Transcultural Interaction and Linguistic Diversity in Higher Education

The Student Experience

A. Fabricius, Bent Preisler, A. Fabricius, Bent Preisler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137397478
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Études supérieures

This book presents research that seeks to understand students' experiences of transnational mobility and transcultural interaction in the context of educational settings confronted with linguistic diversity.

1

Introduction

Anne H. Fabricius and Bent Preisler

Roskilde University, Denmark

During the past two decades, universities around the world have taken part in a new era of explicit and conscious internationalization. While university research has always been international in scope and focus, students travelling abroad from their home universities, or experiencing an increased intake of non-domestic students in their home classrooms, are a relatively newer phenomenon, at least at the scale on which this is now taking place. More than four million people were studying outside their home country in 2011, a fourfold increase since 1999 (OECD 2011). The CALPIU project (Cultural and Linguistic Practices at the International University), housed at Roskilde University and funded by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities from 2009–2013, included in its ambit, among other interests, a particular focus on student experiences and practices in university education (e.g. Hazel & Mortensen 2013; Mortensen & Fabricius 2014; Mortensen 2014), and with the present volume we gather a wide range of locations together in a series of empirical studies of internationalized university contexts. This volume thus sets out to place the international student experience in concentrated sociolinguistic focus.

This volume presents a view of the current state of the art for research on the sociolinguistic consequences of the internationalization of higher education for university students. Its focus on ‘the student experience’ for an increasingly mobile university student population foregrounds this particular area as a counterfoil to pedagogical studies of, for example, teaching or research practice in international(izing) university education, or work which concentrates on higher education policies at governmental levels. International Higher Education has emerged strongly in recent years as an area of empirical interest, where sociolinguistics and applied linguistics can make important contributions to theorizing the processes and challenges involved in educating a young and transiently mobile population. We feel that it is timely to place the student experience centrally in this discussion.

Recently, national governments and ministries of education have been keen to focus on the potential economic benefits of global education, and governmental efforts to encourage increased levels of student mobility have been evident in many places. This has meant that national universities with long-established national higher education practices based on the medium of national languages, with their own background of national traditions of, for example, foreign language learning, have come up against an increasing need to teach, supervise and even conduct administration in English. How this altered linguistic landscape is understood and negotiated by students will determine whether the exercise does indeed achieve its intended goal of creating a flexible global workforce who can negotiate cultural differences and global dynamics in an informed and sensitive way.

Thus, this volume seeks to unfold the student experience of transnational mobility and transcultural interaction in the context of educational settings confronted with linguistic diversity as never before or in new and different ways. Following this introduction, the book consists of a further 13 chapters which in turn examine aspects of the present-day internationalized student experience, from start to finish, as it were: from the initial phase of a sojourn abroad, to teaching and tutoring situations and the challenges that arise in classrooms and other scenarios of university life, until the final chapter, which focusses on the impact of international study on career choices and possibilities. The chapters employ an eclectic set of methodologies, ranging from the quantitative to the qualitative, but are united in a concern to highlight the student experience as the more recent focal point of internationalization efforts at the present time.

The book begins with Alina Schartner and Tony Young’s chapter, entitled Culture shock or love at first sight? Exploring the ‘honeymoon’ stage of the international student sojourn. In this contribution, we are reminded that the ‘international’ student experience goes beyond the time spent abroad and begins before the actual arrival in the host country, with the decision to study abroad, whether that is made as an independent judgment or as the result of parental pressure, for example. While previous research has suggested that student sojourners’ immediate reactions to the new environment are important for the success or otherwise of their sojourn, these immediate reactions tend to be far from uniform, and not necessarily predictable prima facie. This study sought to examine whether, and if so how, personal preferences and modes of behaviour impinge on student sojourners’ subjective wellbeing in the early sojourn stages. The findings illuminate the multi-faceted relationships between pre-sojourn and early-stage factors and the quality of international students’ experiences in the crucial early stage of adjustment. The authors take a fine-grained quantitative approach to this work, and conduct tests for various degrees of, for instance, self-motivation, resilience in the face of difficulties, intercultural awareness and other types of what they call ‘dispositional’ factors. Their results show that making an autonomous decision to study abroad, rather than acting in the face of external pressures, was able to predict that such autonomous students would show greater levels of psychological wellbeing and satisfaction with life when they were tested on this at an early stage of their international experience, making them more likely to feel happy and satisfied in their new environment. This correlational study contributes insight into what types of training and pre-sojourn consciousness-raising might help students to derive more from their opportunities to experience study abroad.

