Abstract
As a result of transnational mobility of students and attempts to widen access to higher education, university campuses have become increasingly multilingual. Responses to this phenomenon have ranged from resistance (sticking to a local and established language) to wide-ranging attempts to become English-medium institutions. The fact that student populations can differ from one semester and one year to the next means that it becomes difficult to plan language-in-education strategies and practices. In the context of South African higher education, this paper argues that lecturers who teach multilingual classes cannot depend on policy makers to create circumstances in which deep learning will take place. It becomes necessary to think in terms of micro-planning (Baldauf 2006), or perhaps rather classroom strategies, to create spaces for multilingual learning.
Highlights
Transnational mobility of students means that higher education classrooms are increasingly linguistically diverse
The idea of language as a local practice can be linked firstly to the core business of higher education, which is knowledge production, and secondly to situated classroom practice, in an effort to investigate the possibility of a framework for higher education institutions to move beyond implementing monolingual institutional language policies
What that means is that we place the responsibility for language arrangements in the hands of the lecturers so that these language arrangements become part of the decision-making processes when planning the teaching programme for a particular class. This is in line with Tierney’s (2008:158) description of higher education institutions: “Increasingly, what one finds in organisational life is a more nuanced sense of decision making that may well serve the needs of academic governance in the 21st century”
Summary
Transnational mobility of students means that higher education classrooms are increasingly linguistically diverse. Higher education institutions are committed to widening access within national borders to minority groups, which may include linguistic minorities. In her description of the ultimate internationalised university, Roberts (2008:9) describes an institution that “is moving towards what we can call a more authentic internationalised university where multilingualism and lingua franca use are common, even normative and no one language has hegemonic power over the others”. The question is, how could such a multilingual institution function? How can language be ‘arranged’ rather than ‘policed’ by means of a language-in-education policy (LEP)? The question is, how could such a multilingual institution function? How can language be ‘arranged’ rather than ‘policed’ by means of a language-in-education policy (LEP)? If the linguistic composition of a class changes from one semester to the how can we plan teaching and learning optimally?
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