ERIC Number: EJ1115460
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2016
Pages: 23
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0790-8318
EISSN: N/A
The Englishisation of Higher Education in Catalonia: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnographic Approach to the Students' Perspectives
Language, Culture and Curriculum, v29 n3 p263-285 2016
This paper investigates the attitudes towards Englishisation displayed by 30 students enrolled in a Combined Languages degree, including English and another language, in a top-ranked bilingual university in Catalonia, where Spanish and Catalan coexist complexly, and where foreign language medium instruction is relatively new. Through a two-year fieldwork project, I report on how the institution implemented this partial English-medium instruction program for the first time in Spain, following its internationalisation mission. I then focus on the students' perspectives towards the officialisation of English as the third language of the Catalan university system. Via a Domain and Emotion Coding analysis of 30 essay-writing assignments, I show that students mobilise a series of predominantly favourable discourses on Englishisation which conflictingly interplay with negative attitudes towards it. They envision English as a post-national "democratising" lingua franca and as an asset for employability and educational excellence, but they also construct it as a politicised threat to linguistic diversity. These perspectives contribute to a nuanced understanding of the students' range of ambivalent stances concerning the established sociolinguistic orders of globalised universities in Barcelona and the neo-liberal linguistic regimes of the European Higher Education Area, which call for policies providing a more balanced ecology of languages.
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Student Attitudes, College Students, English (Second Language), Second Language Learning, Spanish, Program Implementation, Romance Languages, Essays, Coding, Language Attitudes, Official Languages, Language Usage, Bilingual Education, Multilingualism, Employment Qualifications, Cultural Capital, Intercultural Communication, Social Bias, French
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Spain
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A