Chapter 3, Student adjustment: diversity and uniformity of experience, is authored by Peter Sercombe and Tony Young, and takes a qualitative view of the process of student adjustment and its outcomes in terms of whether students thrive in their new situation or not. In the context of the UK, which is the principal national destination in Europe, international postgraduate students generate substantial income for higher education institutions, and they are therefore an important part of the university economy. The shift that these postgraduate students make from one context to another demands some level of realignment, the authors claim, given that the requirements in the new context are not likely to fit exactly with previous university experiences (as we will also see in Chapter 10). The authors collected subjective views and reflections from international students working towards a Master’s degree in Cross Cultural Communication at a single higher education institution in the UK, over the period of an academic year, through a series of interviews. These yielded a number of interesting points, beyond those already known in the literature, such as the importance of language proficiency (in this case in English). There was a generally positive impression about the year abroad and a clear desire to engage with people from different backgrounds. There was considerable importance attached to the roles of other people in influencing sentiments about the student experience, particularly those with whom accommodation is shared. The authors found that positive perceptions of the international student experience were often closely associated with reporting a high degree of interaction with others. The students’ negative impressions tended to relate to significant momentary experiences, rather than to extended periods of time. The authors conclude by stressing the importance of encouraging, facilitating and maintaining relationships between students of different backgrounds in order to foster positive year abroad experiences for these international students.

In Chapter 4, English is not enough – local and global languages in international student mobility: a case study of the Austrian university context, by Hermine Penz, we move to continental Europe and another type of language situation which is shown to have a systematic impact on student experiences. Penz provides insights into the use of English as a lingua franca and the use of the local language, German, which is itself a pluricentric language. She discusses the roles of English and other languages in efforts at internationalizing the universities, elaborates on pragmatic differences within this pluricentric language (between standard Austrian German, Graz dialect and High German) and discusses aspects of language and culture learning that come to light in the context of educational exchange. Her study offers insights into the motivations for the exchange of international students at the University of Graz, and their experiences with respect to language and culture contact and learning.

In particular, Penz shows that even if the academic programme in which an international student takes part may be taught in English, and although international student interaction to a large degree takes place in English as a lingua franca, the local language, Austrian German, can still be crucial with respect to social and cultural adjustment. Exchange students need to juggle various linguistic and cultural demands during their exchange period, within both the academic and the general cultural contexts of the target country. Using a combination of a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, Penz draws out some of the complicated and interrelated factors of international student exchange experiences in the Austrian context that she is describing. She finds that relationship-building among international students works mostly on the basis of English as a lingua franca and that the international student community itself seems to serve as an ‘emotional cushion’ for visiting students. Penz concludes that the value of engaging with the local language should not be dismissed in the internationalization of universities, and that successful exchange programmes should promote both local and global languages and cultures.

With Chapter 5, Students’ representations of multilingualism and internationalization at two bilingual universities in Spain, by Enric Llurda, Aintzane Doiz and Juan M. Sierra, we turn to institutionally bilingual contexts in Catalonia and the Basque Country, where English-medium instruction is an additional player in an already bilingual or indeed multilingual scenario. Llurda, Doiz and Sierra analyze the reflections of 1,377 undergraduate students at two bilingual universities in Spain regarding multilingualism, English-medium instruction and the role of minority languages. Three independent quantitative variables are considered in this study: the strength of the threat to the minority language (Catalan vs. Basque), gender and students’ origin. Their results indicate that Basque students are more concerned about the status of their local language than their Catalan counterparts, that women tend to be more in favour of internationalization and multilingualism than men are, and that international students and local students totally disagree on the role of and the need to promote local and foreign languages. The authors explore the possible impact of these results on bilingual universities’ language policies so that they can successfully provide well-grounded English-medium practices devoid of the linguistic tensions that emerge from their research findings. They conclude that the programmes (using CLIL) that are presently being implemented throughout the educational systems of these two autonomous communities to promote multilingualism (in Basque, Catalan, Spanish, English and French) may in future result in changed student attitudes and better proficiency in English, so that language barriers are not a hurdle when students participate in courses taught in English, and the expressed fear of domain loss for local minority languages may progressively disappear.

