Figure 1: Transitional “Hayakom at HBKU” sign marking HBKU’s presence in the TAMUQ building (picture taken by authors)

Walking into the Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ) building today feels different from just a year ago. As part of an ongoing project, several students and I (Sara) have been documenting the visual and linguistic changes taking place across the TAMUQ building in Education City, Qatar. The university’s traditional greeting Howdy, its maroon banners, and the familiar Aggie insignia (the shared nickname and identity of Texas A&M students and alumni) are still visible, yet they are beginning to lose their dominance. In their place, visitors are now welcomed by new blue-and-white signs displaying a translingual message: “Hayakom at HBKU.” The Gulf Arabic word hayakom, meaning “welcome,” has become increasingly prominent on posters, banners, and orientation booths. Although much of this signage is not yet permanently installed, the shift is already evident.

This evolving dynamic from Howdy to Hayakom reflects more than just a sudden change in branding. It marks a shift in Qatar’s higher education landscape, as the U.S. branch campus TAMUQ, part of Qatar Foundation (QF) and located in Education City, prepares to close in 2028 while its fellow QF institution, the homegrown Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), gradually assumes its facilities and students. The closure decision followed a surprise February 2024 vote by the Board of Regents of Texas A&M University’s main campus in College Station, Texas, which cited regional instability and a renewed focus on its U.S. mission. Soon after that announcement, the three of us began photographing every Texas A&M emblem, sign, and display in the building, creating a record to track the changes over time and to preserve a piece of the campus’s history. Over the past year, we have watched the visual culture of the space shift in real time. Through signage, slogans, and colors, the linguistic landscape of the building and the identities it projects tell a story of institutional transformation, cultural localization, and shifting ideologies of belonging.

The educationscape as a site of change

Scholars of linguistic landscapes often remind us that signs do more than convey information; they materialize power, ideology, identity, and values in public space (Ahmad, 2022; Hillman & Ahmad, 2024). The same can be said for educationscapes, where universities use visuals, language, and architecture to communicate identities, values and affiliations (Krompák et al., 2022).

Figure 2:  Howdy signage inside the TAMUQ building representing Aggie identity and transnational continuity (picture taken by authors)

At TAMUQ, Howdy has reigned supreme for more than twenty years. As the official greeting of Texas A&M, faculty, staff, and students at the main campus use it to welcome one another and to greet campus visitors as a sign of Aggie hospitality. On the Doha campus, Howdy appears in signage, emails, and posters for Student Affairs events such as “Howdy Week.” Its cheerful informality reinforced continuity between College Station and its branch campus thousands of miles away.

Now, however, Howdy coexists with Hayakom. HBKU has introduced its own greeting, one that foregrounds the local linguistic and cultural context. HBKU Student Affairs has also begun cultivating its own traditions: “Hayakom Tuesday,” echoing TAMUQ’s “Howdy Week,” and “Blue Thursday,” where students are encouraged to “wear blue, show blue, scream blue!”—a parallel to TAMUQ’s maroon-and-white Spirit Thursdays where Aggies are encouraged to “embrace the maroon and white.”

This bilingual, bicultural overlap reflects the liminal moment both institutions currently inhabit. TAMUQ has not yet closed, and many of its students and faculty still identify strongly with Aggie traditions. At the same time, HBKU is asserting itself through new rituals, slogans, and events.

From maroon to blue: Rebranding space and identity

Alongside slogans, colors play an equally prominent role in communicating institutional belonging. TAMUQ’s maroon and white palette linked it visually to its U.S. home campus, reinforcing transnational identity and Aggie pride. Walking through the corridors meant walking through a transplanted Texas brandscape, complete with photos of College Station landmarks.

Figures 3a and 3b: HBKU “Blue Thursday” and TAMUQ “Spirit Thursday” posters on Instagram (screenshots taken by authors)

Today, that palette is fading. Blue and white, the colors of HBKU, now dominate new signage, orientation banners, and student activities. Cushions in the front entrance lobby now feature HBKU’s blue and white geometric logo, and the hallways are lined with images of the Minaretein building (meaning two minarets), HBKU’s signature architectural complex that includes both a mosque and academic colleges, replacing many of the Texas-centric visuals that once dominated the space.

The color shift is more than aesthetic. It signals a deliberate rebranding that seeks to reshape not only institutional identity but also the sense of belonging for students, faculty, and visitors.

Signs of state and leadership

The changes are also visible in the presence of Qatar’s leadership. At the building’s entrance, portraits of the Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and his father, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, now hang prominently. Such state imagery was absent during the TAMUQ era, when visual emphasis rested on Aggie traditions and the global prestige of Texas A&M. Their presence today highlights HBKU’s identity as QF’s homegrown university and its role in advancing national priorities. The walls themselves remind visitors that HBKU is a Qatari institution, rooted in the state’s vision for education and innovation.

Bilingualism and the Arabic language protection law

Another notable change is that TAMUQ operated under a cross-border partnership agreement with QF and was not required to maintain bilingual signage. As a result, its displays were often inconsistent, with some appearing only in English and others in both English and Arabic. However, HBKU complies more with Qatar’s 2019 Arabic Language Protection Law (Law No. 7 of 2019 on the Protection of the Arabic Language). This law requires Arabic to be the primary language on all public signage.

In practice, this means HBKU’s official signage is almost always bilingual, with Arabic typically placed above or beside the English text. This layout gives prominence to Arabic while reflecting HBKU’s use of English as its official medium of instruction and as a shared language among its diverse student body

Figure 4: Portraits of Qatar’s leadership, including the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani (left) and the Father Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani (right), now displayed at the building’s entrance (picture taken by authors)

The difference is visible, for example, in faculty office nameplates. At TAMUQ, they appeared only in English, whereas at HBKU they are consistently bilingual, with Arabic displayed first. This small but significant shift reflects how language policy is made material in the everyday visual culture of the university.

Belonging and identity in flux

What does it mean for students, faculty, and staff to inhabit this shifting educationscape? This is a question we are currently exploring in our ongoing research about the transition from TAMUQ to HBKU. For Aggies, watching maroon and Howdy fade from view may bring a sense of sadness, as if traditions and ties to the wider Aggie network are slowly being eroded. For new students entering through HBKU, however, Hayakom and the visible presence of Qatari leadership may foster a sense of national belonging and legitimacy that TAMUQ, as a foreign branch campus, could perhaps not fully provide.

The transition also brings into focus broader debates about language, identity, and higher education in Qatar. For years, international branch campuses have stood as symbols of global mobility and English-medium internationalization. HBKU, by contrast, is an explicitly Qatari project, though still English-medium. Its bilingual signage acknowledges the centrality of Arabic in public life while retaining English as the dominant academic language. In this sense, the visual and linguistic rebranding of the building does more than mark institutional change; it materializes Qatar’s ongoing negotiation between global aspiration and national affirmation.

From global brand to national–international project

The TAMUQ-to-HBKU shift can be read as part of a wider trend. Around the world, branch campuses have been praised for providing global exposure but also critiqued for being costly, unsustainable, or disconnected from local needs (Bollag, 2024; Kim, 2025). By 2028, TAMUQ will join the growing list of international branch campuses that have either closed or been absorbed into national institutions. Yet this trajectory is not universal. In the Gulf and parts of Asia, other branch campuses continue to expand, supported by government funding and demand for global higher education pathways.

Figures 5a and 5b: TAMUQ English-only office nameplate and HBKU bilingual Arabic–English office nameplate (photos taken by authors)

In this case, the closure decision was not driven by Qatar’s plans but rather by political currents in the United States, where heightened scrutiny of foreign funding and a turn toward isolationism have reshaped attitudes toward international partnerships. Although HBKU is QF’s homegrown university, it was intentionally designed to be both nationally grounded and internationally oriented—an English-medium institution that continues to attract global faculty and students while advancing Qatar’s local educational priorities. The move from Howdy to Hayakom thus signals more than a greeting. It marks a broader shift from borrowed traditions to localized yet globally connected narratives of identity and belonging.

Reading the signs

As universities, like cities, are built through language and signs, paying attention to the educationscape reveals the symbolic and material contours of change. At TAMUQ/HBKU, the coexistence of Howdy and Hayakom, maroon and blue, photos of Aggie landmarks and Minaretein, encapsulates a moment of transition.

These signs remind us that institutional change is not only about policy or governance. It is lived and seen in everyday spaces: on banners, cushions, doorways, and Instagram posts. They invite us to consider how language, color, and imagery make and remake belonging in higher education. For now, both greetings echo in the same hallways. Yet with each new sign and slogan, the balance tilts, signaling which voice will carry forward for now.

References

Ahmad, R. (2022, October 11). Mal Lawwal: Linguistic landscapes of Qatar [Blog post]. Language on the Move. Mal Lawwal: Linguistic landscapes of Qatar – Language on the Move
Bollag, B. (2024, December 31). International branch campuses spread in Mideast amid concerns about costs, impact. Al-Fanar Media. https://www.al-fanarmedia.org/2024/12/international-branch-campuses-spread-in-mideast-amid-concerns-about-costs-impact/
Hillman, S., & Ahmad, R. (2025). Combatting Islamophobia: English in the linguistic landscape of FIFA World Cup 2022. In K. Gallagher (Ed.), World Englishes in the Arab Gulf States. Routledge.
Kim, K. (2025, July 4). Branch campuses and the mirage of demand. SRHE Blog. https://srheblog.com/2025/07/04/branch-campuses-and-the-mirage-of-demand/
Krompák, E., Fernández-Mallat, V., & Meyer, S. (2022). The symbolic value of educationscapes—Expanding the intersection between linguistic landscape and education. In E. Krompák, V. Fernández-Mallat, & S. Meyer (Eds.), Linguistic Landscapes and Educational Spaces (pp. 1–27). Multilingual Matters.
Law No. (7) of 2019 on the Protection of the Arabic Language. (2019). Al Meezan, Qatar Legal Portal. https://www.almeezan.qa/EnglishLaws/Law%20No.%20(7)%20of%202019%20on%20Protection%20of%20the%20Arabic%20Language.pdf

Author bios

Dr. Sara Hillman is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and English at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU). Prior to joining HBKU, she spent nearly a decade at Texas A&M University at Qatar. Her research spans emotions, identity, and (un)belonging in English-medium instruction (EMI) and transnational higher education, World Englishes and sociolinguistics, linguistically and culturally responsive teaching and learning, and language and intercultural communication. Her current research explores the visual signage and symbols of Qatar Foundation’s international branch campuses and the homegrown Hamad Bin Khalifa University and how they project identity, values, and belonging.

Aishwaryaa Kannan is a third-year Electrical and Computer Engineering student at Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ). Alongside her studies, she has been deeply engaged in student leadership and research, serving as the Founding President of the Management & Marketing Association and as a student research partner on the campus closure study led by Dr. Sara Hillman. Having experienced the TAMUQ-to-HBKU transition firsthand, she connects personally with the paper’s themes of identity and belonging. Her interests span technology, education, and human connection, and she is passionate about how innovation and culture shape everyday experiences on campus.

Tim Billy Tizon is a third year Electrical and Computer Engineering undergraduate student at Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ). In addition to his studies, he has been actively involved in campus life through student leadership and research. He served as Secretary of the Leadership Experience Club for two years and is currently a member of the Management and Marketing Association. He has also participated in research across several disciplines, including communications and machine learning.

Group of international students at Macquarie University (Image credit: Ingrid Piller)

Dr Bodis is a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University as well as the Course Director of the Applied Linguistics and TESOL program. Dr Fang is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie as well as a NAATI-certified translator and interpreter between English and Chinese. She also serves as a panel interpreter/translator for Multicultural NSW and as a NAATI examiner.

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Transcript (coming soon)

Hanna and Prash discuss English language in higher education research and practice, in the understudied context of the South Pacific, and Prashneel’s new book, English Language-Mediated Settings and Educational Inequality: Language Policy Agendas in the South Pacific published by Routledge in 2025.

Transcript

Hanna: Welcome to the language on the move, podcast a channel on the new books network. My name is Dr. Hanna Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in linguistics and applied linguistics at Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr. Prashneel Ravisan Goundar. Dr. Prashneel is an academic based in the graduate research School in the University of New England. His research interests span applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and educational linguistics. Today we’re going to talk about his new monograph, which will be published next month. English language, Mediated Settings and educational Inequalities published by Routledge. Welcome to the Show Presh.

Prash: Hi, Hanna, thank you for having me.

Hanna: It’s lovely that you could be here, and I really am really excited about introducing your work to our audience, so can you start us off by telling us a little bit about yourself, and how you got interested in the topic of your book.

Prash: Well, thanks personally to you for inviting me and reaching out. It’s always good to expand on your work and put yourself out of your comfort zone and rethink what you have done. So, the book obviously was part of my PhD. Thesis. But I’ll start just a little bit about myself.

So, I’m originally from Fiji. and I moved to Armidale, which is in the New England region in 2022 to complete my PhD. I’d started working on my PhD in Fiji, but because it was during the Covid period in 2020, and there were restrictions on travel and all of that, so I couldn’t move until mid of 2022, when things got a bit better. Back home back in Fiji I was an academic as well. I taught linguistics and applied linguistics courses for a decade or so. and part of what we had to do was we had to make sure that we upgraded our qualifications. We were given a timeline to do this upgrade, and I started looking at research topics.

Fijian streetscape (Image credit: Felix Colatanavanua via Wikipedia)

The way it kind of worked was the former Prime Minister of Fiji had gone into a function and had spoken at length about the English language problems that he had come across, and he had mentioned some of the civil servants, teachers or professionals who were writing emails. He noticed a lot of spelling mistakes, sentence structure errors, grammatical errors, and things like that. That’s when my my research skills kind of just picked up on this. And I started to think, well, he’s saying that. But does he have any form of data to back up his ideas? Or why have we come to that conclusion? Why is that the case? So that’s when I started to think aloud about this, and I thought this was going to be an interesting topic to investigate.

