Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1026

Part of Session 169: Sociolinguistic perspectives on the internationalization of HE (Other abstracts in this session)

Higher education – a national institution within an international setting? The implications of “language” to higher education

Authors: Saarinen, Taina
Submitted by: Saarinen, Taina (University of Jyväskylä, Finland)

With the increasing focus on policies of “internationalization”, "knowledge society" and "knowledge economy” within higher education (Välimaa & Hoffman 2008; Williams 2010), it is somewhat surprising that language does not feature in these policies that would seem to require a certain amount of language use and communication (Saarinen 2012). Simultaneously, while developments of internationalization and globalization challenge our views of a national higher education system, the aspect of “national” has not come into focus of analysis in current higher education policy research.

This presentation fills these gaps, by focusing on the cross section of the political (in)visibility of language in higher education on one hand and the universities as national institutions on the other.

Universities provide a testing ground for theorizing about the position of language in developments of internationalization and globalization, and of the position of national institutions within those developments. It is a cliché that “universities have always been international”. However, it is obvious that universities are, demographically speaking, internationalizing in different ways than the general society, as international recruitments within universities rarely reflect the migration patterns within any Western country (see, for instance, Hoffman 2007).

The presentation brings together different kind of data: sets of national and institutional policy documents; interviews at universities in Finland and Denmark (N=25); and a questionnaire to all Nordic universities and colleges on their language and internationalization policies . The qualitative discourse analysis of the data focusses on the action and actors (see van Leeuwen 1995 & 1996) around the concept of “language”: what actors and what action takes place around language?

The main questions are:

· What is the position of language in Nordic internationalization policies of higher education?

· What action and actors seem to drive “internationalization”?

· What are the implications of the position of language to universities as national institutions in an international setting?

The presentation is part of a larger study on the position of language in higher education policies, in Finland, funded by the Academy of Finland project n. 138287.

References:

Hoffman, D. 2007. The Career Potential of Migrant Scholars in Finnish Higher Education: Emerging Perspectives and Dynamics. Jyväskylän yliopisto,

Saarinen, T. 2012 (forthcoming) Internationalization of Finnish higher education – is language an issue? Forthcoming in International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 216, Thematic issue “Language variety, language hierarchy, and language choice in the international university”, edited by Hartmut Haberland and Janus Mortensen

van Leeuwen, T. 1995. Representing social action. Discourse & Society 6 (1), 81–106.

van Leeuwen, T. 1996. The representation of social actors. In C. Caldas-Coulthard & M. Coulthard (Eds.) Texts and practices: Readings in critical discourse analysis. London: Routledge, 32–70.

Välimaa, J. & Hoffman, D. (2008) Knowledge society discourse and higher education. Higher Education 56:265–285.

Williams, G. (2010) Knowledge Economy, Language and Culture. Multilingual Matters.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Higher education – a national institution within an international setting? The implications of “language” to higher education