Sociolinguistics Symposium 19
Freie Universität Berlin | August 21-24, 2012
Programme: accepted abstracts
Abstract ID: 766
Part of Session 197: Urban multilingualism in a context of international mobility (Other abstracts in this session)
The New Multilingual Challenge for Higher Education
Authors: Berthoud, Anne-Claude
Submitted by: Berthoud, Anne-Claude (University of Lausanne, Switzerland)
Our contribution to this session aims to show how higher education responds and can respond to the new multilingual challenge, how it copes and can cope with the new needs of international mobility and situations of increasing language diversity. Higher education is caught between two contradictory forces: the needs to compete in the international arena and at the same time to forster the national cultures and languages. The challenge is to find a balance between monolingual and multilingual solutions: on the one hand, the use of English as a lingua franca for international communication, for efficiency, immediacy, economy and simplicity, and on the other hand, the choice of multilingual strategies for intersubjectivity, fairness, participation, collaboration and decoding of complexity. Both of them are necessary components of efficient communication in the context of higher education.
In this perspective, a new conception of multilingual education can offer a way to respond to the "double bind": the use of an ALAST language mode (simultaneous use of several languages in a teaching event). Universities have to draw up multilingual policies that are no more "based on the "monolingual" view of multilingualism (seen as the addition and division of several languages), but on the "multilingual" view of multilingualism (seen as the integration of several repertoires). That creates favourable conditions for the construction of knowledge in a context of international mobility, in a new multilingual context.