I sent research proposals over to a few universities, and that landed at UNE and my primary supervisor Finex Ndlovu he picked up on that, and he said, well, this looks like an interesting topic, but there would be other elements that I would like to add on to that. And that’s how I started working on my PhD which I finished in 2023. And that’s when we then started to see how the thesis could then be turned into a monograph and published as a book. So, I sent out the proposal to 2 publication houses and Routledge had sent it out for review, and they got back, and the review was very positive. And I thought, okay, now this is the time to start revising and reworking on how I can reach out to a wider audience who would be interested in this language, planning language policy, medium of instruction book. So that’s how it came about.

Hanna: Fantastic. Well, we’re glad that it did! It makes me feel like very old to think that you were doing this in Covid, because in my mind, Covid was just, you know, last year. But you’ve done so much since then, so I’d like to start in terms of delving into your book to focus on two of the things that I found really innovative and exciting about your research. And that is, of course, that it explores a really under-researched context. So that’s the first thing. And then the second thing is that it’s very participant centred. So, it really allows the participants to have a voice. Could you speak to those two aspects, or expand on them a little bit for our audience?

Prash: Absolutely, so if I did a quantitative study and just looked at a language test to see what the students were doing, or how they were coming into the university with a particular school, I think the study would not have been of merit in the sense that we are just looking at it from the statistics point of view. To just say, this is the level the students have entered the university, this is the level that they are leaving out from the University. What I wanted to go into was why they were at that particular level. What actually happened at the back end of it. And this is where the whole story about the Prime Minister comes into place is that something must have happened along the way for them to have a particular level of English when they entered a university, and that space was under researched.

Other researchers or scholars in Fiji had looked at primary school level of English, they had looked at high school level of English, or they had used interventions in those spaces, but they did not move on to the university and try to investigate. We have students who end up at the 3 main universities in Fiji where they all have English as the medium of instruction. But Fiji is so diverse. The linguistic background spans over 300 islands that we have, and you have students who would come from maritime schools who are very in rural areas. And then you have students who come from urban schools, and they enter the university. But for someone to just say, oh, well, you all come from schools. You should have the same level of English is very unfair. It’s an injustice, because that’s not how it works. So that’s the whole space that I really wanted to tap into and see what we could do to address these issues or what we could do to find out what these issues were, and that’s where the methodology came into place.

So I’ll tell you a funny story about this when I wrote the proposal, and I had sent it out to my supervisors, and I said, This is what I would like to do, and this is what I want to find out, and I remember them writing back to me and saying, Well, have you thought about how you’re going to give voice to the students. and that kind of put me into. Okay, how do I do that? So, I started again, looking at different methodologies. The most suitable one I found was grounded theory, methodology, and why it was suitable was it generates. The findings are centred with the data. So, the data actually generates the themes. The data actually brings about all the information that you could possibly gather. Then I started reading more about grounded theory, and then I noticed it was not used in the South Pacific context. When it came to language testing regimes, it wasn’t in that space. So, I said, okay, this is a new element. That’s coming into the picture and grounded theory, because it is of 3 different coding systems that go into its open coding, selective coding, and theoretical coding, these 3 different stages let the findings shine in their own spaces. Because you have this open coding where we had rural schools’ data. We had data about urban schools. We had data about tertiary institutions. And then we streamlined what we got from there into the selective coding space to look at. Okay, this is from, you know, these 3 streams. Then we grouped it to put rural schools and urban schools together. Whether it’d be primary schools or high schools. We put that information together. Then we moved on to getting the higher education data together as well. So, these were the new elements that kind of came about in the book. The methodology allows the participants to go on and speak about that information that they have.

So, we were able to have the total participants I had in the study which was 120, who did 2 language tests, one at the beginning of the year, and at the end of the year. We had writing interventions that I used to give them feedback on how they were progressing. And then, when we looked at the data at the end again qe showed improvements, but then I still wanted to know what had happened. So, we chose 30 participants to have an interview, and they were all randomly selected. It wasn’t someone who has performed the best was selected, or people who were low. And then I started to talk to them about their background educational background in terms of their primary school and high school level of English. What had happened, and those findings then told us a whole new picture.

Recently, even last year, if Fiji has started looking at examination results, and they have tried to look at what’s happening, and they want to have an educational review. So, I recently wrote a newspaper article. and I explained in that review that it’s not just blaming the students and saying that we need to do this review because the students did not perform well or we need to do the review because the teachers are not doing their job. What are the elements that are contributing to the unsatisfactory level that the Ministry of Education or the Fijian Government is looking at? And so, I put my whole findings forward. And a lot of people sent me an email. And they said, yeah, it was spot on that these are the things that in reviews in previous years people have not considered, and they have just put a blame on somebody in that aspect. So yes, the voices that have come from the grounded theory methodology. Now, I’m trying to look at avenues where I can put this through…

Hanna: Yes, contribute your voice to the debate?

Prash: Yes, exactly.

Hanna: So you looked at a 120 students, you tested them at the beginning, and at the end of their first year at university. And then you interviewed 30 students. So, to kind of understand their experiences with English language, learning in all those diverse contexts.

Prash: Absolutely.

Hanna: It’s so relevant to other contexts in English language teaching all over the world where you do have this diversity of educational spaces, particularly in rural and regional areas, but also with you know, with diverse access to resources in all sorts of different spaces, like, even in the same city, you can have very diverse access to resources in the same educational contexts.

Prash: Yes, that’s so true.

Hanna: It’s important, and, as you say, that you are now introducing this into the political space is also so fascinating, and that it wasn’t there before is shocking. But it’s fantastic when you know your research has an impact or can have an impact. So, I guess for our audience, we’d really like to know a little bit more about what you found. So, my next question is, you talk about these different ways in which students in different parts of Fiji, in the primary system, and the high school system, too, I’m imagining, have this unequal access to essentially quality, English language, learning. Can you tell us a bit more about what your main findings were? What were some of the things that you found, and what were some of the main barriers. preventing equal access for all students to quality. English language learning, and teaching?

Prash: You have already mentioned, coming from same region schools, but they have different kind of access to resources. That’s exactly what we discovered in this particular project. So, I spoke to the students. One of the students told me, he came from a rural school. So, the two main islands in Fiji they have Viti Levu, and Vanua Levu. So, he came from one, and he said to me, he said. when I was in second grade, the library had 10 books. When I left the 8th grade to move to high school the library still had the same 10 books. There was no movement in the in the 6 or 7 years that the student was there, so I said there was no new books? He said, no. Ten books for 300 students who would have studied in that whole period. So if we are saying English should be improved, and it can be improved by reading. Well, do we have the resources to give to the students? You can’t just say read, read, but well, let’s look at our backyard. We don’t have those books to give.

Related to that the students told me, about what they found in their library. This is another student, but it’s related to what I just spoke about. The library only had books for upper primary. They didn’t have any books for lower primary. So, if you have students who are from one to four in those classes. They didn’t have books to look at, and it’s the same with other schools. People had books for lower primary, no books for upper primary students, or vice versa. In the high school context as well.

Students also told me that because they came from maritime schools or they came from rural schools there, what happens is they come from very small communities, and it’s so small that you kind of know everybody in the community. So, the students are also very familiar with the teacher who was teaching, so the teacher would not use English to teach English instead of using, you know, English to teach a reading of English class or a grammar of English class the teacher was using a vernacular. What led on from there was when this particular student she moved to high school. She said “I was in culture shock because all the students were speaking in English, and I’m coming from a rural primary school”, an island primary school, and she was so depressed she told me. She said she spent the first year of high school in isolation. She would sit under the tree and just try, and you know, be herself, or she would go to the library because she had no voice. She didn’t know how to communicate. There was a huge language barrier for her.

She wasn’t able to even have a simple conversation with the teacher to talk to the teacher, and I remember her telling me she said, I tried to go and talk to the teacher. I tried to make time to go into the teacher, but the teacher has so many classes. The teacher has so many students, she said. I couldn’t get through to talk to her on how I could improve my conversation skills, or in general, you know my skills in the English language. That was the other situation. A similar one. Another student said to me, she said, I didn’t care that we had to speak in English. I spoke in iTaukei, which is an indigenous Fijian language, she said. I spoke with people of other languages who would speak in English, but I had no words, so I would speak to them in the iTaukei language and just try and make a conversation. But it was hard. It was very hard. It was depressing, for some of the students. How would you go about solving this kind of issue?

So, what I do recommend in the book is that for the students who are coming from these schools, once we know that yes, they are having this kind of issue, we need to set up basic academic kind of skills training for these students so that we nurture them to then progress gradually into the class, and they don’t feel that isolation. They don’t feel that they cannot talk. And the other aspect about resources was very interesting. So, as I said, it’s always vice versa. You cannot have a balance in this. One of the students from a rural school said. which was, I found it a bit funny the way he explained it, he said “oh, well, we didn’t have a lot of resources.” This is a very rural school in Fiji, he said, “we only had seven laptops”, and I said to him, “seven laptops in a rural school. I think you were well in place”, you know. At the same time I spoke to another student who came from the same region but attended an urban school with no computer access. They didn’t have any Internet; they didn’t have any computer access. So, the distribution of resources is unequal here. So how do we look into that.

Another student told me, she spoke to someone who came from another urban school and she also attended an urban school. Sha said “we did not have the same textbook access, they had more textbooks than us, or they had more teaching and learning resources, such as charts. They had access to those things as well”. So, I noticed that students actually make this comparison when they are there in the same space. They do talk about all of these things. And yeah, these are different barriers that they have in trying to excel in exams, because in high schools as well, the medium instructions is in English. But if we don’t look at it right from the beginning when they come here. And that’s when you know the blame game starts. And in the last examination results that came out for Fiji they were 76% pass rate. And everybody was, why is it so low? Why is it? 76? But yes, you’re not looking at the circumstances that the students go through that the teachers go through. Because yes, you can say to the students, but then the teachers can also be like, well, be didn’t have the books to do this.

Another interesting issue is the shortage of teachers which has two aspects. One is a literal shortage. One student said they didn’t have an English teacher for two terms completely, because the teacher fell ill. Now there was no one to step in to look after these students for two terms, and it was an examination class to prepare for an external exam. So, in the third term they got a substitute teacher. But instead of learning, it was just rushing through to cover whatever they could cover to sit for the exam. Who can you point to in in that space? Well, should we say that the school would have had to make contact with the Ministry of Education to try and look for someone to come into this place should we point to the teacher and say, well, if you were unwell, you should have informed us in advance. Should you point to the head of department and say, why didn’t you have a contingency plan in place to get someone to cover that shift as well? It’s a whole structure, who do you kind of get into that space as well. So yeah, it was fascinating to listen to their stories.

Hanna: It’s so relevant as well, these structural educational issues. And they’re also often interconnected with issues around medium of instruction in lots of contexts. We could, we could talk about that for the whole podcast, but I want to move on to your monograph. You used a language testing tool to assess students at the beginning of the semester, and at the end of the year which hadn’t been used in in fact, I think you said it hadn’t been used in the region outside of Europe and the “global north”. The Common European Framework of Reference. So can you tell us a bit about why you chose that tool, and how you argue it should be used to better meet the needs of learners in the Fijian context, because it was developed in quite a different context, as we know.

Prash: That’s a very interesting question that you have asked, because a lot of people come back to me and say, oh, so how did you choose this or what made you think about this one? So, when we had conversations about this, I needed to have a tool that I could use to measure students at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year to check. So, what could work in that? So, I started to investigate language testing regimes, and the book covers all of these aspects about the history of all of those, and what I found was tests such as TOIC test, TOEFL test or IELTS test, Cambridge examination language tests, they all went back to the CEFR, which is the Common European Framework of Reference for languages. The CEFR was where all these other tests got ideas from, and they built onto that. So, I said, instead of using, let’s say, a TOEFL test to do the testing instead of looking at IELTS test to do the testing, why not look at how the CEFR can be used in this context. And then I understood that the CEFR has got so many different sorts of scales for different aspects.

So, if you’re looking at writing, my study looked at academic writing. It had about six different ways of looking at writing. And because it comes from because it comes from Europe it had gone through about 2,000 different descriptors before it was designed. And that’s when I said, okay, if there’s so many languages in Europe, and they have looked at 2,000 different descriptors to come up with this standard one. This could now be suitable for the Fijian context because of the different languages that are being used in this context. And what I found is you already alluded to is that in the South Pacific context that had not been used. The CEFR was very new in that aspect, and the IELTS test is an ongoing thing. So, in Fiji or in Australia the IELTS test is used generally for migration purposes for scholarship purposes. But that’s not what my target audience was my target audience was looking at higher education students and trying to align their educational needs. And this particular framework, the descriptor. So, there are 6 descriptors to this. A1 and A2 indicate that the students are basic users. And then you have B1 and B2, which say, the students are independent users. And then you have C1 and C2, which say, these students are proficient users. And that’s exactly what we wanted to find out from the student when they entered the university, what kind of user can we classify them into? And this really kind of matched into that. And when we it was so nicely utilized when we looked at it at the end of the year we found improvement they had made on the scales.

