-product of these processesâgained a privileged position in HEIs across all continents, be it in education, research, administration or management. While universities have always been inherently globally oriented institutions (De Ridder-Symoens, 1996; Palfreyman & Van der Walt, 2017), these recent developments reflect the wider socio-economic and political forces of âglobalisation and internationalisation, migration, the emergence of a knowledge economy and information societyâ (Dafouz & Smit, 2016, p. 397; see also Knight 2018). At the same time, these changes have relied on the ever-increasing role of English as the leading language of wider communication between speakers of different first languages (L1s) as well as the first foreign language learnt in Europe and elsewhere (Graddol, 2006; Jenkins, 2014).
With its unprecedented rise, the systematic internationalisation of higher education (HE) has attracted a good deal of research interest from various disciplines and research angles. In a systematic analysis of more than 8400 relevant studies published between 1980 and 2014, Yemini and Sagie (2018) show that the most dominant themes investigated have been national policies, student mobility and different forms of internationalisation. The narrower process of Englishisation, on the other hand, has been treated less intensively so far and usually from the perspective of applied linguistics. These studies show an interest in the roles and functions of English in HEIs more generally and thus tend to focus on the full range of institutional policies and practices, comprising research, administration and education. A recent example is a special issue of the European Journal of Language Policy, in which Englishisation policies at various European HEIs are discussed from a bottom-up perspective (Lanvers & Hultgren, 2018). Apart from a widely held acceptance of the ongoing Englishisation as a conditio sine qua non for twenty-first century European HE, these contributions underline the site-specific challenges and opportunities that come with the increased use of English, which, furthermore, can be perceived quite diversely across social actors and contexts.
1.2 Conceptual Considerations
Reflecting one of the core concerns of applied linguistics, the domain of education has been singled out and investigated in detail with regard to Englishisation. This has been done using a range of labels, most prominently English-Medium Instruction (EMI) (e.g. Ackerley, Guarda, & Helm, 2017; Hultgren, Jensen, & Dimova, 2015; Macaro, 2018) and Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education (ICLHE) (e.g. Fortanet-GĂłmez, 2013; Valcke & Wilkinson, 2017), which is itself reminiscent of the school-level research into Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) (Smit & Dafouz, 2012). As hinted at in the acronyms, the focus of such research is on the institutionalised use of English as an additional language for educational purposes, and/or what this means for educational practices and student achievements in terms of content and language learning. However, we prefer another term, namely, English-Medium Education in Multilingual University Settings; EMEMUS for short. As argued in Dafouz and Smit (2016), EMEMUS is conceptually wider in the sense that it is inclusive of diverse research agendas, pedagogical approaches and of different types of education, comprising, for instance, online programmes and teacher pedagogical development. Furthermore, the concept is more transparent because it refers to âeducationâ, thus embracing both âinstructionâ and âlearningâ instead of prioritising one over the other. Additionally, it explicitly describes the sociolinguistic setting in question, which is understood as âmultilingualâ in the widest sense, be it as a reflection of top-down regulations or bottom-up practices. This in turn also recognises that English as medium goes hand in hand with other languages that form part of the respective multilingualism. Finally, the term makes it clear that our focus is exclusively on the tertiary level. Rather than merging all levels of educationâas is done, for instance, in Chalmers (2019), Macaro (2018) or in Nikula, Dafouz, Moore, and Smit (2016)âwe consider it important for our interests to focus exclusively on HE (see also Schmidt-Unterberger, 2018). As well as having shared characteristics such as adult students voluntarily engaged in advanced learning or teachers who are also or mainly researchers (e.g. Smit & Dafouz, 2012), it is the tertiary level of education that has been most influenced by the recent developments in internationalisation. Based on these considerations, we will from now on use EMEMUSâor EME for short1âwhen reporting on or discussing higher educational scenarios in which English is used as an additional language for education or for related purposes, such as administration or management.2
Understandably, EMEMUS concerns are of central relevance to all stakeholders and have attracted a great deal of detailed analysis, resulting in an ever-growing body of descriptions and critical evaluations of particular EME cases (e.g. Hultgren, Jensen, & Dimova, 2015; Tsou & Kao, 2017; Valcke & Wilkinson, 2017). Reflecting the situated nature of educational realities, the individual cases represent unique constellations of the aforementioned global forces and locally relevant factors, such as social agents, academic subjects, types of knowledge and skills, et cetera. At the same time, these depictions are so intricate and multi-layered that it remains very difficult to draw meaningful conclusions about what can more generally be labelled âgoodâ or âsucces...