Rethinking Language Learning for Accountants

We recently published Communication that Counts by Pia Patricia P. Tenedero. In this post the author dispels the myth about accountants and poor communication.

More than a decade of teaching English language courses to accounting professionals and students in the Philippines has shown me that these people are serious about improving their English skills. They are among the most eager and diligent adult learners I have had the joy to teach. While they are not all A+ students, it is NOT true that they are poor in communication any more than professionals and students in other disciplines. But somehow, their number-smartness seems to be constantly leveraged against their identity as corporate communicators.

 “Accountants are not good communicators.”

Echoes of this complaint have motivated me to interrogate it. Is it true? Certainly, it is easy to believe especially with the introverted quant persona repeatedly portrayed in movies, and the skills gap discourse reported in mostly Anglophone-based communication research. But as in all stereotypes, its truth has limits.

To uncover the limitations of this claim, Communication that Counts unpacks the issues by clarifying what counts as ‘good communication’ in globalized accounting schools and workplaces? Who sets these norms? For what ends? In the process, the book challenges other deeply held beliefs about language, higher education, and the workplace.

“The language curriculum should be aligned with workplace practices to ensure the communicative competence of future accountants.”

I partially agree with this and propose some practical innovations in the communication training provided to future accountants. (In January 2023, I begin teaching Communicating for Globalized Accounting, an elective course based on the findings of this study.) At the same time, I caution against viewing perfect alignment in school-workplace communication practices as a panacea to the supposed gap in the communicative ability of university students. It is an impossible target, to begin with! Higher education and the workplace are interrelated domains, yes, but they also have distinct goals. School is only partly a preparation for the workplace, so we can only target partial alignment at best. This dynamic, however, does not make schools any less of a ‘real world’ than corporate and home offices. Naturally, what happens in accounting schools is not an exact replica of what happens in accounting workplaces, including how teachers, students, and practitioners communicate, what languages they use, and who they view as effective communicators.

“English is the language of global accounting.”

I also examine this, and other ideas about language held by accounting students, teachers, employers and professionals. The way people think about languages is shaped by and, in turn, shapes language education and experiences. Yet we do not reflect on it enough. I believe it is especially important for language teachers like me to be more aware of our language attitudes as this affects the practices we (dis)allow in the classroom and which our students may expect to see in the workplace (a.k.a. ‘the real world’). But, as I’ve discovered in my ethnographic work with onshore and offshore accountants, English is, in fact, NOT the only language spoken or written in the highly multilingual and multicultural space of globalized accounting.

Globalized accountants engage in complex language and communication work. In this field, effective communication has multiple, shifting meanings. While English is treated as a superstar, it is not the only skill that counts in this multilingual field. These and more are part of the Global South story I share in Communication that Counts.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Language Management by Natalie Victoria Wilmot.

How To Design, Run and Assess Quality Bilingual Programmes

We recently published Developing and Evaluating Quality Bilingual Practices in Higher Education edited by Fernando D. Rubio-Alcalá and Do Coyle. In this post the editors explain what to expect from the book.

We are pleased to reach the final stage of publication of the volume Developing and Evaluating Quality Bilingual Practices in Higher Education. It’s been more than two years of successful triangulation work with the authors and Multilingual Matters, which have led to the birth of a book that deals with topics surprisingly scantly covered in the literature of bilingual education. The publication of the book will undoubtedly unfold new perspectives on how quality bilingual programmes can be designed, run and assessed.

We have had the privilege of working with a host of experienced, recognized and well-known authors who have paved the way for producing a text with meaningful and grounded content. Emma Dafouz has prefaced the volume, and David Marsh, Wendy Díaz, Víctor Pavón, Patrick Studer, David Lasagabaster, Jennifer Valcke, Karin Bage, Pat Moore, Kyria Finardi, Inmaculada Fortanet, Maria Ellison, Felipe Guimaraes, Javier Ávila, Francisco Rubio and Rocío López have contributed to writing nine excellent chapters that have been strategically devised into two main parts. The first part is devoted to theoretical issues and discussion about language policy and internationalization, and the second to the application for setting up, supervising and evaluating bilingual programmes and classroom practice. We are very grateful to all of them and also to those that have endorsed the publication, namely Magnus Gustafsson, María Luisa Pérez Cañado and Esko Koponen.

The book is valid for all contexts in higher education. While the authors work mainly in Europe (UK, Finland, Spain, Sweden, Portugal, Switzerland) and America (Mexico and Brazil), the contents can be applied to any geographical area. Being keynote speakers, many of the authors participate in international academic events and therefore, the mindset permeating our volume promotes a globalized vision and represents institutions around the world.

It addresses policymakers (especially those chapters related to the analysis of language policies), programmes’ coordinators, researchers, practitioners and other stakeholders (especially those chapters referred to the exposition of tools and analysis of quality indicators).

It is our challenge to make a significant contribution to the field of bilingual education so that we inspire the use and adaptation of innovative tools to raise the quality of each and every one of the myriad of multilingual programmes. In fact, if there is no quality in those programmes after the considerable economic and human effort it entails, what is the purpose of having those programmes at all?

Fernando D. Rubio-Alcalá and Do Coyle

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Academic Biliteracies edited by David M. Palfreyman and Christa van der Walt.

Internationalisation and EAP: Transforming the Academy through a Focus on Language

This month we published Making Language Visible in the University by Bee Bond. In this post the author explains the context in which her book was written.