So, the 120 students who set the test at the beginning of the year, what I found was that 62 of them were at A1 level. And 49 of them were at A2 level. Both were at basic user levels. So, throughout the year, what we did was we had writing interventions for academic writing to improve this skill, because that’s the lower end of the scale, and we tried to see how we can improve on that. So, they had paragraph writing activities that they did. They had some rewriting activities. They worked on academic writing. There were three interventions, academic writing, essay, writing, that they did, and at the end of the year, when we checked how the cohort had done so from the 120, 12 of them moved from A1 to A2, but the significant change that came was 90 moved to B2. And then that’s becoming an independent user. Interestingly, 8 of them moved from A2 at the beginning of the year to C1 as proficient users. But of course, this is just to do with their writing skills. We’re not looking at anything else, so we can’t say, well, very brilliant. They are very proficient speakers. But no, no, we’re just looking at the writing part, so I don’t want to excite the audience too much.

Just to see it function in in that aspect was really something good that came about. So, I sent the book to the Deputy Prime Minister in Fiji, and he has written a blurb in the book as well, and it was good that it’s getting to people who make decisions to see where I can come in, and how I can contribute to that conversation as well.

Hanna: Congratulations! That is fantastic result, isn’t it, that the Deputy Prime Minister not only has read your book but has endorsed it.

Prash: Yes, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Hanna: So, my last question, which is for those of us who are, you know, interested in researching in this space for emergent researchers, for students, linguistics and applied linguistics, and also language teaching students. What is the kind of key findings that you would like us to take away from your exciting and wonderful new book?

Prash: So, I’m trying to share and not over share, so that readers would want to read the book, and I don’t want to give too much away. What I would say, is like the book has connected three different spaces. That is the higher education, language testing regimes, and the grounded theory methodology. So, it’s an interconnection of these three different things that have come about in this book and I think readers and emerging scholars or established scholars like yourself. The book will give you how grounded theory can be applied into language, education, research. When I started looking at grounded theory methodology, it was mostly used with clinical psychology, or it was used in the sciences to get their data. And I read through Urquhart’s book, Cathy Urquhart. She has got a fantastic book that looks at grounded theory methodology. And the book was my bible, because it showed you the steps that you need to do to arrive at the data, how you collect information, and then how you analyse and interpret the data.

One of the [thesis] examiners praised the methodology of the research and said that he didn’t think that theory could be utilized in this way in a language testing or language education, research, so to say, so that that I thought was a very good compliment. I think leaders will then be able to use that space as well, coming towards higher education because they have been findings of different spaces in that language, medium of instruction, language policy. And this here, this is trying to get the student to say, well, what do you think we can do to improve? Or what is the problem that you are facing at this particular juncture. and what I found with the the university students, the way they talked about coming into lectures, and not being able to understand the delivery of the lectures. They said we wanted to just leave everything and go out. We couldn’t process the kind of language that was coming through to us, and then to start writing that seemed a bit challenging for them.

However, one of the things that I think scholars will be happy to hear, I asked the students. I said, what did you think the language test that you did, what did you think about the academic writing interventions which I monitored throughout there. The students gave very honest feedback in that aspect. Some of them said it was very challenging, which is fine, because you want to know what they felt. Some of them said that they found it useful because each had a task that they had to do. And then, obviously, I was giving feedback to them on how they would improve on the next task, or that particular task. They found that very helpful. They said the writing in interventions they found it to be helpful because essentially academic skill, academic writing skills is not just a 1 1-year thing or not a one semester kind of thing. Students go on to the 3 year or 4-year program, but they need to be able to submit assignments. They need to know how they go about making an argument or supporting a discussion. So, this whole book kind of outlines how helpful this were to them.

So that’s one of the things I could say. The other aspect that the students brought about was not only having teachers but having motivated and passionate teachers. That also really contributes to how the students perform in the class. And I mean, I don’t want to boast here, but I’ll tell you. I used to teach the academic English course many years ago, and I would have a lecture at eight o’clock, and there were 700 students in this class. One day I noticed the attendance would be 90%. There would be 90% students in the class. The students told me that, sir, the subject is very boring, but you make it so exciting that we show up. We want to know, and they would not feel sleepy in the class, because I would deliver the language academic English in such a way that it sorts of hit them, that why, they were in the class, or why they were doing that. So, I think if that filters down, or if that tickles down to primary school teachers or high school teachers, and they are that they know they don’t just there, because in a fortnight they’re going to be paid. They they’re there because they make a difference to the life of the student that it takes them. You know, from primary to high school, from high school to university, and it’s just going to be good in that aspect to look at it. So those are the key things.

Hanna: I think that’s fantastic place to end Prash! That’s so important. And I think it’s lovely also, for I know some of my students who are English language teachers or teachers in training will be listening to this. And I think that’s a really lovely point to end on which is that, yeah, it’s not just about having teachers, of course, although, of course, that is of paramount importance. But it’s about having passionate and motivated teachers. And that’s very impressive to get 700 students to turn up at 8 o’clock in the morning. I think that speaks. That’s a great compliment for any teacher.

Thanks again, Prash, and thanks very much to our audience for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the language on the move podcast because we talk about fantastic topics like this. And our partner, the new books network to your students, colleagues and friends until next time.

Tazin speaks at Talent Day, Bangladesh Forum for Community Engagement

Every year, the Bangladesh Forum for Community Engagement in Sydney, Australia hosts an event called ‘Talent Day’ to acknowledge the achievements of primary and high school students in the Australian-Bangladeshi community. How does this interest a sociolinguist?

In so many ways – the interaction of multiple languages, the code-switching in the speeches, the expressions of heritage and identity in language use, the living examples of language shift through generations of migrants and so much more.

This year, though, my attention was taken by a request to give a short guest speech to the HSC graduates about to embark on their university journeys. My first dilemma was determining what meaningful contribution, as a second year PhD student, I could make. Which part of my university experience could I share? I decided to talk about my PhD supervisors and share two experiences that, for me, underlined the significance of language itself.

I told them about the lecture that Dr. Loy Lising delivers on the first day of class for our students. In the process of introducing me and the other members of the teaching team, she brings up the slide about communicating with us. But before the technical details, she implores the students to remember our common humanity when communicating with teachers. She explains that the use of our shared courtesies, such as “Dear [teacher’s name]”, “could you”, “thank you” acknowledge that a student and a teacher are two human beings communicating with one another.

From Dr. Lising’s words, I extrapolated that approaching someone more learned with humility confers dignity to both the teacher and the student and if anything, reminds one of the humility that should be cultivated in the pursuit of learning.

I then spoke about my first time as a student of Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller, when I was doing my Masters of Applied Linguistics. It was time for the final assignment and before giving us the details, she displayed an image of a Persian rug. She directed us to the intricate parts that were woven, bit by bit, to produce something so beautiful.

Her next request was for us to write her a “beautiful” assignment. To achieve this, she asked us to remember the great privilege of higher education, which so many others have been and continue to be deprived of. We were reminded of our moral obligation to use our learning to contribute to society and the first step was to dedicate our attention to writing a good assignment – to remember the privilege of being able to write one.

I had never had an assignment presented quite like this before!

Conceptualising and expressing the act of learning as a privilege and the production of work as beautiful was yet another exercise in humility, a reminder of the very significant role that our teachers play in shaping our minds, and an acknowledgement of the purpose of higher education.

Towards the end of my speech, I realised I had given the students a series of stories and I wanted to explain why I had done this.

To be meaningful, university and higher education must be a journey of purpose, guided by our teachers and mentors who nurture our potential to contribute to the world. Ultimately, the university journey symbolises the lifelong commitment to learning from those who are more learned and passing it on to those that follow.

“Giant Head” installation at the Gentle Monster store at Sydney Airport

One of the goals of graduate education is to empower students to reach their academic and professional goals by developing their communication skills. For example, one of the learning outcomes of a class I teach in the Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University is to enable students to “communicate advanced knowledge and understanding of socially relevant aspects of language and culture contact to diverse audiences.”

To achieve that learning outcome, students undertake a series of writing tasks throughout the semester on a public forum, namely right here on Language on the Move.

Although moderating around a thousand comments per semester is a huge workload, I’ve always enjoyed this task. The series of responses to writing prompts (aka comments on blog posts) allows me to learn more about my students’ backgrounds, interests, and perspectives. It is also rewarding to see that student comments become more sophisticated and engaged over the course of the semester and that their confidence in their academic writing increases.

Has ChatGPT ruined writing practice?

While I used to enjoy supporting students to develop their communication skills in this way, the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and the rapid adoption of other generative AI platforms since then has changed things.

A not insignificant number of students now submit machine-generated writing tasks, and I’m saddled with the additional task of catching out these cheaters.

Submitting machine-generated text obviously has no learning benefits. Therefore, my task descriptions and syllabi now contain an explicit prohibition against the use generative AI:

Use of generative AI is prohibited
Your response must be your own work, and you are not allowed to post machine-generated text. Use of machine-generated text in this or any other unit tasks defies the point of learning. It is also dishonest and a waste of your time and my time. […] If I suspect you of having used generative AI to complete your writing task, your mark will automatically be 0.

In 2023, this prohibition took care of the problem, but in 2024 it no longer works. This is because machine writing has become virtually indistinguishable from bad human writing.

Machine writing and bad human writing now look the same

Most commentators note that machine-generated text is getting better. This may be true. What has received less attention is the fact that human writing is getting worse as people read less widely. Instead, more and more people seem to model their writing on the bland models of machines.

The feedback loop between reading and writing is breaking down.

The Internet is drowning in an ocean of poor writing, whether created by humans or machines – a phenomenon Matthew Kirschenbaumer has described as the looming “textocalypse:” “a tsunami of text swept into a self-perpetuating cataract of content that makes it functionally impossible to reliably communicate in any digital setting.”

Instead of developing their communication skills through audience-focussed practice, my students’ regular writing practice may now be contributing to this tsunami. If students use generative AI, it certainly no longer meets its stated aim – to practice communicating advanced knowledge and understanding of socially relevant aspects of language and culture contact to diverse audiences.

Where is the line between outsourcing learning to tech and using tech to support learning?

To my mind, the line was clear-cut: to use generative AI is to outsource learning to a machine and therefore pointless. I was not concerned about the use of other language technologies, such as spell checkers, auto-complete, grammar checkers, or auto-translate.

But then I received this student inquiry, which I am reproducing here with the student’s permission:

I am writing to inquire if using the grammar check program for writing tasks is also prohibited.
I’ve been aware that AI generation is prohibited, and I did not use AI for my writing task. I [used all the assigned inputs], and I tried to organize ideas in my first language, then translated them by myself (without using any machine translator).
However, I always use a grammar check program, and sometimes, it suggests better words or expressions that I can adopt by clicking, as I am a paid user of it. I use it because I am unsure if my grammar is okay and understandable. I was wondering if this is also prohibited?

The easy answer to the query is that (automated) translation and grammar checking are allowed because they are not covered by the prohibition.

The more complicated question is whether these practices should be prohibited and, even if not strictly prohibited, whether they are advisable?

Dear reader, I need your input!

Translation as a bridge to English writing?

Let’s start with translation as a form of writing practice. The inputs for the task that triggered this question (Chapter 3 of Life in a New Language, and Language on the Move podcast series about Life in a New Language) were all in English.

After having perused all these inputs in English to then draft the response – a short reflection on the job search experience of one of the participants – in another language is a lot of extra work. You have to process input in English, write in another language, and translate that output.

This extra work may become manageable if it is done by a machine. A generative AI tool could produce a summary of the input in no time. An auto-translate tool could translate the summaries into the other language, again in no time. The student then drafts their response in the other language.

It’s technically the student’s work. Or is it? And, more importantly, is this process developing their English writing and communication?

Grammar checkers, suggested phrasing, and auto-complete

Like the student who posed the question, most of my students are international students, most of whom are still developing their English language skills, at the same time that they are required to learn and perform through the medium of that language.

To avail themselves of all kinds of learning tools is important. I myself use the in-built spell-check, grammar-check, and auto-complete features of MS Word. However, I can evaluate the advice provided by these tools and readily reject it where it’s wrong or inconsistent with my intentions.

Judgement needed: Until recently, the MS Word auto-correct tool incorrectly suggested that the spelling of “in-principle” was “in-principal”

I worry that, for a learner using these tools, these nuances get lost. If the machine is perceived to be always right, language changes from something malleable to form and express our ideas into a right-or-wrong proposition.

Similarly, learning synonyms is important to improve one’s writing. To this day, I regularly look up synonyms when I write with the intent to find the best, the most concise, their clearest expression. However, looking up synonyms for an expression and evaluating the various options is different from receiving automated suggestions and accepting them. One seems like an active, critical form of learning and the other like a passive form of learning. The writer’s sense of ownership and autonomy is different in the two instances.

How best to use language technologies to develop academic literacies and communicative competence?

In sum, most use of language technologies for the kinds of learning tasks I have described here strikes me as counterproductive. Yet, I can also see its uses. Where is the line between using tech to support one’s learning and using tech to avoid doing the hard work of practice, the only way that leads to fluency?

How do you use tech in your university assignments and where do you draw the line? How would you deal with these dilemmas as a teacher?

In the conversation, we explore how the dominance of English has become more contested since the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in higher education and global knowledge production.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

References

Novak Milić, J. 2024. 40 Years of Croatian Studies at Macquarie University. Language on the Move Podcast.
Piller, I. (2022). How to challenge Anglocentricity in academic publishing. Language on the Move.
Piller, I., Zhang, J., & Li, J. (2022). Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production: a positive case study. Multilingua, 41(6), 639-662.
Salomone, R. C. (2021). The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language. Oxford University Press.

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added 30/05/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Dist Prof Piller: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Ingrid Piller, and I’m Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Professor Rosemary Salomone. Rosemary is the Kenneth Wang Professor of Law at St. Johns University in New York, USA. Trained as a linguist and a lawyer, she’s an internationally-recognised expert and commentator on language rights, education law and policy, and comparative equality.

