Background/purpose: While the existing literature explores the internalization of higher education, a significant gap remains in comprehending the motivations behind international students choosing Portuguese higher education. This study aims to address this gap by examining the motivations of a specific group within Portuguese universities:…

This paper empirically investigates whether Chinese language learning opportunities abroad have exerted a positive effect on international student mobility (ISM) to China. We utilize both official and self-compiled panel data for 182 countries, spanning a period of 15 years. We use the establishment of Confucius Institutes as an indicator of…

This paper focuses on international student mobility and the funding of higher education. We theorize that relying on international students for funding is stronger for institutions in developed English-speaking countries because they more often adopt marketization practices. Compared to Northern and Southern European countries, we find that they…

This study qualitatively explores how studying abroad in an English as a lingua franca context promotes student-sojourners' intercultural awareness (ICA) taking a longitudinal perspective. A group of Catalan/Spanish bilinguals and Turkish-L1 speakers were interviewed regarding their past ERASMUS experiences in terms of ICA following a stimulated…

Linguistic diversity emerging from international student mobility, in non-anglophone universities, is typically eclipsed by the existing tensions between the national language(s) and English as 'Lingua franca'. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with university lecturers, this study highlights the tensions surrounding national…

Reduced international student mobility has prompted Australian universities to reframe the way they provide intercultural and international learning experiences, with less dependence on the recruitment of international students. However, many related teaching and learning approaches are often met with perceived student resistance. The aim of this…

The past five decades have witnessed a political tension between Taiwan and Mainland China in relation to many countries on a global scale both economically and diplomatically. While both of them still claim the legitimacy of each other's national sovereignty since 1949, little academic attempts have been made to unravel the intricacies of…

The internationalisation of higher education has led to widespread adoption of English as a medium of instruction in European universities, and this strategy is supporting increasingly diverse student mobility. Many students undertaking short-term Erasmus+ mobility see this as an opportunity to develop their English language skills but may lack…

This study explores connections between design features of faculty-led short-term study abroad programs and resulting changes in students' global perspectives. Over 2,000 students provided data for this study, completing the Global Perspective Inventory (GPI) before and after studying abroad. Results indicated that program features such as…

While study abroad (SA) has long been considered an opportunity for language learning, relatively little research has investigated how short-term SA programs hosted by Anglophone countries support varied aspects of sojourners' language learning. To address this gap, the current study examined how 10 college students from a Korean university…

"Crossing borders" features prominently as a theme in study abroad, not only in terms of students' physical border crossings but also in their intercultural interactions with second language (L2) speakers whose background (linguistic and otherwise) they may perceive as markedly different from their own. Researchers have had a…

The increasingly international orientation of many higher education (HE) institutes and the growing role of English as an academic lingua franca have far-reaching implications for how we conceptualise universities and student mobility. In this paper, it is argued that the complexity and diversity of languages, communities and cultures present in…

This study starts from the premise that academic mobility contributes to the development of students' plurilingual identities and that study abroad contexts aiming at becoming global spaces are particularly interesting sites to explore the individuals' discursive work to (re-)construct their plurilingual identities by reconciling their language…

The paper presents the core aims and objectives of the teaching materials developed within the IEREST (Intercultural Education Resources for Erasmus Students and their Teachers) project, and shows how the innovative approach adopted for these activities can be implemented in the classroom. The IEREST teaching modules are innovative in that the…

This article explores linguistic and cultural border crossing and the long-term consequences of transnational mobility on a professional international academic. It provides an in-depth qualitative analysis of a research interview which investigated the internationalisation background of a Danish academic within an English-speaking context. This…