Reflecting the increased use of English as lingua franca in today's
university education, this volume maps the interplay and competition
between English and other tongues in a learning community that in
practice is not only bilingual but multilingual. The volume includes
case studies from Japan, Australia, South Africa, Germany, Catalonia,
China, Denmark and Sweden, analysing a range of issues such as the
conflict between the students' native languages and English, the reality
of parallel teaching in English as well as in the local language, and
classrooms that are nominally English-speaking but multilingual in
practice. The book assesses the factors common to successful bilingual
learners, and provides university administrators, policy makers and
teachers around the world with a much-needed commentary on the
challenges they face in increasingly multilingual surroundings
characterized by a heterogeneous student population.
Patterns of language alternation and choice have become increasingly
important to the development of an understanding of the
internationalisation of higher education that is occurring world-wide.
This volume draws on the extensive and varied literature related to the
sociolinguistics of globalisation - linguistic ethnography, discourse
analysis, language teaching, language and identity, and language
planning - as the theoretical bases for the description of the nature of
these emerging multilingual communities that are increasingly found in
international education. It uses observational data from eleven studies
that take into account the macro (societal), meso (university) and micro
(participant) levels of language interaction to explicate the range of
language encounters - highlighting both successful and problematic
interactions and their related language ideologies. Although English is
the common lingua franca, the studies in the volume highlight the
importance of the multilingual resources available to participants in
higher educational institutions that are used to negotiate and solve
their language problems. The volume brings to our attention a range of
important insights into language issues found in the
internationalisation of higher education, and provides a resource for
those wishing to understand or do research on how language hybridity and
multilingual communicative practices are evolving there. Richard B.
Baldauf Jr., Professor, The University of Queensland