Rosemary is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. She’s also a former faculty member of the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University, a lecturer in Harvard’s Institute for Educational Management, and a trustee of the State University of New York. She was awarded the 2023 Pavese prize in non-fiction for her most recent book, The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language.

Welcome to the show, Rosemary.

Prof Salomone: Thank you for inviting me, Ingrid.

Dist Prof Piller: It’s so great to have you and to be able to chat about The Rise of English. The Rise of English was first published in 2022 and has just been re-issued in paperback. The NY Times has described The Rise of English as “panoramic, endlessly fascinating and eye-opening”, and I totally have to agree. It’s an amazing book. Can you start us off by telling us what in the seemingly unstoppable rise of English has happened since the book was first published two years ago?

Prof Salomone: When I look back over those two years, I was looking for trends, you know, was there some theme running through language policy that indicated there were some new movements going on, if you will. Or was it just more of the same? I actually found both. In terms of themes I saw running through, for sure, were nationalism, immigration and a backlash against globalisation.

So, you saw that coming through in English-taught programs in universities, where the Nordic countries and the Netherlands were pushing back. They had been in the vanguard of offering English-taught programs, and then they started pushing back. Some of that was related to governments moving towards the right and hostile feelings toward immigration and linking internationalisation with immigration.

So, you saw, for example, Denmark limiting the number of English-taught courses in certain business subjects. They saw enrolments drop precipitously, particularly in STEM enrolments, and the business community started pushing back on it. Denmark, then, had to back-pedal because they realised they really did need these international students to come in. Many of these countries are suffering from declining demographics, and so they’re trying to balance this internationalisation and migration against the needs of labour and the global economy.

We see the Netherlands, right now, this week it’s been in the newspapers in the Netherlands, where there’s been proposed legislation to limit the number of courses taught in English. There was a real concern about the quality of education and accessibility for Dutch students, and whether the Dutch language itself was dying or being lost, so there was a proposal that was put forth by the minister of Education into their legislative body. That seems very likely to be adopted.

So, again, you see these Nordic countries where there was this connection between migration, internationalisation and a backlash against globalisation coming through in these very nationalistic environments.

What I saw also, which was interesting, was the use of English in diplomacy. I was tracking the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as he was giving speeches and addressing the British parliament in English, the US Congress in English. Progressively, he was more and more speaking English, and his English was, indeed, improving. But you could see the effect of it, that he was able to address these groups. He was speaking from the heart. He was asking them for aid, appealing to them, and he was doing it very directly in their language, and without the barrier of an interpreter. He was able to control the message better. It became more and more comfortable for him to do that.

I also saw it, which was interesting, in Prime Minister Narendra Modi, when he visited NY. He has been pushing to have Hindi considered one of the official languages of the United Nations. So, he goes to address the United Nations, he speaks to them in Hindi to indicate the importance of his language, but then there’s a yoga event on the lawn of the United Nations. Now, there he has a rather young, progressive group of individuals. Some celebrities were there. And he speaks in English. So, you see this very strategic use of English being used by world leaders for diplomatic effect, for diplomatic purpose.

So, those were two of the trends that I saw, or novelties. There was also a rather interesting proposal in Italy, and again, Italy being a country where it’s become a much more conservative to the right government at this time. There was a legislative proposal that all education would have to be in Italian. Now, you understand that would be devastating for English-taught courses in the universities, and we see those growing more slowly than, certainly, in the Nordic countries. But we see Italy adopting many more English-taught courses because they also are suffering from declining demographics. And in order to attract young people from other countries to come in and stay, in order to keep their own students from leaving to take English-taught programs in other countries, the Italian universities realised that they have to move toward English-taught programs or courses. And yet, you had this proposal from the government saying that all education would have to be in Italian. There would even be fines imposed up to 5,000 euros to businesses that would use words like “deadline” or “blueprint”.

This is the sort of thing we’re accustomed to more seeing from France, from the Académie Française, but even their equivalent in Italy, the Academia della Crusca, they opposed the legislation. There was legislation proposing that English should be the official language of Italy. It’s all coming from these feelings of nationalism. So, Italy doesn’t have an official language in their constitution. Any references to an official or national language raises concerns about fascism because Mussolini imposed standard Italian on everybody, and there were so many regional varieties being spoken. So, again, that theme of nationalism, the pushback against globalisation, fears of internationalisation, that’s what I found in those two years.

Then, on the other side, there was much more young children in primary and secondary schools learning English as their second language throughout Europe and throughout the world. More and more, universities were offering English-taught courses. So, it seemed like English was really unstoppable, but then there were these other forces operating that I didn’t see originally trying to set it back.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, I think that’s really one of the fascinating bits of your book, that it’s in many ways such a contradictory and conflicting story. I mean, throughout the 20^th century it seemed that there was this much more linear narrative of the rise of English. But in the 21^st century, it has become more complex and there’s this competition with other languages, as you’ve just pointed out. In diplomacy, multilingual people are English and their other language strategically. So, the story of competition between languages that is inherent in The Rise of English really also looms large in your book.

So, I thought maybe we can take this conversation now to Africa, which also plays a big role in your book, and focus on the competition between French, another European language, and English, and how it plays out there. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Prof Salomone: Well, there’s competition in the former French colonies, the francophone countries, with regard to English. France has had a rather tenuous relationship with those former colonies over the years. We see Morocco, very slowly, moving toward English. We see Algeria, I guess it was about 2 years ago, the minister of higher education announced that university courses would then be offered in English, that university instruction would be in English in Algeria. It made headlines in Morocco when the minister of education announced that children would be learning English beginning in the 3^rd grade.

In those countries, you have English competing with Arabic and with French. There was a study done by the British Council several years ago looking at about 1200 young Moroccans, asking them what they favoured in terms of a language. Well, they favoured English more than they did French or Arabic. They predicted a large number, a very large percentage, predicted that English would be the primary secondary language in Morocco within 5 years, meaning that it would push out French. Arabic being their primary language and English being their secondary language.

So, there is this competition in Africa within the francophone countries between French and English. But you also have China in Africa now. You have Russia in Africa now. You have Chinese Confucius institutes in Africa, and Africa has been much more willing to accept those institutions. Certainly, the US and some western European countries as well. They just don’t have the resources to provide those language programs on their own, and they’re not as concerned about the issues of academic freedom that certainly rose in the US where most of those programs have closed at this point. But you do have this competition between Chinese and English, and other languages within Africa.

And now Russia coming through, and Russia is sort of following the China playbook on language, and instituting language programs both online and in person in Russia. Russia has moved into the Sahel region where we’ve had those coups in recent years, and some of that has been provoked by Russian disinformation. So, here you have, again, the use of language in kind of a perverse way as well. There’s lots going on in Africa right now in terms of the competition for languages.

That said, I don’t think Chinese or Russian is going to replace English as a lingua franca throughout Africa. I think it is replacing French in many ways.

Dist Prof Piller: Interesting that you mention misinformation because it seems to me that a lot of the misinformation is actually also enabled by English. I’m wondering whether you have any thoughts on how the global spread of English is actually part of a lot of misinformation that’s coming out of Russia or wherever it’s coming from.

Prof Salomone: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting observation because of the internet and because of streaming. Because of all these media outlets and what we call fake news. The ability of people all over the world to access this information through English. You’re absolutely right, that English is in a way fomenting some of that or facilitating or enabling some of that disinformation as well. For sure.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, it’s contradictory yet again. So, you’ve already mentioned Chinese, and China was also one of these countries after the pandemic, as the Nordic countries, where English became a bit more controversial and they are kind of pulling back on English in higher education a bit.

So, I thought let’s turn to higher education now because English is, of course, the global language, even if it’s not the language of teaching in all higher education, it’s certainly the language of academic publishing. It’s the language of knowledge-making. So can you maybe tell us a bit more about the role of English in international academia?

Prof Salomone: Well, it’s there for good and for bad. We can argue that there is a value of a common language so researchers can better collaborate. If you think of the Covid 19 vaccine that was produced between Pfizer, an American company, and BioNTech, a German company. Could that have been produced at such breakneck speed if those scientists couldn’t collaborate with each other and communicate with each other in a common language? So, you see there the benefit of having a common language.

But then again, you also see all the downsides of it, particularly in academia. It used to be, when I would attend conferences in Europe, that you would get a headset, that there would be interpreters. That doesn’t exist any longer. Most often, those conferences may be in the national language and in English. Maybe. But very often they’re just in English. So, it really does put non-native English speakers, those who are not fluent or proficient in English, not necessarily just native speakers, it does put them at a disadvantage in terms of the ease with which they can present their scholarship. Do they have humour? Do they understand the nuances of the language? It forecloses them from networking opportunities as well if they don’t speak English proficiently. It forecloses them certainly from publishing opportunities. It used to be “publish or perish”, but now it’s “publish in English or perish”. In order to have your scholarship published in an academic or well-respected academic journal, you have to write it in English.

I bring that point up in the book. It really puts younger faculty or researchers at a disadvantage. They may not have the economic means to hire someone to do the editing on it, whereas those who do have the economic means can get that outside help. This is a booming business of editing scholarship and refining the English of scholarship. So, you see that there are some serious inequities built into the rise of English in academia.

Dist Prof Piller: You’ve got this law background as well. Do you have any thoughts on what we can do to enhance fairness? You’ve just raised all the issues and laid them out quite clearly, but what can we do to improve equity and fairness in global knowledge-making?

Prof Salomone: In a legal sense, I don’t think there’s much we can do. But I think pf Philippe Van Parjis and his proposals. He believes very strongly in English and the utility and value of English as a common language, but he understands (being a political philosopher and economist) on the other hand the limitations of it. How can we build more equity? Should there be a tax imposed on countries that have high levels of English? That money would go to other countries where there’s not a high proficiency in English in order to gain proficiency. I don’t see that being workable. I don’t see how that can occur.

I think it’s just, at this point, unfortunate. I don’t see any legal way, or even a policy way, out of it. English has become just so dominant. The interesting question I find, though, in talking to other people about this, and people in other countries, as to whether English really belongs to us, to the Australians and Canadians and Brits and Americans. Does it belong to us any longer? Or does it belong to the world? Has it become neutral? Is it just utilitarian? Just a tool, a pragmatic tool for communication that’s kind of unleashed from British colonialism or American imperialism or American soft power in Hollywood.

I think that’s easier for those of us who are anglophones to say, “Yeah, sure, I think it’s neutrual.” But I’m not sure that, for other people, it’s really neutral. I think it does carry all that baggage for better or worse.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, true, and I guess even on the individual level. Things like, you mentioned earlier, that networking is so much more difficult in a language in which you are not entirely confident. Or even if you have high levels of proficiency, you might not be the one to joke easily or have that confidence. So, there are challenges at all kinds of levels.

Personally, I am also quite interested in individual mentoring approaches and co-publishing. I think there is a responsibility that we as people who are in established anglophone academia have to co-author or collaborate with people who are struggling with their English and to support peripheral scholars to come into these networks as more central members.

Prof Salomone: I think that’s a really interesting suggestion. I really do. Should there be some of us coordinating this? Should there be some movement, if you will, for those of us who are strong in English to mentor professors who are not, or to collaborate or to coauthor pieces with them? I think that’s really an interesting suggestion. I do. And I wonder what the vehicle could be for instituting a project of that sort. I have to give it some thought. What networks you or I belong to, seriously, to raise that.

Dist Prof Piller: For us, the Language on the Move network has been a little network where we collaborate, and we have lots of people, particularly PhD students, who come to Australia as international students and then return to their countries of origin to teach there. We continue to collaborate, so we’ve built, at a very small level in our field of applied sociolinguistics, a kind of international collaboration network. We’ve tried to co-publish in English, but also then translate some of the publications into other languages for more national or regional dissemination.

That brings me to my next question, actually, to the anglosphere. We’ve talked about English in the non-anglosphere, the countries that are not traditionally considered the owners of English. But, of course, the dominance of English, the hegemony of English, also does something to English in the US, in Australia, in the UK, and to the speakers there. We mostly see that kind of as an advantage, I think. That’s how we’ve discussed it here.

But there is also this other dark side. There is a real complacency about other languages in the anglosphere – like, “If I speak English, I don’t really need another language because I’m able to get around wherever I am on this globe.” We see that in the dwindling numbers of students who enrol in languages programs, the disestablishment of languages at all kinds of universities. Every couple of months we have the news that this or that university in the US, in Australia, in Britain, is establishing their language programs.

I’d like to hear how you view these developments and how we can push back.

Prof Salomone: It’s so short-sighted. It really is very short-sighted. It’s myopic. English cannot do it all. It just can’t. And there is a value to speaking other languages other than the human flourishing that many of us experienced in learning other languages when we were young at the university or whatever. That seems to have gone by the wayside. People don’t talk about it anymore. It really is unfortunate.

Just the joy of reading a classic in the original, or the joy of watching a movie in the original. I’ve tried it. I’ve tried a little experiment of my own of reading a book in English that was translated from Italian, then reading the book in Italian, then watching the movie version, the Hollywood movie version of the book, which was totally perverted (the book). I realised that it just lost so much in the translation. Even the best of translators, and it really is an art form and I totally respect them, even the best of translators – you’re not reading the original. So, there is that sense of human flourishing that we don’t talk about anymore.

Multinational corporations – a large percentage of businesses are done through a cocktail of different languages, so it really does give you a leg up in the job world. In the US there is this slow-moving interest toward offering dual-language immersion programs where you have half the student population (in the public schools) are native speakers of Spanish, Chinese, French, whatever. The other are native speakers of English. And you put the kids together, half the day in one language and half the day in another. What’s motivating the English-speaking parents here is the value of languages in the global economy. They’re not concerned about their children reading Dante in the original, or Moliere in the original. They’re interested in their children having a leg up in the global economy, so they’re becoming more and more popular in the US within public school districts.