Anne Holmen, in Chapter 6, Linguistic diversity among students in higher education: a resource in a multilingual strategy? focuses on linguistic diversity among students at the University of Copenhagen as a potential resource in their academic development. The chapter is motivated by the university’s new language strategy More Languages for More Students, which encourages the integration of language components in academic studies. This strategy supplements the explicit parallel language policy of the University of Copenhagen with a focus on English and Danish, by including more languages. Moreover, the university is not only a multilingual learning space through its language teaching, but also through the linguistic diversity which is brought into the academic learning site with the language backgrounds and experiences of the students. However, according to the students their language resources are seldom seen as assets during their education or for their career. The core of this chapter gives voice to different groups of multilingual students, international as well as domestic students with language minority background, on their experience with language use and norms at the university and particularly on the weight which they ascribe to language(s) in their academic learning experience. It first discusses the language policy of the university as an example of a ‘multilingualism light’ profile. In the main parts of the chapter there is an overview of different categories of multilingual students, a summary of reports on the learning situation of linguistic minority students and finally a comparison between student experiences in programs characterized by different language norms and educational priorities.

In Chapter 7, Simultaneous parallel code use: using English in university studies in Iceland, Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir and Hafdís Ingvarsdóttir present the findings of a study of over a thousand Icelandic university students’ experiences with using English in university learning. The term simultaneous parallel code use is introduced to describe an academic context where the curriculum input is mainly in English and the output is in the native language. The study focused on how students cope with simultaneous parallel code use as they negotiate meaning between a receptive language (English) and productive language (Icelandic). In questioning to what extent students are able to master the academic discourse of their particular field of study in their first language, when the linguistic input is largely in a different language, the authors raise issues which have important implications for educational policy, since the use of English is spreading in academia at the same time as the population of university students increases and becomes more socially and educationally heterogeneous. Their findings suggest that despite perceived high English proficiency, many students experience language-related challenges when extracting meaning from reading materials written for native speakers of English, for example. The authors suggest that one current language ideology, that Nordic students automatically have English skills that suffice for use in academic study, needs to be critically re-examined and nuanced in light of an awareness of factors such as rhetorical style in Anglo-American textbooks, which can be challenging to students coming from other linguistic backgrounds.

Chapter 8, Questioning linguistic imperialism: language use and needs in a Puerto Rican agriculture program, by Kevin Carroll, Rosita L. Rivera and Kimberly Santiago, raises similar issues in addressing agriculture students’ perceptions of the use of English in their tertiary studies at the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez (UPRM), where Spanish is also present as a local language and medium of university instruction. The chapter provides an overview of linguistic imperialism and how the context at UPRM forces one to question what such imperialism might look like in post-secondary studies on the island. Through survey data, classroom observations and interviews with students, the authors provide a description of the context at UPRM, where both Spanish and English co-exist throughout the students’ curriculum and both are important for success. After presenting their data, the authors make recommendations for the incorporation of more clearly articulated institutional language policies, to benefit students enrolling in courses where much of the medium of instruction is in their second language. On the other hand, they also suggest that the high global prestige and local language maintenance efforts of Spanish in Puerto Rico have created a context on the island where the use of Spanish in higher education is not only normal, it has become expected. Professors and administrators at UPRM, they argue, have quietly challenged the idea that higher education, especially in the case of agricultural studies, must be done in English. The authors make a series of recommendations that bring the status of English and Spanish more in line with each other, and make the roles of the languages more explicit, which, they argue, will benefit students, staff and institutions in a challenging bilingual situation.

