PDF The Sociolinguistics of Higher Education Download
- Author: Josep Soler
- Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
- ISBN: 9783030166793
- Category :
- Languages : en
- Pages : 150
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An accessible and entertaining textbook that introduces students to sociolinguistics in a real-world context, with issues they care about.
This volume examines different forms of language and dialect discrimination on U.S. college campuses, where relevant protections in K-12 schools and the workplace are absent. Real-world case studies at intersections with class, race, gender, and ability explore pedagogical and social manifestations and long-term impacts of this prejudice between and among students, faculty, and administrators. With chapters by experts including Walt Wolfram and Christina Higgins, this book will be useful for students in courses in language & power and language variety, among others; researchers in sociolinguistics, education, identity studies, and justice & equity studies; and diversity officers looking to understand and combat this bias.
This book investigates the sociolinguistic dimension of the internationalisation of higher education, examining the linguistic tensions and ambiguities experienced by universities around the world, particularly in non-anglophone contexts. Joining current debates within discursive and ethnographic approaches to language policy, the authors analyse the narrative emerging from university language policy documents, and then trace the stance-taking processes of different stakeholders at a small university in Catalonia. They pay particular attention to how teachers, administrative staff, and exchange students position themselves in connection to the role of Catalan and its coexistence with other languages at the university. This book will be of interest to language policy scholars and practitioners, as well as graduate students in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics
In today's increasingly interconnected, knowledge-based world, language policy in higher education is rapidly becoming a crucial area for all societies aiming to play a part in the global economy. The challenge is double faceted: how can universities retain their crucial role of creating the intellectual elites who are indispensable for the running of national affairs and, at the same time, prepare their best-educated citizens for competition in a global market? To what extent is English really pushing other languages out of the academic environment? Drawing on the experience of several medium-sized language communities, this volume provides the reader with some important insights into how language policies can be successfully implemented. The different sociolinguistic contexts under scrutiny offer an invaluable comparative standpoint to understand what position can - or could - be occupied by each language at the level of higher education.
English medium-of-instruction (EMI) is transforming modern-day universities across the globe, creating increasingly complex linguistic and intercultural realities which lecturers, students and decision-makers must negotiate. Teaching subject matter at higher-education level through the medium of English, in countries where English is neither an official nor national language (e.g. the Netherlands, Germany), is a highly complex phenomenon fraught with challenges and benefits. EMI programmes are capable of transforming domestic degree programmes into platforms of intercultural teaching and learning by infusing them with greater numbers of international faculty and students. Equally however, EMI programmes pose a socio-linguistic, -cultural and -economic challenge by institutionalising English at higher-education level within a country and displacing somewhat national and minority languages. This book, the first of its kind, provides an up-to-date and empirically-informed exploration of these salient themes in Europe, based on significant empirical data gathered and analysed on the German EMI context.
This book provides an overview and evaluation of the quality of bilingual education found in internationalised higher education institutions. Its authors focus on the multifaceted roles that language(s) play in these growing multilingual spaces and analyse and identify the many factors that account for quality multilingual degree programmes. The chapters cover themes such as language policy, quality assurance tools and indicators of quality and the authors approach issues of quality from very different and complementary perspectives, adopting for example, temporal, evaluative and developmental positioning, and taking micro, meso and macro level perspectives, while still keeping sight of the local realities, practices and possibilities. The contributions are written by authors working in Brazil, Finland, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK and have implications for researchers, education coordinators, practitioners and other stakeholders who are looking to design, launch and evaluate new programmes in any higher education context worldwide.
Language and Decoloniality in Higher Education brings together a collection of diverse papers that address, from various angles, the issue of decoloniality, language and transformation in higher education. It reflects the authors' cumulative years of experience as educators in higher education in different southern contexts. Distilled as case studies, the authors use a range of decolonial lenses to reflect on questions of knowledge, language and learning, and to build a reflexive praxis of decoloniality through multilingualism. Besides a number of decolonial persepectives which readers will be familiar with, this volume also explores a conceptual framework, Linguistic Citizenship, developed over the past two decades by scholars in southern Africa. In this collection, Linguistic Citizenship is used as a lens to 'think beyond' the inherited colonial matrices of language which have shaped this region (and many other southern contexts) for centuries, and to 're-imagine' multilingualism – and semiotics, more broadly – as a transformative resource in the broader project of social justice. Although each chapter has firm roots in the South African context, these studies have much to offer others in their 'quest for better worlds'. Of particular interest to global scholars are the authors' recounts of how they have grappled with leveraging the country's multilingual resources in the project of promoting academic access and success in the face of historical hierarchies of language and social power.
Applying a critical and holistic framework, International Students in Higher Education: Language, Identity, and Experience from a Holistic Perspective explores the lived experiences of four multilingual international students at a Canadian University. Vander Tavares investigates how the students experience life in the host community, construct their multiple identities, and develop their proficiency in the English language. Additionally, Tavares examines the ways in which the institutional context impacts the students’ experiences by foregrounding the voices of domestic students, faculty and support staff, and their experiences and perspectives on international students, multiculturalism, and multilingualism. Drawing from theories of cultural and social psychology, post-structuralism, multilingualism, and a sociocognitive approach to second language acquisition, this project presents rich ethnographic portraits of the students’ experiences. This contextualised and humanised portrayal of the students’ individual journeys challenges the prevailing discourse of deficit that has traditionally been used to characterise the multilingual international student experience. Overall, this book demonstrates that an ethical understanding of multilingual international students’ experiences requires critical attention to the sociocultural and sociolinguistic contexts of their academic communities and a holistic approach that considers the multiple domains of lived experience that the students navigate.