So, you have that value in terms of job opportunities. We saw during the pandemic the need for multilingual speakers to deal with immigrant communities, you know, to explain to them what the health hazards were, whether it was in hospitals or social welfare agencies. There was a critical need for speakers of other languages, and some of them were relying on Google Translate or software translation. But even Google Translate – the state of California posted a disclaimer on their website that you cannot rely totally on the translation of Google Translate. It didn’t have necessarily 100% accuracy.

We know that artificial intelligence is getting much more sophisticated. As I was writing the book over those 7 years, I didn’t know Afrikaans. I didn’t know Dutch. I didn’t know Hindi. So, I had to rely on translation software, and it became more and more accurate as the years went on. BUT….but…. you lose lots of nuance there. You lose the human element. Very often, translation or interpretation is needed in a crisis situation, whether it be in foreign affairs diplomatically, or in a health crisis. Can you rely on artificial intelligence in that critical kind of moment where you really do need the understanding of nuance and sensitivity toward the human situation?

So, I think we are really short sighted in not understanding the value of other languages. Just this week it’s come up in newspapers here in the US that our Department of Defense has dropped 13 what we call flagship programs at universities. These were federally funded programs that provided funds for university students for 4 years to learn a critical language – Chinese, Arabic, Russian. They dropped 13 of them, ok? Five of them being Chinese programs.

Dist Prof Piller: That’s unbelievable.

Prof Salomone: What are they thinking? What are they thinking? That this should be a high priority for the federal government, to be training our young people in speaking Chinese and where they would have a study abroad opportunity in either mainland China or Taiwan. Thirteen of them were dropped, and 5 of them were Chinese programs.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I mean that’s just stupid and heartbreaking. And shocking to hear.

I want to get back to what you’ve just said about AI in a second but, before we do, you’ve mentioned the dual language programs in the US and that parents and their children are there to enhance their careers and for economic reasons.

But I have to pull out one of my favourite bits from your book, and that was the information that the most bilingual state in many ways, or the one that has the most bilingual programs is Utah. That’s related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and how they want to be missionaries. I really enjoyed reading that. I’ve met lots of young Americans in various places who speak the language beautifully. Maybe you can tell us a bit about one of these other impulses, why people actually learn languages. The missionary impulse and this particular church.

Prof Salomone: When I thought of what states or localities should I select to flesh out these dual language programs, I chose California because that was a dramatic turnaround where bilingual programs were just about dead several decades ago. What that did, effectively, was mobilise the support for language programs to the point where they could turn that legislation around through a popular referendum. So that was just a dramatic turnaround.

I looked at Utah because Utah has just such a high number of dual language programs and was really in the forefront of these programs because you had the support of a governor, a senator, of somebody within the educational establishment. But it was all done because of a particular religious population there that values languages. They train their young people there in Utah and then send them out on a mission.

But what it has done, it’s been a boon for industry in Utah. Multinational companies are looking to move into Utah because you do have this linguistic infrastructure that’s already there.

In NY City, what I found really interesting, was the French community, this bottoms up, grassroots community of mothers who were looking for an affordable alternative to bilingual education for their children. (Then they went) to the NY City Board of Education to a particular principal whose mother was French, and so she was very sympathetic. But also, she had declining enrolments in her school, so she was very eager to welcome a larger population. That school has so changed that community in Brookly. You walk down Court Street, which is the main street there. Loads of French cafes. French restaurants. People on the street speaking French. It changed the community. It became a focal point for the community. French mass at the local Catholic church. The French population has never been politically active in NY City at all, but because of their efforts and with the support of the French Embassy as well, other language groups within NY City started saying, “We could have that as well”. So, you see a proliferation of dual language programs across the city in all kinds of languages.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s amazing. The importance of these flagship programs. And if you’ll allow me, I’ll just plug another of our podcast episodes here. We recently spoke with Dr Jasna Novac Milić, about the Croatian studies program here at Macquarie University. It’s one of the few Croatian studies programs outside of Croatia. And, like you’ve just said for this French school in Brooklyn, it’s got such a flagship role and it’s also so inspirational to other language communities when they see what you can build in terms of structures from primary education through secondary up to the tertiary level. So yeah, these programs are really, really important.

Prof Salomone: I was speaking in the UK last week, and a woman came up to me afterwards and said, “My grandson attends a dual language program in California. He’s 9 years old, and he speaks Spanish fluently.” And I said, “Well I admire his parents for having the good sense to enrol him in that program.”

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s amazing. I think we really need to think about the rise of English within bi and multilingual ecologies. It’s not just about English, right? This is not English doing away with other languages. We really need to keep thinking about how we can make the best use of this international lingua franca while also supporting all these multilingual ecologies. All these languages have different roles for different people, and that’s sort of the positive side of it.

Before we wrap up now, I wanted to ask you on your thoughts on the future of English. Will we really, you know, will English keep rising? Or will not another language come along but will language tech and generative AI and automated translation be the end of any kind of natural language hegemony?

Prof Salomone: Or any kind of natural language communication at all! We don’t know. We just don’t know where AI is going to take us. And it’s developing by the nanosecond. Yesterday I viewed audios that one of my colleagues at the law school has been a partner on where they took the oral arguments from the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education which was the racial desegregation case from 1954. Now it’s the anniversary.

They recreated the voices of the justices of what they would have sounded like. They took the transcript, the written transcript, and converted it into an audio using artificial intelligence. So, they just took audios of the justices speaking in other contexts so that they could get a sense of their voice and then transposed it onto this written transcript and created what would have been, could have been, the oral arguments in the case. I mean, who would have thought? And it sounded convincing. It sounded convincing. These were bots speaking, not the real justices. So, we have no idea.

We need human communication. We will. We’re not going to have machines communicating with each other. Not in our lifetimes. So, as a language of human communication, I think English is going to steadily increase. Not this huge trajectory that we’ve seen in the past 20 years. It’s really gone quite high. It’s not going to level off. I think it’s going to slowly increase as we see more young people learning English in schools and colleges. More of these English talk programs at universities. So, more and more people are speaking English than ever before, and that will continue.

Will it be the lingua franca forever? Don’t know. If I had to think of any language that could possibly replace it, it would be Spanish because it is a language that’s spoken on 5 major continents. But I don’t see that happening in a long time. I think English, as a dominant lingua franca, is here to stay for quite some time.

Will we see more pushback against it? Possibly. A couple of years ago I didn’t foresee the pushback that I’m seeing now. Certainly, in a country like the Netherlands or Denmark, I never could have predicted that. Or the kind of radical legislation coming out of Italy. I couldn’t have predicted that. Or the incursion of Russia into Africa. Couldn’t have foreseen that. The world is in such constant flux, and the global politics are really in such constant flux that I don’t think we’re capable of foreseeing how English is going to intermix here.

I was hoping that with the streaming of movies, that more people would become interested in foreign languages because there are so many movies being produced on Netflix. So many of those movies are produced in other countries, in other languages. But, you know, there’s dubbing. So, people just turn on the dubbing and would rather listen to the dubbed voices than listen to the original or make any effort to understand the original. I think that’s unfortunate. Part of it is us. Part of it is anglophones ourselves. Seeing English as being just the possibility of doing everything with it.

But English will continue. It will be our lingua franca for a while.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, I agree. Obviously, you can never predict the future, but I think there are interesting questions to be raised, particularly in terms of how the bulk of text and garbage that is being put out by digital technologies now, how that actually will overwhelm communication in a sense.

One sense that I get from my students, many of whom are from Asia, many of them are very multilingual, is that English is completely normal. You have to have English in the same way you need to know how to read and write. But what they’re interested in is actually learning other languages. You spoke about Netflix. Korean is super popular with K-pop and Korean drama and whatnot. Really, all kinds of different languages being learned. So, I do see a great diversification actually. It seems to me that English has become so basic. You need it, no doubt about it. But what’s really interesting seems to be more and more other languages, other skills, other frontiers. It’s an exciting time to think about language.

Prof Salomone: Well (Korean) is the one language where enrolments are on the rise in the United States. Because of K-pop. Totally. It’s the only language where enrolments are going up. So, it gives you a sense of the soft power, the power of soft power.

Dist Prof Piller: Well, thank you so much, Rosemary. It’s been really fantastic and really informative. Everyone, go and read The Rise of English. It’s such a rich book and so many interesting panoramic views as we said earlier.

Thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Till next time!

Broadly speaking, Croatian Studies in Australia attracts three groups of students: first, children and grandchildren of immigrants from former Yugoslavia who learned the language at home and want to study it formally to develop higher levels of proficiency, including academic literacies; second, students with a heritage connection who did not learn the language in the home but want to develop some level of proficiency to connect with extended family, also on visits back to Croatia; and third, a small but growing number of students, with no heritage connection who have developed an interest in Croatian for various reasons. The latter include mature age students who take up the challenge of learning another language later in life for reasons of personal interest and intellectual development.

Dr Jasna Novak Milić in the Croatian Studies Centre Library at Macquarie University

Croatian is a fascinating language in many ways and so the conversation is also a springboard to speak about language politics and language naming, both back in Croatia/former Yugoslavia and in the diaspora. Croatian speakers first came to Australia in the early 20th century but mass migration from former Yugoslavia was a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century.

The Croatian Studies program at Macquarie University developed in this context and during Australia’s decisive turn to multiculturalism from the 1980s onward. The Croatian Studies Centre today enjoys strong community support through the Croatian Studies Foundation and is also benefitting from the commitment of the Croatian state, a member of the European Union, to the Croatian diaspora.

Beyond the specifics of Croatian language learning, our conversation also turned to broader issues related to “small” languages in Australian higher education, and why the availability of languages programs in higher education is critical for heritage language maintenance.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Related resources

• About the Croatian Studies Centre at Macquarie University
• Study Croatian at Macquarie University
• “Easy Croatian” Podcast” hosted by Dr Jasna Novak Milić on SBS
• Keynote lecture by Dr Jasna Novak Milić, “Why Australia needs Croatian Studies“
• Petition to save Croatian, German, Greek, Italian, and Russian at Macquarie University

Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL students at Macquarie University (Image credit: Jung Ung Hwang)

As pre-pandemic levels of migration have been restored or exceeded, international students are once again in the spotlight.

Canada is planning to cap international student visas and Australia plans to raise English language proficiency requirements for student visas. The stated rationale is to “improve the quality of students’ educational experience and reduce workplace exploitation” and to “support international students to realise their potential.”

I argue that raising the English proficiency requirements for university admission is not a good way to achieve the stated rationale. International students’ educational experience and their successful integration into the workforce can be improved in a different way.

Why are language proficiency tests used for university admission?

A certain level of language proficiency is undoubtedly required to be able to study in a degree program.

However, standardized language proficiency tests that are designed to be used on a large scale, are, in fact, not good predictors of academic success, and are not viewed as such by university teaching staff and other stakeholders. After all, language proficiency is just one aspect of the many facets that contribute to students’ academic achievement.

Furthermore, language testing is administered selectively and not every applicant’s  language proficiency gets tested, entrenching inequality between different student groups from the outset.

Why is language proficiency testing not enough?

Successful communication depends on many factors, including the communication skills and supportiveness of the interlocutor. In standardized English language proficiency test situations, the interlocutors are trained assessors, who focus on language skills, fluency, and accuracy in a controlled test environment. In real life, however, interlocutors are not trained language experts and not necessarily supportive either, as adult language learners experience all too often.

Here’s an example from Yumiko, a Japanese international student featured in the forthcoming book Life in a New Language. In the first few months of her time in Australia, Yumiko only ordered orange juice because hospitality staff could not understand her Japanese accent when she said ‘apple juice’ (probably sounding like “apuru juice”). Not only did she not achieve the desired result but interlocutors often responded to her in an unkind way. This is an example of a social situation that isn’t academic in nature; however, unfortunately, international students do get judged as competent or incompetent in such situations, which of course, has very real consequences for them.

While language proficiency tests give an indication of general language proficiency, it would be unrealistic to expect them to replicate all the potential language use situations in a university student’s life. Therefore, raising the language test score requirements for university study is unlikely to significantly improve students’ educational experience.

How do we improve student experience then?

Instead of having a higher score on a standardized language proficiency test, what truly helps improve the students’ educational experience is language support and experiential learning that enable them to function in their future workplaces. Language support should be provided to all students with a dual purpose: on the one hand, to assist with their studies – as a more immediate need – and on the other, to gain effective communication skills for employability.

Besides the generic university-wide academic language support that most universities provide, discipline-embedded language support can be provided to all students and not just international students. This is to avoid the ‘sink-or-swim’ approach that they experience in higher education.

At the same time, valuing and building on the multilingual repertoires of students can provide a superior learning experience for all. An inclusive environment clearly benefits all. Engaging with languages in their studies and classes opens up new ways of knowledge production for students. For instance, in a recent seminar activity on the topic of wellbeing for language teachers, my class explored two Japanese concepts as part of the seminar activity. This led to an interesting discussion on what other wellbeing concepts there are in other languages and what we can learn from them.

Preparing students for the workplace

Furthermore, students need to be prepared for workplace requirements both linguistically and by building skills and connections through work-integrated learning (WIL). Learning activities that require students to research and engage with professional bodies are a good start to build awareness and language skills. This can then lead to learning activities and assessment practices that require industry project participation. For instance, Applied Linguistics and TESOL students at Macquarie University design language testing activities for English language schools as part of a unit I teach on language assessment.

In conclusion, setting up additional barriers to admission does not support students. What does support students is creating safe spaces with supportive interlocutors where they can simultaneously grow their linguistic repertoires, their disciplinary knowledge, and their workplace skills.