Damian Rivers’ chapter, The self-other positioning of international students in the Japanese university English language classroom begins with an overarching discussion of macro-sociological treatments of internationalization within the Japanese historical, political, cultural, economic and social context. Rivers argues that rather than looking toward the possible creation of hybrid identities through internationalization in Japan, the discourse of internationalization in the country focusses on cultural identity promotion that foregrounds nationalist pride. The author then goes on to show how these macro-positions have an impact on the experiences of internationalization among seven international students enrolled within a top-ranking Japanese university. The chapter situates the experiences of these international students within the context of the compulsory English language classroom, where English was an additional language for both the local and international students, and finds that there were a number of shared experiences and positions taken in response. These highlight the challenges facing international students moving to Japan. The author draws out a series of ‘storylines’ that unite international student experiences where the consequences of mismatched linguistic resources are especially in focus. This work suggests that at some future point this friction between the macro-sociological treatments of internationalization espoused by government officials, administrators and universities and the micro-sociological experiences of actual international students needs to be resolved, if indeed it can be, in the light of the societal discourses described at the beginning of the chapter.

In Chapter 10, The student experience as transculturation: examples from one-to-one tutorials, Joan Turner discusses her findings from a set of semi-structured interviews with eight Japanese students studying in the UK who recount their experiences with one particular institutional genre: the one-to-one tutorial. She presents theories of globalization and the contact zone, and this chapter particularly highlights the concept of transculturation and the associated notions of appropriation and talking back, and shows how both the student experiences and the norms of their institutional environments are subject to flux, contingency and unpredictability. These student experiences prove to be transformative, sometimes reinforcing a preference for their home environments, and sometimes creating a sense of ambivalence and instability. Four specific examples of sociolinguistic transculturation are identified in the chapter: saying you’re stuck; taking up a position in academic writing; sociolinguistic hybridity (involving a mentor from the same language background); and the affective dimension in tutor/supervisor–student interactions. Turner argues that the one-to-one tutorial appears to offer rich sociolinguistic and pedagogic pragmatic insights for international higher education, beyond the boundaries of the gen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Anne H. Fabricius and Bent Preisler
• 2 Culture Shock or Love at First Sight? Exploring the ‘Honeymoon’ Stage of the International Student Sojourn: Alina Schartner and Tony Young
• 3 Student Adjustment: Diversity and Uniformity of Experience: Peter Sercombe and Tony Young
• 4 English Is Not Enough – Local and Global Languages in International Student Mobility: A Case Study of the Austrian University Context: Hermine Penz
• 5 Students’ Representations of Multilingualism and Internationalization at Two Bilingual Universities in Spain: Enric Llurda, Aintzane Doiz and Juan M. Sierra
• 6 Linguistic Diversity among Students in Higher Education: A Resource in a Multilingual Language Strategy?: Anne Holmen
• 7 Simultaneous Parallel Code Use: Using English in University Studies in Iceland: Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir and Hafdís Ingvarsdóttir
• 8 Questioning Linguistic Imperialism: Language Use and Needs in a Puerto Rican Agriculture Program: Kevin S. Carroll, Rosita L. Rivera and Kimberly Santiago
• 9 The Self-Other Positioning of International Students in the Japanese University English Language Classroom: Damian J. Rivers
• 10 The Student Experience as Transculturation: Examples from One-to-One Tutorials: Joan Turner
• 11 Perception and Identity for Non-Native Speakers of English in an English-Medium University Environment: Jane Vinther and Gordon Slethaug
• 12 Living the Bilingual University: One Student’s Translanguaging Practices in a Bilingual Science Classroom: Catherine M. Mazak and Claudia Herbas Donoso
• 13 Why Does Meredith Wish to Sound Like the Queen? An Investigation into Identity Issues surrounding Spoken English Usage of Chinese ELF Speakers in London: Stuart Perrin
• 14 Language Policies in English-Medium Programmes in Germany and Denmark and their Long-Term Effects on Graduates’ Bonds with the Host Country: Frauke Priegnitz
• Index