Rethinking the role of language study in internationalizing higher education

Abstract

This article critically examines current discourses of internationalizing higher education both inside and outside the humanities and considers whether some contemporary practices and positions taken on by departments of languages, literatures and cultures might actually undermine public perspectives on language study by encouraging conceptually reductive views of language. Three common myths about language study that commonly surface in discussions of internationalization are then identified and analyzed, with the intention of exposing the discursive traps that scholars of languages and literatures often set for themselves and finding new ways of explaining our potential role in institutional efforts to internationalize curricula. _______________

Transdisciplinarity across two-tiers

“…The idea that meaning-making might provide a central shared concern for scholars from diverse disciplines working in foreign languages, which Swaffar espouses here, has found much traction among U.S.-based applied linguists working in foreign language teaching and learning over the past two decades (e.g. Hiram & Maxim, 2004;Kramsch, Howell, Warner, & Wellmon, 2007;Maxim et al, 2013;Swaffar et al, 1991;van Lier, 2004;Warner, 2011). In part prompted by the 2007 Modern Language Report, a growing body of applied linguists within FLLC departments have approached this as not only an intellectual but also a curricular problem, by trying to reimagine the desired learning outcomes of collegiate foreign language programs in terms of literacy and design awareness (Kern, 2000;Paesani et al, 2016), textual thinking (Maxim, 2006), symbolic competence (Kramsch, 2011), semiotic agility (Warner & Gramling, 2013, 2014 and literary thinking (Richardson, 2017).…”

Whose ‘Crisis in Language’? Translating and the Futurity of Foreign Language Learning

“…This psychopolitics of anticipation also shapes the broader discourse of higher education, which increasingly frames its purpose as professional training in a hydraulic register at odds with both preservationist and progressive liberal arts values of ambiguity, uncertainty, and dissent. Language departments often try to straddle this tension by offering language courses as a service to the institution and adding more occupationally keyed courses that are targeted at specific fields of study (e.g., German for Business, German for Engineers) to their curricular menu, while maintaining a symbolic core emphasis on more traditional coursework in literary and cultural history in the (smaller) rest of their program (see Warner, 2011). This often also involves a sort of doubling-down on the nationalization of literacy and the monolingual ideology of curricula in language programs (see Plews, 2013;Risager, 2007;Shohamy, 2006;Warner & Gramling, 2014).…”

Motivation and Gender Differences in Learning Spanish as a Foreign Language in a Malaysian Technical University

“…The significance of foreign language learning in the global landscape of higher education is augmented axiomatically amidst the flow of economic, political, academic and socio-cultural interests across borders (Ciobanu & Bujor, 2011;Warner, 2011). In this regard, various foreign languages are offered in different campuses of the Universiti Kuala Lumpur.…”