References

Bodis, A. (2017). International students and language: opportunity or threat? Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/international-students-and-language-opportunity-or-threat/
Bodis, A. (2021). The discursive (mis) representation of English language proficiency: International students in the Australian media. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 44(1), 37-64.
Bodis, A. (2021). ‘Double deficit’ and exclusion: Mediated language ideologies and international students’ multilingualism. Multilingua, 40(3), 367-392. doi:doi:10.1515/multi-2019-0106
Bodis, A. (2023). Gatekeeping v. marketing: English language proficiency as a university admission requirement in Australia. Higher Education Research & Development, 1-15. doi:10.1080/07294360.2023.2174082
Bodis, A. (2023). Studying abroad is amazing, or is it? Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/studying-abroad-is-amazing-or-is-it/
Piller, I., & Bodis, A. (2023). English Language Proficiency for Australian University Admission. YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUSqSSploSE
Piller, I., & Bodis, A. (2024). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society, 53(1), 1-23. doi:10.1017/S0047404522000689
Piller, I., Bodis, A., Butorac, D., Cho, J., Cramer, R., Farrell, E., . . . Quick, B. (2023). Submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Migration Inquiry into ‘Migration, Pathway to Nation Building’. Canberra: Parliament of Australia. Retrieved from https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=8c0d9316-2281-4594-9c7b-079652683f54&subId=735264

Attendees at “Linguistic Inclusion Today” workshop pose for a group photo

There is only one Australian university that has a program in Croatian Studies: Macquarie University. A few weeks ago, the University proposed to disestablish this program, along with four other language programs, citing low enrollment numbers, expected advances in language technologies that would make language learning redundant, and a strategic shift to generic cultural competence focused on Asia.

Against this background, we explored the role of languages in Australian higher education at last week’s Linguistic Inclusion Today workshop.

In a powerful keynote the director of the Croatian Studies Centre at Macquarie, Dr Jasna Novak Milić, explored the role of Croatian Studies in Australia.

The lecture clearly identifies the academic, community, and socio-cultural benefits of a “small” languages program in Australian higher education. Since its founding in 1983, Croatian Studies at Macquarie has built a strong model for a university language program that is closely integrated with the Croatian community in Australia and also has deep international ties.

The curricular and funding model created by Croatian Studies at Macquarie University provides excellent language education in a language that is both learned as heritage and international language. Additionally, it also has the potential to serve as a template of a successful university-community partnership for other languages within Australia’s multicultural fabric.

Ultimately, the question is not why we need a Croatian Studies program at an Australian university. The answer to that question is abundantly clear. The real question should be why we would consider destroying something that is so valuable to so many people.

(Image credit: Mana Akbarzadegan via Unsplash)

Have you noticed the persistent divide between domestic and international students at Australian universities? Do you worry how the English-monolingual habitus of our highly linguistically diverse institutions of higher learning affects student learning? Would you like to discuss the recent Language in Society article “Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission” with the authors?

Here’s your chance: The Linguistics Department at Macquarie University will host a free webinar devoted to “Rethinking English Language Proficiency and Academic Achievement in Australian Higher Education” this Friday.

When: Friday, March 31, 2023, 4-5pm AEDT (Sydney time)
Where: via Zoom (Pwd: 798325)
Who: Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller and Dr Agnes Bodis

Abstract: English language proficiency (ELP) is central to the academic achievement of the 1.5 million students enrolled in Australian universities each year. Yet, students are highly linguistically diverse, with a mix of domestic students from English- and non-English-speaking backgrounds and international students from national contexts where English may be the main language, an official language in a multilingual context, or a foreign language with limited communicative functions.

How do universities manage students’ linguistic diversity through their admission requirements and set students up for success?

In this seminar, we examine ELP requirements for university admission in Go8 universities to answer this question. Our language ideological analysis found two categorically different constructs of ELP: inherent ELP based on citizenship, linguistic heritage, and prior education, and tested ELP. We show how these two different conceptualizations of ELP map onto two dichotomous student groups. One of these is deemed to naturally speak English while the other is constructed as deficient and subject to perpetual scrutiny.

These language ideological constructs frame ELP as a matter of individual responsibility rather part of embedded in learning processes. Conversely, they obscure the need for continuous language development of all students and the need for pedagogical innovation in linguistically diverse educational institutions. We close with implications for policy and practice.

Further reading

Bodis, A. (2023). Gatekeeping v. marketing: English language proficiency as a university admission requirement in Australia. Higher Education Research & Development, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2023.2174082
Piller, I. (2023). How do universities decide whose English needs to be tested for admission? Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/how-do-universities-decide-whose-english-needs-to-be-tested-for-admission/
Piller, I., & Bodis, A. (2022). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404522000689 [open access] ]]> https://languageonthemove.com/event-multilingual-students-in-monolingual-universities/feed/ 9 24679 https://languageonthemove.com/international-education-in-rcep-the-worlds-largest-free-trade-zone/ https://languageonthemove.com/international-education-in-rcep-the-worlds-largest-free-trade-zone/#comments Mon, 15 Mar 2021 23:14:00 +0000 https://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=23388

Diversity of international students is celebrated through images that map students onto nations represented by their flags

International education is often touted as a golden road to fluency in another language and the development of a global vision. However, ethnographic research into the language learning and settlement experiences of international students in a variety of national contexts has painted a less rosy picture, as the Language-on-Move archives devoted to international education show.

Such research has found many discontinuities between the promises of international education and students’ actual experiences.

One of the problems in the existing system of international education is the nation-based categorization of seeing international students of diverse backgrounds as a homogeneous group (Piller, 2017).

This categorization is further complicated when international students return to their ancestral homelands for their international education. Such “return migrants” may be positioned in often conflicting ways on the continuum of local and migrant, native and foreigner, as our recent research explores (Li & Han, 2020).

Ethnic Chinese students migrating to China for their international education

As one of the largest diasporas, ethnic Chinese constitute a population of over 50 million. The great majority of them live in Southeast Asia. Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia have been perceived as a powerful nexus between China and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, mostly due to their remarkable economic performance and their historical contribution to China’s nationalist movement in the early twentieth century. As China is emerging as one of the largest receiving countries for international education, ethnic Chinese may get the first admission ticket to higher education institutions in China.

However, the prioritization of ethnic Chinese migrating to China for their international education is not without problems. These students are confronted with several linguistic and cultural challenges.

Some of these challenges are similar to what has been reported in previous studies, and others are specific to this group and have to date mostly been overlooked in the existing literature on international education.

One big challenge relates to a conflict between students’ self-perceptions of their identities and the ways in which others perceive them. An ethnic Chinese student from Myanmar, for instance, expressed her shock and confusion since coming to China: “我以为我的根在中国，来中国我发现我没根了！” (“I used to think that my roots are in China. However, coming to China has made me rootless.”)

Like this female student, ethnic Chinese students from Myanmar used to be oriented towards China. Learning Putonghua in Myanmar was a top priority for their transnational empowerment (Li, 2017; Li, 2020; Li, Ai, & Zhang, 2020). However, once they move to China for their studies, their trajectories gradually gear them to identify Myanmar as their true homeland and as their land of opportunity. How is this possible?

Linguistic and cultural essentialism

To find out, we (Li & Han 2020) examined the learning experiences of 14 ethnic Chinese from Myanmar who were enrolled in Putonghua-medium degree programs at a Chinese university. We found that the language ideologies of speaking standard Putonghua and writing simplified Chinese characters challenged these students’ sense of being authentically Chinese. In the process, they were turned from proficient Chinese speakers in Myanmar to deficient Putonghua speakers in China.

Ethnic Chinese students from Myanmar are often made to feel weird for engaging in practices that are considered “Burmese”, such as putting on thanaka, a protective white-paste face mask

National essentialism was another ideological force that challenged their Chinese identity. In their classrooms and everyday interactions, the students found themselves positioned not as ethnic Chinese but as Burmese nationals. This “one nation, one culture, one language” mindset not only erased our participants’ Chinese identity but also reinforced an essentialist view of Myanmar as the country of the Burmese, the dominant ethnic group in that highly diverse country.

Neo-essentialist curriculum

Most research into international education is based in Anglophone countries, where a monolingual mindset prevails and exclusive use of English is promoted while languages other than English are devalued.

This is not the case in China. China’s promotion of Putonghua as an international language follows a reciprocal approach that also values the languages international students bring. Their bilingualism is regarded as an asset. In our case, both Burmese and Putonghua constitute desired linguistic capital to achieve mutual cooperation and promote the regional economy and integration between China and ASEAN.

However, this promotion of bilingualism is not unproblematic, either. Linguistic diversity is not unconditionally valued but rests on its convertibility in an international communication market – between the Chinese and Burmese state in this context.

This orientation to the nation as a market applauds bilingualism in Burmese and Putonghua but marginalizes bilingualism in non-standard Chinese varieties and languages that are not official to a nation.

In short, our research demonstrates that the neoliberal valorization of bilingualism is not in and of itself better than the monolingual mindset: it only reproduces the cultural superiority of essentialized linguistic icons while devaluing and erasing non-privileged cultural forms and identities.

The future of Chinese international education

While the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the language challenges confronting diverse populations worldwide (Piller, 2020; Piller, Zhang, & Li, 2020), it has also reconfigured the global economic and political order.

Since the outbreak of Covid-19 early last year, China has shifted its global strategy by strengthening its regional connectivity with Asian countries. In 2020, ASEAN replaced the USA and EU to become China’s largest trading partner. A recent trade agreement, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) has reinforced the regional integration between China and its region. As the largest free trading zone covering 30% of the global populations and 30% of global GDP, RCEP will mark a new era for Asia-Pacific cooperation in various social dimensions.

Will the free movement of goods and people in this vast zone also lead us to a greater valorization of linguistic and cultural diversity? Will it open a space for embracing diversity and bringing greater equity and social justice?

Our research suggests that, as long as the ideological foundations of linguistic and cultural essentialism stay in place, the international education in RCEP may just be old wine in a new bottle.

References

Li, J. (2017). Social Reproduction and Migrant Education: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Burmese Students’ Learning Experiences at a Border High School in China. (PhD). Macquarie University.
Li, J. (2020). Transnational migrant students between inclusive discourses and exclusionary practices. Multilingua, 39(2), 193-212. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2019-0125
Li, J., Ai, B., & Zhang, J. (2020). Negotiating language ideologies in learning Putonghua: Myanmar ethnic minority students’ perspectives on multilingual practices in a borderland school. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 41(7), 633-646. doi:10.1080/01434632.2019.1678628
Li, J., & Han, H. (2020). Learning to orient toward Myanmar: ethnic Chinese students from Myanmar at a university in China. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 1-19. doi:10.1080/07908318.2020.1858095
Piller, I. (2017). Intercultural communication. Edinburgh University Press.
Piller, I. (Ed.) (2020). Language-on-the-Move COVID-19 Archives.
Piller, I., Zhang, J., & Li, J. (2020). Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis: Language challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Multilingua, 39(5), 503-515. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/multi-2020-0136/html

First up is Tazin Abdullah’s inquiry into COVID-19 information aimed at international students in intensive English courses in Australia. Access to timely high-quality information is key during any crisis and it is widely acknowledged that English language learners in Australia have often been left out of timely high-quality information. But is there such a thing as too much information and does quantity compromise quality?

***

(Image credit: Kristina Tripkovic via Unsplash)

“Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant,” says Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation. He may have, originally, addressed this to fellow IT professionals but that image of information gushing out strikes a chord with many. It rings especially true in the context of COVID-19, where the transmission of information has been the modus operandi for almost every institution. Today, none of us can envisage functioning without a steady flow of information but in some situations, does it drown in itself?

ELICOS students in Australia

Take, for example, the case of ELICOS (English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students) students. ELICOS courses are offered by Australian universities to enable international students to fulfill English language requirements for university entry. The students have stringent visa conditions regarding attendance and academic progress. They must pass their courses, as failure to pass means they have to repeat that same ELICOS course, while their university entry is delayed.

Formal requirements are only part of the story

While all these formal requirements are outlined in black and white, the everyday challenges facing ELICOS students may not be so apparent. These students face the same challenges that have been identified for international students and language learners in other contexts (Piller, 2016; Barakos & Plöger, 2020; Li, Xie, Ai, & Li, 2020).

During their time in Australia, they are engaged in the process of getting their head around a new language. At the same time, they must read and write academically in that new language and sit examinations that test their language skills in relation to specific subject matters, e.g., accounting or current affairs.

The challenges of being a newcomer

Now, add one more layer to this complexity. They are in a new country, interacting with previously unknown systems, and in unfamiliar socio-cultural contexts. Consequently, ELICOS students must decipher all sorts of important and relevant non-academic information. In a new country, they must find out who to call in an emergency or how to go to a doctor. To do these things effectively, they must not only be able to read information but also to locate it.

Teaching institutes are legally required to provide information

This necessitates legislative frameworks such as the Australian ESOS (Education Services for Overseas Students) Act, under which ELICOS institutions carry the responsibility of making adequate support and welfare information available to students. Students must know where to find emergency, medical, mental health, accommodation, health insurance services, and more. The aim is to ensure that they have access to all kinds of information relating to living and operating in a new country. Given the linguistic difficulties that ELICOS students face, the effective communication of all of this requires great effort, even without COVID-19.

With the onset of the pandemic, this communication challenge took on a whole new dimension.

Providing orientation information online

As institutions moved online, the provision of support information also relied entirely on online mechanisms (Behan, 2020). One of the changes that has taken place is that orientation programmes have become virtual. They take place via the Zoom format of presenters speaking and sharing slides with links, contact details and videos. Students are being sent emails, also full of links and contact details for support services. At the same time, students are receiving voluminous emails regarding academic matters.

To observe the impact of these changes, it is useful to examine online orientations in contrast to pre-COVID-19 face-to-face orientations. Orientations always involve the provision of multiple links and contact details but the face-to-face format allows presenters to address the specific linguistic needs of ELICOS students.

For example, prior to providing contact details for mental health support, there would be an explanation of what mental health is. This will usually involve interactive games or activities that arouse the interest and hold the attention of students. Once an ELICOS student understands what mental health is and can contextualise the language around the subject, contact details for mental health support will mean more than just letters and numbers on a slide.

Face-to-face orientations are also structured to provide a large amount of information at a pace suitable to ELICOS students. In contrast, online orientations are compressed into shorter time frames. This includes all the usual support information plus specific direction regarding COVID-19, but minus the interactive activities that help a student contextualise and understand that information.

Drowning in emails

Then, there are emails. The volume of pandemic-time emails has inundated inboxes, with students feeling like they are drowning in a sea of information. In a survey I conducted at the Macquarie University English Language Centre (see also Abdullah, 2020), students lamented that they find it difficult to look at inboxes and distinguish where each email has come from.

When they open emails, they are confused by the number of email addresses and the variety of links to go to for information. Consequently, students skim to find what they regard as essential, e.g., the how to enrol or pay fees and they overlook information about support services.

Drawing attention to support services

So, how can support and welfare information attract the attention of ELICOS students? Student attention is already scattered over several online platforms and digital multi-tasking can reduce effective reception of information (May & Elder, 2018). As students are digitally multi-tasking at unprecedented levels, students themselves suggested being innovative with online communication tools.

For instance, GIFs and memes can be used to promote support services or provide contact details. Another idea is to use short animated videos that demand less time from viewers and also deal with each aspect of welfare at a time. These videos can be played at different times throughout the length of ELICOS courses, so students can be reminded gently of the support available.

Listen to the target community

This input from students that was provided in the survey is a meaningful reminder of the valuable contribution the target community itself can make (Carlo, 2020). Not only can they assist by highlighting their specific literacy needs but the ‘grassroots’ knowledge they possess will inform the design of communication that is most effective for them (Piller, Jia & Zhang, 2020).

Developing a base of community volunteers (Piller, 2020) who can assist in producing context-appropriate and relevant GIFs, memes or videos will help to develop communication tools and methods that are community-centred and thus, more inclusive.

Centering ELICOS students

It is important for ELICOS students to be seen as a community of their own within the larger international student cohort. They have unique needs when it comes to assistance with navigating any kind of information. Now, more than ever, support and welfare information is pertinent, as they endeavour for success in their university education during the international crisis we are facing.

It is imperative that institutions ensure that the message of support reaches, not overwhelms, ELICOS students.

References

Abdullah, T. (2020, September 18). How can we support you better? Looking after ELICOS students in uncertain times [Presentation Slides]. 2020 English Australia Conference. Australia. https://www.englishaustralia.com.au/documents/item/1072
Barakos, Elisabeth, & Plöger, Simone. (2020, May 25). Recent-arrival migrant students during the Covid-19 school closures. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/recent-arrival-migrant-students-during-the-covid-19-school-closures/
Behan, T. (2020, September 8). Bringing Back Our International Students: The Future of International Education across Australia and New Zealand [Zoom Webinar]. Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre. https://monash.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wvxIR2YFTB-no6I9b7Wf5A?fbclid=IwAR3wHidfa7D9zCSOit3HF2XPzoiCTc95G7ju3fZ-SoagFdcPxsB8J5H_NZM
Carlo, P. D. (2020, August 6). Message- vs. community-centered models in risk communication. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/message-vs-community-centered-models-in-risk-communication/
Li, J., Xie, P., Ai, B., & Li, L. (2020, August 17). Multilingual communication experiences of international students during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Multilingua, 39(5), 529-539, doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2020-0116
May, K. E. & Elder, A. D. (2018). Efficient, helpful, or distracting? A literature review of media multitasking in relation to academic performance. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education. 15 (1) 1-17.doi: 10.1186/s41239-018-0096-z
Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic diversity and social justice. Oxford University Press. DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937240.001.0001
Piller, I. (2020, October 12). Crisis communication in multilingual Australia. https://languageonthemove.com/crisis-communication-in-multilingual-australia/
Piller, I. Jia, L. & Zhang, J. (2020, August 28) Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis: Language challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Multilingua 39(5): 503–515. DOI: https://www.degruyter.com/view/journals/mult/39/5/article-p503.xml

My “audience” as I was recording the first online lecture for the new term

Yesterday, I spent six hours pre-recording a puny little lecture of 15 minutes for the postgraduate “Literacies” unit I’m teaching this term. The unit has gone fully online this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic and I have been planning for interactive delivery in a variety of formats.

One element in the overall mix is a podcast series. I’ve taught the unit a couple of times already so have the content down pat and figured all I needed to do was sit down and deliver my lecture into a microphone. It did not turn out to be a smooth experience.

The content I was covering yesterday – features of written vs spoken language – usually takes about 40 minutes of class time to deliver. That includes asking questions, taking student responses, and summarizing those responses. A standard teacher question-student response-teacher feedback cycle.

Without dialogue, the lecture shrunk to not much more than a third of the time it would normally take but producing it blew out by about nine times.

Most of this production time is a one-off, as I needed to learn how to use Adobe Audition and spent a lot of time designing an intro and an outro, and figuring out how to overlay them with a signature tune (I chose a few bars of Vivaldi’s Spring Concerto :-). Including a signature tune is a playful option that is obviously not strictly necessary but was fun to learn.

Quite a bit of time also went to editing in order to smooth out bloopers.

Hot tip: If you are unhappy with anything you’ve recorded, don’t stop recording. Instead, pause, click your tongue three times, and repeat whatever went wrong. This way you can easily identify the bits you’ll need to cut in your voice editor.

I may have smoothed out major bloopers but the final product still doesn’t please me and doesn’t meet my usual standards of work. I’m dissatisfied with recurring disfluencies, with too much detail in some parts and not enough in others, a joke that I started and then trailed off because it seemed silly delivering it to the unmoved microphone.

Seeing how much time I invested, I’m wondering where did I go wrong?

Maybe it’s not me at all but the problem is the genre of the academic lecture?

What’s wrong with lectures?

Lectures are odd creatures at the intersection of reading and writing, as a quick look at the table listing the key differences between written and spoken language will show.

The academic lecture, including in its pre-recorded version, is obviously a form of spoken language. However, most of its characteristics are typically associated not with spoken but with written language:

• The lecture is technologically mediated (recording device at my end, audio player at yours).
• Speaker and audience are distant across time and space (I recorded the lecture yesterday in my home and students will listen to it at other times and places).
• In terms of context, the lecture sits somewhere in the middle between high and low context (it’s part of a unit taught in the Applied Linguistics program at Macquarie University but it could be taught in any Applied Linguistics program in an English-medium program).
• The recording is durable and not as fleeting as the spoken word usually is.
• The lecture is not quite as scannable as a written text but you can certainly stop and rewind if there is something you didn’t understand, or jump ahead if you get bored.
• The lecture is planned and tightly structured.
• In terms of syntactic complexity and formality, I was aiming for a simple and casual style – the desired “conversational tone” of a podcast. However, on listening back, I discovered that I used a garden path sentence to exemplify one, and I also used words such as “therefore” and “thus” – clear traces of written language.
• I don’t even need to mention that the content of the lecture is relatively abstract (“Features of written language”) and that I delivered a monologue.

These mismatched criteria produce a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” genre. For instance, I did not write up the lecture beforehand and so did not read out a script. In face-to-face teaching, I don’t need one and for pre-recordings the general advice seems to be that a script will make the lecture sound unnatural. Even so, I’m now I’m beating myself up for uneven delivery – there are a few unfinished thoughts and dysfluencies.

How did such an awkward genre become the main mode of university teaching?

Miniature drawing of a medieval lecture (Image credit: British Library)

The academic lecture has its origins in the European Middle Ages, when both literacy – the ability to read and write – and books were scarce. In a world where writing is cheap and literacy is almost universal, it is hard to imagine just how scarce they were back then. Only the most valuable information was committed to writing. Hand-written manuscripts took years to produce and books were a rare and extremely valuable commodity. Online courses, textbooks, even notebooks were still far in the future.

To teach the valuable information committed to manuscripts, early university education therefore consisted of a “lecturer” reading to an audience. A lecturer is literally a “reader”, a title still used in UK academia today for what is an Associate Professor in the Australian and US systems. The lecturer read the set text out loud, sometimes providing running commentary or explanations as they went along.

That explains why the lecture is such an odd cross-over genre between written and spoken language. It’s a written text read out loud.

What it doesn’t explain is why we are reverting to this mode of teaching as we transition from face-to-face to online teaching. The best explanation I can come up with is that technical affordances of the digital world have changed both written and spoken language in fundamental ways, and we are all still working out how to harness them best for learning.

What do you think about pre-recorded lectures? And what are your most and least favorite teaching genres? Have they changed between face-to-face and online?

As for me, I’ll try and mix genres as much as possible. Even if they make me cringe, I’ll keep podcasts in the mix for now, mainly because I want my students to experience another form of writing to learn: note taking. To commit something to memory and process it deeply, writing continues to be the medium of choice.

“To reach the mind, knowledge has to flow through the hand,” as one of my lecturers in teacher training kept insisting.

Editor’s note:

To view the other RECLAS ethics rants, click here.

***

As researchers and teachers, we know that our work is thoroughly social. We accept that we have an ethical responsibility to society and the people who both enable our work and need it. The societal impact of universities, on the other hand, cannot be reduced to the short-term impact increasingly required by funding bodies.

From social to market-based understandings of societal impact

“Researchers’ Night” is an outreach event of the University of Jyväskylä for community members of all ages (Image credit: University of Jyväskylä)

Since the 1970s, a new “entrepreneurial” and “innovative” ethos started to be naturalized in higher education, leading to a discussion of marketization and commodification of higher education conceptualized as “academic capitalism”. This development coincided with demands for a de-bureaucratization of public institutions like universities, thus creating a situation where the bureaucratic budget steering of the public sector made way for an accountability and evaluation based steering. This coincided with neoliberal New Public Management (NPM) theories that called for a decentralized market-like governance of the public sector.

My rant hits this paradox: how can we make universities more meaningful for and in society, while accommodating the market demands steering of higher education? Closer to home: how can we, in the RECLAS collegium, criticize managerialist funding practices and the demands that come with them, while at the same time participating in the game and playing by its rules?

I first discuss meanings of the term “societal impact” for higher education and society at large. In particular: how is societal impact understood and measured? I will then discuss the funding of universities from the perspective of societal impact. This will lead me to a discussion of the artificial divide between basic and applied research and the relevance of this divide for societal relevance of higher education. I finish with a call for arenas for societal impact that go beyond entrepreneurial and market based logics and loop back to the traditional tasks of research and teaching.

What is societal impact?

The basic tasks of higher education are, in the Humboldtian tradition, research and teaching. The “third mission” or “societal” turn of the 1970s was originally understood as co-operation of higher education with governments, industry and society at large, and operationalized as contributions of teaching and research to societal life and political decision making on one hand, and as commercialization of that teaching and research on the other.

A way of further understanding the third mission is to divide it into the social, the enterprising, and the innovative third mission. Especially since the 1970s, the “second academic revolution” has seen a turn from teaching and research to services to community and society – which, in turn, might or might not imply economic benefits to someone.

Critical voices have problematized this naturalization of an industrial and entrepreneurial third mission, which has its roots in demands for ex-post accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness. What is typical of this managerialist turn is that while the formal (normative and regulative) steering of higher education has loosened, the “soft demands” (persuasive and informal) have tightened, making the steering of higher education more opaque.

University funding and societal impact

How do we, then, know what societal impact is? I would like to suggest that the question should not be what but when. I will illustrate this with an example from higher education funding.

The basic tasks of universities, namely education, research, and the dissemination of knowledge gained through research, are ultimately very societal in nature and at the heart of universities’ societal impact mission. Because of this societal task, universities are generally either publicly funded or exempt from taxes in their fundraising even in the most market-oriented systems.

The Strategic Research Funding instrument, coordinated by the Academy of Finland, is an example of funding that is allocated to “high-quality research that has great societal impact” (Image credit: Academy of Finland)

However, in recent years, funding for higher education has started to include more performance based or strategically steered elements, as political goals of “societal impact” have been included in funding systems. Consequently, an increasing proportion of core funding for universities is now allocated as competitive funding or performance based funding; i.e. not as consistent or steady basic funding but funding based on politically dependent criteria and indicators. This applies to both traditional research funding (= need to anticipate impacts of research in funding applications) as well as teaching (= need to provide a particular amount of Masters degrees rather than a particular “amount of critical thinking”).

The societal benefits of higher education are, however, (only) partly predictable. Society needs experts and professionals trained by universities. So much is obvious. But not even the labor market demand for public sector workers such as doctors, teachers, or librarians is easily predictable. And it is even more difficult to anticipate long term impacts of research that is accumulated over decades and centuries. Development of critical thinking is no easier measured. The public funding of universities, thus, is largely based on the funder’s trust on this long-term benefit of higher education without any explicit indicators.

Thus, there is a mismatch between the long-term activities (or “impact”) of universities and their short-term strategic decision-making.

This mismatch affects the universities’ core functions. Funding models and strategic funding may change as political cycles change, and yet, universities need to enter a short-term funding competition based largely on strategizing societal tasks and societal usefulness of their activities to be successful. However, the activities of universities have long-term effects, which are less predictable and less easily measurable.

