Professor | Molt bé, bon dia a tothom. Avui parlarem del futur del sistema capitalista global | Well, good morning everyone. Today we will talk about the future of the global capitalist system |
Int. St. A | (she raises her hand) Por favor, señor | (she raises her hand) Excuse me, sir |
Professor | ¿Sí? | Yes? |
Int St A | (she stands up) ¿Perdone pero podría dar la clase en castellano? | (she stands up) Excuse me, but could you give the class in Spanish? |
Int. St. B | Sí … | Yeah … |
Professor | Lo siento señorita pero no podrá ser. La mayoría de estudiantes son catalanes, o sea, que no creo que tenga que cambiar de idioma | I’m sorry, miss, but it’s impossible. The majority of students are Catalan and, I mean, I don’t think I need to switch to another language |
Int. St. A | Hay más de quince estudiantes Erasmus que no hablamos catalán y para usted no es un problema hablar español | There are over fifteen Erasmus students here who don’t speak Catalan and for you speaking Spanish is not a problem |
Professor | Mire, yo la entiendo perfectamente, señorita, de verdad, perfectamente, pero usted me tendría que entender a mí también. Estamos en Cataluña y aquí el catalán es idioma oficial. Si usted quiere hablar español, ¡se va a Madrid o se va a Sur América! | Look, miss, I understand your point perfectly, I really do, but you should understand mine too. We are in Catalonia and here Catalan is an official language. If you’d like to speak Spanish, go to Madrid or South America! |
Int. St. B | O … | Oh … |
All: | (noise) | (noise) |
The extract above, from the film L’Auberge espagnole by the filmmaker Cédric Klapisch, captures a moment of linguistic tension in the context of a university classroom in Catalonia. The movie is about Xavier, an undergraduate economics student from Paris, who decides to embark on a year-abroad study programme as an Erasmus student, and goes to Barcelona. Beyond capturing the then growing youth phenomenon of the study-abroad experience, this scene in particular is of relevance to the topic that we want to address in this book, namely the sociolinguistics of higher education. Prior to the dialogue that we read in the extract between one of Xavier’s friends (also an exchange student) and their professor, we see the same student together with Xavier and their group of friends talking (in French) before class and wondering if there is anyone who will ask the professor to switch to Spanish when delivering the subject.
As groups of foreign students began to populate university classrooms in Catalonia in larger numbers from the turn of the century onwards, this type of scene became more and more familiar to both university teachers and local students alike. It is something that preoccupied university stakeholders then, and that continues to be an issue of concern now, as we shall see in the pages of this book. While it is dramatized and therefore exaggerates the debate, the scene succinctly captures a moment in the sociolinguistic life of Catalan universities, encapsulating many of the issues that we wish to investigate in our volume. These issues are as follows:
- 1.In a context of increasing internationalisation, how do key stakeholders ‘on the ground’ at universities (teachers, students, and administrative staff) respond to their changing sociolinguistic environments and to the language policy documents of their universities?
- 2.What major themes emerge from officially formulated policy documents; that is, what stance do universities present in their regulating documents?
- 3.What is the fate of languages like Catalan, which has a relatively solid presence at universities in Catalonia, in a context of increased coexistence with other major languages such as English, but also Spanish?
In the modern world, higher education has become a key site for exploring compelling issues of a sociolinguistic or applied linguistic nature. One of the main reasons for investigating universities from a sociolinguistic angle is that, while they are key state (i.e. national) institutions, universities are also increasingly portrayed as internationally relevant players in a global educational market (Hultgren et al. 2014). As a result, many higher education institutions today are pervaded by a range of different discourses, which range between the nationalising and the globalising poles (Soler and Vihman 2018). This interplay of diverse, sometimes opposed, discourses frequently results in important sociolinguistic tensions, ambiguities, dilemmas, and expectations, and these can crystallise in the formulation of specific language policy documents authored by university councils or other relevant authorities (Källkvist and Hult 2016) that are intended to have an impact on the actual language practices of speakers within the context in which they operate.
This book explores in some detail how Catalan universities respond to the challenge of becoming more international and global in nature, while remaining very much locally grounded and nationally relevant—something that is, of course, not exclusive to universities in Catalonia (Vila and Bretxa 2015). What makes Catalan universities a particular case, compared to many other universities in non-anglophone countries, is that universities in Catalonia already present a bilingual setting, with both Catalan and Spanish as prominent working languages (that is, languages of teaching and learning, of research, and of administration), and with English gaining increasingly in importance (Pons 2015). This is a situation that Catalan universities share with other higher education institutions in officially bilingual territories, for example those in the Basque Country (Doiz et al. 2013) or some universities in Finland (Lindström and Sylvin 2014).
The general perspective that we offer in the first half of the book, which is based on a document analysis of university language policies, is combined in the second half with a more situated, qualitative, and ethnographic account of the specific situation at one public university in Catalonia, with data collected through participant observation of classroom practices and institutional events, focus-group discussion sessions, and in-depth interviews, while also taking into account the university’s web page and other university materials. This more situated perspective allows us to present the different positions taken by a number of relevant stakeholders at the university (teachers, administration staff, and international students); in our analysis, we aim to show how the positions that these stakeholders take are discursively shaped, and how their positions are associated with particular vested interests. Before summarising the key points of our analysis and providing an outline of the volume, in this first chapter we situate the book with respect to current scholarly discussions around language issues in the context of higher education and trends in internationalisation, where language, and particularly matters of language policy, are seen as key sites of struggle, anxiety, and ambiguity.
The Internationalisation of Higher Education from a Language Policy Perspective : Methodological and Theoretical Issues
As mentioned above, universities today are under more and more pressure from seemingly opposed discursive poles, the ‘nationalising’ and the ‘globalising ’ (Soler and Vihman 2018). In the last few years, it has become very clear that this can easily lead to a number of paradoxes and ambiguities that are played out in the terrain of language (cf. Haberland and Mortensen 2012; Cots et al. 2012; Liddicoat 2016). To put the issue as briefly as possible, at the same time as they are attempting to strengthen their international profile, universities are being portrayed as key national flagships, assets of the ...