Abstract
Academic writing centres in non-Anglophone countries navigate language policies that encourage the development of local languages and English within multilingual university settings. These policies entail diverging language ideologies that connect language use to diversification and standardisation aims. Although writing centres are stakeholders in academic language development and therefore participants in the policy process, their role and agency in this process has been neglected. The study explores how writing centre staff perceive their work in relation to university language policies and aims. Data were collected via a nation-wide survey of centres in Sweden and seven focus groups. The results demonstrate that the staff claim agency as language brokers. Institutional ideologies of monolingualism and assessment regimes that value the text product over the learning process provide limitations. The reported practices illuminate the special status of Swedish for English text production, and opportunities for grassroots agency as intermediaries between students, lecturers and policies.
Highlights
With the massification and diversification of higher education, European non-Anglophone universities have introduced services that support students’ academic writing development
In Sweden, these writing centres cater for two academic languages, Swedish and English, which corresponds to language policies at Nordic universities that aim to develop the national language(s) and English as the lingua franca of science (Hultgren, Gregersen & Thøgersen, 2014)
We selected seven centres for focus groups (FGs) to explore the topics in the questionnaire further (Appendix B) and examine how the various perspectives and beliefs about language use are negotiated amongst the centre staff (Litosseliti, 2003)
Summary
With the massification and diversification of higher education, European non-Anglophone universities have introduced services that support students’ academic writing development. In Sweden, these writing centres cater for two academic languages, Swedish and English, which corresponds to language policies at Nordic universities that aim to develop the national language(s) and English as the lingua franca of science (Hultgren, Gregersen & Thøgersen, 2014). Kaufhold & Wennerberg, 2020) This multilingual reality has been acknowledged by the Nordic Council of Ministers (Gregersen et al, 2018) in terms of engaging with multilingual speakers nationally and reaching out internationally. Their report echoes aims of widening access to higher education nationally and universities’ internationalisation. It recommends academic language development with a focus on the national language(s) and English in multilingual contexts where the lecturers and students do not share the same first/stronger language (L1). At the same time, such language policies index conflicting orientations towards language, for instance perceiving multilingualism as a valuable resource or as a problem (cf. Källkvist & Hult, 2020)
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