Societal impact and the artificial divide between “basic” and “applied” research

How, then, can societal impact be understood? What is societal impact? It seems that at least a part of the divide between “research” and “societally relevant research” is based on a divide between basic vs applied research. We have been conditioned to think of research either as something that is inspired by research curiosity (“basic research”) or something that is inspired by a desire to apply that research into practice (“applied research”).This thinking can lead to two kinds of fundamental value judgements on the importance of research:

• Basic research is seen as “academic”, “timeless” and “accumulating knowledge”, whereas applied research is seen as “practical”, “fast” and “accumulating (economic) benefits”
• Basic research is seen as “useless” (for society and economy in particular), whereas applied research is seen as “useful” (for society and economy in particular)

However, the divide between basic and applied research is based on problematic premises and an artificial divide that has its origins in statistical and registry needs rather than actual research internal needs. The linear assumptions of research curiosity leading to basic research, further leading to practical applications, and ending at technological innovations do not hold empirically. “Applied” innovations can lead to “basic” research questions and “basic” research can have very immediate practical applications. Thus, Donald Stokes’ concept of use inspired basic research may be useful, bridging “research promise and societal need”.

Equally, the divide between usefulness or uselessness of research is artificial because just as it is difficult to know whether research is useful, it is equally difficult to know when it is useful. The time span to evaluate the usefulness or scientific work is beyond economic quarterly assessments. It is impossible to know, on a short term basis, what is beneficial for society in the long term. This tweet about the dismissal of coronavirus research as unimportant, even only a year ago provides a stark example:

Why competitive project-based funding is bad for research, part 856249: French scientists specialising in coronavirus research were repeatedly denied funding because their topic was deemed not fashionable enough (and reviewers argued symptoms in humans were `just like a cold`) https://t.co/4OkpiYwwmx

— Aline Courtois (@Aline_Courtois) March 9, 2020

Additionally, the example of the dismissal of coronavirus research also calls into question the overall ethicality of government-steered research. By submitting research to the dictates of short-term payoffs through the denial of long-term guaranteed funding, the overall resilience of higher education – and, hence the overall benefit to humanity – is reduced. A famous example is Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine: Salk did not seek a patent as he felt the rights of the vaccine should be owned by the people. The main value here is to pay it forward to the common good, not to funders and markets.

Should research be societally relevant? Yes.

Do we know what is societally relevant? No. Or, to be precise, not in the short term.

In the end, the societal impact requirement has turned from an integral part of our research and teaching activities into a naturalized political demand, rewarding us for things that are secondary to our ethical responsibility for society.

As academics, this places us in a difficult position. We are good at arguing to ourselves why we need to participate in the “neoliberal governmentality game” of applying for top funding such as the RECLAS profiling money. We have internalized a self-governing ethos where we monitor our behavior and check our Google Scholar citations while at the same time criticizing neoliberal academia with traditional humanist arguments. We need to prove our societal worth by planning, executing and demonstrating societal impact in our research, to the extent that we have lost sight of what societal impact of higher education is.

What should we, then, actually talk about when we talk about societal impact?

Echoing Laredo’s (2007) idea of teaching and research in different constellations as the main roles of the university, I would like us to go back to the intertwined role of teaching and research justifying funding. Universities need funding because they teach and research for the common good. That is a high value. We cannot know the precise minutiae of the societal impact of our work and we must be willing to live with this uncertainty.

References

Laredo, P. (2007). Revisiting the Third Mission of Universities: Toward a Renewed Categorization of University Activities? Higher Education Policy, 20(4), 441-456.
Stokes, D. E. (2011). Pasteur’s quadrant: Basic science and technological innovation. Brookings Institution Press.

A non-fluent Latin reader painstakingly worked her way through this text

“Man is an obligate aerobe”, I recently read in a medicine book for general readers (Nuland, 1993). The phrase was noteworthy to me because it did something that rarely happens to an educated adult reader: it broke the automaticity of my reading. The phrase “obligate aerobe” was new to me and I had to look it up in the dictionary. In case you don’t know, either, an “obligate aerobe” is an organism that requires oxygen to live.

Without knowing exactly what the phrase meant, I could, of course, still guess the general idea: if not as an adjective, “obligate” was still familiar to me as a verb; I knew related words such as “oblige” and “obligation”, and their Latin root “obligare”; “aerobe” did look like it might be a combination of “air” and “microbe”, I knew “anaerobic”, and my mind also made an association with “aerobic exercise”.

All these considerations took me away from the content of the text and made me focus on the language itself. In other words, I had to do a bit of language learning before I could continue to learn about the physiology of dying – the primary purpose why I was reading that particular book in the first place.

This kind of language learning distraction happens extremely rarely to me in English and German, the two languages in which I am highly literate. However, it is very familiar from other languages I read with less fluency. The images show pages from my copy of Caesar’s Gallic War in Latin, which I read as a high school student. Given the copious notes on grammar and vocabulary my younger self left between the lines and in the margins, it must have been difficult to focus on the content. And it certainly was a slow read – the way I remember it, reading Gallic War took up most of Year 9.

Reading in Latin was a slow process for this 15-year-old, who, at the time, was already an accomplished German reader

Back to “obligate aerobe”: as a linguist, discovering a new turn of phrase always gives me pleasure. As a student of medicine, being forced to learn a new turn of phrase was an unwelcome distraction.

My experience was unusual in that I am primarily a linguist and only secondarily a – very amateur – student of medicine. Most readers are in a very different position: they read for the content, not for the language. In the vast majority of cases, the primary purpose of reading is to get new information and to learn new content. This is best achieved if reading is highly automatic.

Reading basically involves matching visual shapes – letters and larger chunks – with the words and expressions of a specific language. To do that efficiently, we not only need to be able to decode those visual shapes at extremely high speed but we also need to be able to retrieve the meaning of the words and expressions they represent at equally high speed. The larger our vocabulary and our general knowledge, the easier it is to do that.

The whole point of learning to read is ultimately reading to learn.

Education is designed with that purpose in mind: the early years of schooling are devoted to developing automaticity. By the time we reach secondary and higher education, literacy learning is no longer an aim in itself. By that point, the aim of literacy is to make us more efficient learners.

Caesar’s Gallic War is a puny little book of around 100 pages; at this pace, it took months to read.

For learners who hear the language of schooling from birth, who are then taught how to read and write that language in primary, and who have access to high-quality content in a wide variety of subjects throughout their further education and for the remainder of their lives, this can become a highly virtuous cycle.

After the saying “whoever has will be given more” from the Matthew Gospel, this virtuous cycle is known as the “Matthew Effect”: rich oral input in early life facilitates learning to read quickly and enjoyably; the latter, in turn, facilities ease of learning all kinds of content later in life.

In literacy research, the Matthew Effect is typically used to explain the reading gap between children from middle-class families who are exposed to the language of schooling in the early years and children from poor and/or minority backgrounds. For the latter group, having to learn the language of schooling at the same time as learning how to read can result in permanent educational disadvantage.

Much less research has been devoted to the gap that is experienced by students who have learned how to read in one language and then go on to read to learn in another language.

Back in the Middle Ages in Europe, the use of Latin as universal language of higher education constituted such a barrier to knowledge. As John Wycliffe, the first translator of the Bible into English, famously wrote in the 14^th century: “[…] it helpeth Christian men to study the Gospel in that tongue in which they know best Christ’s sentence.”

If English is the new Latin, are we slowing down the learning of students around the world?

His advocacy for the use of the mother tongue in religious education soon became a steady stream of critical debate over the use of Latin in higher education. “The main point of these critiques was that the use of foreign languages allowed professionals to mystify and so to dominate ordinary people” (Burke, 2004, p. 17).

By the 19^th century, these reform efforts had largely been successful and the national languages had replaced Latin as the language of instruction in higher education. The change in the medium of instruction went hand in hand with an explosion in human knowledge: the flourishing of the sciences, the age of invention and discovery, the industrial revolution all happened after a variety of national languages had replaced Latin as the main medium in which knowledge was available.

Today, the trend is in the opposite direction, and English is fast becoming the predominant language of higher education. Inevitably, studying through the medium of English is easier for those who come to higher education as proficient readers of English. Conversely, proficient readers in another language will have to put in extra effort as they read to learn in English while, at the same time, still learning to read in English.

What are your experiences with reading to learn in another language?

References

Burke, P. (2004). Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nuland, S. B. (1993). How We Die. New York et al.: Random House.

Goose Lizzy Fountain, Goettingen: in a city full of memorials to notable men, the most prominent memorial to a woman is to a generic peasant girl

March 08 is International Women’s Day. Therefore, we will explore gender aspects of academic excellence in a loose series throughout this month.

In January, I was invited to speak at the University of Göttingen. It was my first visit ever to this famous German university and the city that is built around it. For those who don’t know it, one way to think about Göttingen is as the German equivalent of Oxford or Cambridge.

Göttingen is steeped in academic excellence: the university boasts 45 Nobel Prize winners, and wandering through the city and looking at all the names on the commemorative plaques that indicate where a famous person lived or studied is nothing less than awe inspiring. Anyone who has ever used a Bunsen Burner, figured out a Gaussian Normal Distribution, or tried to understand Planck’s Constant has engaged with knowledge created in Göttingen.

Wandering through the city and being wowed by all the big names, it did not take me long to notice that all these names seemed to belong to men. In fact, the only memorial to a woman I saw on my (admittedly not very extensive) walk was not to a pioneering thinker but to a generic peasant girl, Goose Lizzy.

I only had a few hours in Göttingen; and so later I went to check out the Wikipedia list of famous members of the University of Göttingen. There are a breath-taking 637 notable academics on that list, starting with the founder of paleo-biology Othenio Abel and ending with the polymath Thomas Young. The latter, incidentally, was the first to propose an international phonetic alphabet, which he appended to his 1796 medical dissertation “so as not to leave these pages blank”.

Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer is not on the list (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

So how many women are there among all these great thinkers, pioneering discoverers and trailblazing researchers? A paltry 23. An unbelievable 3.61 percent.

Can it be true that academic excellence in women is so rare?

The list includes current and former academics. So the lack of opportunity faced by women until the second half of the 20^th century might be one explanation. Indeed, 14 out of the 23 women on the list are still alive today. The first woman on the list (in terms of her birthday) is the mathematician Emmy Noether, who was born in 1882.

In Germany, women gained the formal right to study at university only in 1908 although various exceptions had been made before then. If women couldn’t go to university, they obviously had no opportunity to demonstrate academic excellence.

Sofja Kowalewskaja is not on the list (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

That’s not the full explanation, though, as the case of Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer shows. Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer is NOT on the Wikipedia list of notable members of the University of Göttingen. And yet, Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer was the second woman ever to be awarded a PhD at a German university – Göttingen, in fact – in 1787.

The daughter of Professor August Ludwig von Schlözer – whose name is on the list – her education was the result of a bet her father had waged that women’s brains could be equal to men’s if properly trained. She therefore had the best private tutors and learned to speak ten languages (in addition to German, these were Dutch, English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Spanish, and Swedish). By age 17, Professor Schlözer considered his daughter ready for university. Dorothea was not allowed to enroll, however. To humor her influential father, she was permitted to undertake a private examination at the conclusion of which the PhD was awarded.

This concluded the experiment – the bet was presumably won – and Dorothea was duly married off. Father and daughter went on to co-author a book about the Russian economy. Incidentally, Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer also became the first German woman to take a double name including both her husband’s and father’s names.

Surely, Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer’s achievements merit her inclusion in the list. Why is she not there? Because of the technicality that she was not enrolled?

Charlotte von Siebold is not on the list (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

Well, Charlotte von Siebold, who was enrolled as an auditor and who is commonly regarded as the first modern German female gynecologist, is not there, either. The same is true of another three trailblazing academic women, who all received their PhDs in Göttingen: the mathematician Sofja Kowalewskaja (1874), the chemist Julia Lermontowa (1874) and the physicist Margaret Maltby (1895).

That I can identify five notable academic women affiliated with the University of Göttingen who have not made it onto the Wikipedia list of notable members more or less off the top of my head puts the outrageously low number of women on the list in a somewhat different light: their absence is not only the result of the historical exclusion of women but of contemporary ignorance.

Margaret Maltby is not on the list (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

The fact that women are less likely to be considered notable, even today, was strikingly illustrated last year when Donna Strickland won the 2018 Physics Nobel Prize. At the time of the award, Donna Strickland did not have a Wikipedia page. Someone had attempted to build a Wikipedia page for her in May 2018 (about half a year before the award) but the submission had been rejected by a Wikipedia moderator on the grounds that “this submission’s references do not show that the subject qualifies for a Wikipedia article.” The male joint winner, Gérard Mourou, had had a Wikipedia entry since 2005 …

That there have been more notable men than women throughout history is the result of centuries of patriarchal domination. That we do not know about the achievements of many female thinkers, researchers and scientists is the result of the ongoing dismissal of women’s contributions. Even today, female achievement is ignored and judged by different standards. The latter in turn cements the perception that academic excellence is a male prerogative.

Julia Lermontova is not on the list (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

If you’d like to make a difference this International Women’s Day, why not get onto Wikipedia and add Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer, Charlotte von Siebold, Sofja Kowalewskaja, Julia Lermontowa and Margaret Maltby to the list of notable members of the University of Göttingen? Or curate the page of a notable yet overlooked woman?

Related content

• Why do female academics publish less than their male peers?
• Strange Academic women

Further reading

Bazely, D. 2018. Why Nobel winner Donna Strickland didn’t have a Wikipedia page. Washington Post

Cecco, L. 2018. Female Nobel prize winner deemed not important enough for Wikipedia entry. Guardian