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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 513

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

Global strategies and local norms. Languages at the international university

Authors: Söderlundh, Hedda
Submitted by: Söderlundh, Hedda (Malmö University, Sweden)

The international university attracts students and staff from different parts of the world. People meet and interact for a couple of months, weeks or days, and then return to their home countries. To the meetings they bring expectations about social and linguistic behavior that are subsequently negotiated and manifested in interaction - expectations about what languages to use with whom and in what situations, notions of the statuses of different languages in relation to one other, and presumptions about what contact language to use in lingua franca-interactions.

In my paper I discuss the kind of expectations – or norms – at the international university that have to do with language choice. The discussion is based on a study on language choice at English-medium courses in Swedish higher education, in which norms are defined as shared – explicit and implicit – expectations concerning social and linguistic behavior. As evidenced by what students say and do, I discuss general as well as group-specific norms for language choice and how they relate to each other and to the institutional context. These norms are seldom overt, instead being “seen but unnoticed” as Heritage (1984) writes, and the analysis is first and foremost based on sequences where students or staff violate the norm and hence make visible a sociocultural context (cf. Gafaranga & Torras 2002).

The results show that English is the first choice of language in most classroom situations, as being the shared lingua franca and official medium of instruction. In addition, the majority language of the surrounding population holds a strong position and Swedish is occasionally used in interactions. Languages associated with exchange students from non-English speaking countries, such as Spanish or French, are not included in participants’ expectations.

In the paper I argue that participants’ norms are based on calculations of others’ linguistic competence and identity, and strongly influenced by the local context. Swedish holds a certain indexical value that gives the language a strong position alongside English. A conclusion is that even though the courses are international in the sense that they attract students from different countries, local sociolinguistic circumstances, such as geographical place and societal context, also influence participants’ norms for language choice.

Gafaranga, Joseph & Torras i Calvo, Maria-Carme, 2002: Interactional Otherness: Towards a Redefinition of Code-switching. I: International Journal of Bilingualism 6(1). S. 1-22.

Heritage, John, 1984: Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge.