The role of language and languages in doctoral education

Introduction: The Imperative for the Politics of ‘Researching Multilingually’

“…The internationalisation of higher education has given rise to superdiverse campuses of faculty and students, presenting the opportunity to develop new educational and social practices, open-mindedness and cultural and linguistic hybridity (Preisler et al, 2011). Yet, despite the multilingual environment of universities, monolingual expectations and practices tend to prevail (Araújo e Sá et al, 2020), and especially in Anglophone universities (Ryan, 2011;Singh, 2017). Other chapters grouped under the theme of hegemonic structures point to the challenges of researching in these multilingual environments, which are influenced by their structural determinants and the emergent interactions among researchers working individually or in teams, and doctoral supervisors and supervisees (Blommaert, 2010).…”

“…Yet, many doctoral researchers have English as their second, third or fourth language, requiring much investment to meet institutional monolingual norms. This situation threatens multilingualism, and knowledge expression and creation in other languages (Araújo e Sá et al, 2020;Singh, 2017). Furthermore, the expert/novice binary can tacitly shape doctoral supervisor and researcher communication; it also embodies the power relations implicit in the doctoral researcher process, thus further diminishing doctoral researchers' agency in challenging status-quo, institutionalised academic norms and practices .…”

A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss? The Case of Mature Students in Higher Education and Their Plurilingual Repertoires

“…Considering pre-HE and despite that the increased visibility of linguistic (super)diversity may not be reflected deeply in classroom practices [23], several studies suggest that it is possible and required to mobilize all languages in students' plurilingual repertoires in order to create inclusive classroom spaces and to foster learners' plurilingual identities [4,7,17,[24][25][26][27]. Concerning HE, the development of plurilingual repertoires seems to be intrinsically linked to the construction of knowledge, since the subject has access to more contacts with foreign languages, namely through new readings, new lectures, new social interactions, new findings, and, therefore, more new knowledge [28][29][30][31][32][33].…”

“…Additionally, by considering these MS' voices, HE Institutions will have access to privileged information regarding the labor market dynamics and the skills needed to succeed in this dimension, namely, in terms of language skills levels. HE Institutions have an important role in developing a kind of transversal skills that are capable of enhancing the students' mobility, their ability to live in linguistic and culturally diverse societies, and their integration into a globalized labor market [30][31][32][33]. This necessarily implies taking into account the students' life histories as well as their practical needs and aspirations.…”

3. Multilingual Researching, Translanguaging and Credibility in Qualitative Research: A Reflexive Account

“…Relevant curriculum content, and pedagogical and academic practices are beginning to be addressed (Magyar and Robinson-Pant 2011), but the processes and policies to support multilingual doctoral researchers who may be researching in a second, third, or fourth language have been largely neglected (Ryan 2011;Singh 2017). Araújo e Sá et al (2020) highlight the importance of multilingualism in understanding a research topic, but the little attention given to the education of doctoral researchers (and their supervisors) in using their linguistic resources in doctoral programmes, especially where many of the candidates are international students. Furthermore, whether and how researchers come to realise the significance of their linguistic resources in their research often seems to be missing in the discussion of the literature (Byrd-Clark and Dervin 2014) and in doctoral theses.…”