English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and the (neoliberal) Higher Education policies of internationalisation have an ‘elective affinity’ (Zepke, 2015). In other words, the exponential growth in the demand for EAP is directly linked to an increasing focus on marketing Higher Education study to an international market. EAP as an emerging field of study and practice would not have been afforded as much space to grow and develop had it not been for global Higher Education policies that encouraged student mobility across borders and the increasing stronghold of English as the accepted norm for most academic communication. EAP and its practitioners directly benefit from this growth.

However, for most EAP practitioners, the neoliberal focus of such policies sits uncomfortably with their world view and their professional practices. The connection between the international student and financial gain for an institution works to the detriment of a focus on the intellectual, cultural and social benefits that come from studying in a global community and does not sit well within the epistemology of those involved in the study and teaching of languages.

Furthermore, there is a tension between EAP and the rest of the academy due to the frequent framing of international students as being in deficit. This perception positions those whose work is focused on supporting English language learning students to find ways of accessing academic content in English as being on the edges of academia – acting as a bridge to the real work rather than an integral part of academic life. This is also connected to the invisibility of language within the academy which, as Turner argues (2004) only becomes visible when it is viewed as a technical problem that then needs to be ‘fixed’ by an EAP practitioner.

It is these intersections and misconnections between internationalisation, the EAP practitioner and the view of language as either an invisible or a technical aside to the real academic work of disciplinary content knowledge development that provide the context for my book. In order to address these issues, and move EAP away from the ‘edges of academia’ (Ding & Bruce, 2017) it is clear that it is necessary to work within this context; to embrace the ‘elective affinity’ that EAP  has with internationalisation policies and to work through them to effect change rather than to ignore or resist from the margins. By engaging in scholarship; acting as ethnographers of the academy to better understand the role of language within specific disciplines and contexts, and then communicating and highlighting this understanding beyond the EAP community, I believe it is possible for EAP practitioners to work in partnership with international students as agents for change.

International students have the potential to positively transform higher education practices, forcing a reflexive, shifting awareness of pedagogy, academic practices and the disciplinary canon. EAP practitioners, fully embedded and accepted within their institution as valued scholars, should work as advocates and allies for these students, pushing for structural change through policy decisions. In this way, EAP practitioners can become agents for positive change rather than marginalised technicians who are exposed to the political and structural decisions made around them.

Bee Bond, The University of Leeds

b.bond@leeds.ac.uk

@BeeBond1

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like International Student Engagement in Higher Education by Margaret Kettle.

The Three As: Defining Engagement in Higher Education

This month we published International Student Engagement in Higher Education by Margaret Kettle. In this post, the author introduces her “three As” model for defining the concept of engagement and explains what inspired her to write the book.

Engagement is everywhere. When I go to meetings and presentations, and read policy documents, the word is pervasive. We have student engagement, community engagement, the importance of engaging with industry partners, and so on.  It is clear to me that the word has become a catch-all and that the concept is in danger of being washed out, and then possibly thrown out. My book International Student Engagement in Higher Education is an attempt to identify the components of what is a complex and elusive concept. To this end, I foreground international students’ experiences and utilise social practice to explain the multiple, interrelated dimensions of engagement. My model comprises three ‘A’s: antecedents to engagement, actions of engaging, and achievements and accomplishments flowing from engagement.

Antecedents to engagement include dominant forms of academic English as well as facilitative teaching and assessment practices. Actions refer to students’ strategic acts in the moment of engaging. Finally, accomplishments draw attention to the benefits students derive from engagement such as academic achievement and personal change. The power of my model is that it disentangles the various dimensions of engagement while retaining their interrelationship.

By understanding the complexity of engagement, I believe that university leaders, managers and academics are better equipped to make decisions about policy and teaching approaches as well as academic support. Clearer conceptualisation of engagement will benefit international students and domestic/home students. Indeed, the model could also be used in other educational settings such as schools.

My interest in international student engagement began with my own experiences as an international student in Germany. It continued with work at an Australian university and being privy to international students’ strategic campaigns to assert themselves in their postgraduate courses. The opportunity to research engagement arose through my study with a university academic who had a reputation among colleagues and students for being an excellent teacher. The research involved a case study of the academic’s course over a semester – a rich and transformative experience for all, including myself as researcher.

At a time when the focus on engagement is increasing, the best way for institutions to learn about international student engagement is by listening to the students themselves. Teachers are integral to the student experience and have a vital role to play in providing the conditions for engagement. This book explicates these relationships and will hopefully be of benefit to people interested in promoting engagement for all students undertaking higher education.

For more information about this book, please see our website. If you found this interesting, you might also like Desiring TESOL and International Education by Raqib Chowdhury and Phan Le Ha.

The Multilingual Nature of Higher Education

This month we published Academic Biliteracies edited by David M. Palfreyman and Christa van der Walt. In this post, David and Christa discuss their experience of coediting the book. 

Christa: There were some initial signs that this book was not meant to be. Firstly, David’s e-mails to me disappeared in cyberspace and it was only when Nancy Hornberger contacted me to enquire very diplomatically whether I had received the e-mails, that we found out his institutional e-mails were not delivered, for some unfathomable reason. Secondly, this was an under-researched topic and we were not sure that we would get any contributions; and thirdly, both of us dealt with serious interruptions of a personal and professional nature. And yet, here we are, three years later, with chapters that showcase the multilingual nature of higher education in all its complexity.

Our first (academic) challenge was to agree on what we understand ‘literacy’ to mean, so that we can evaluate contributions on ‘biliteracy’. Going through our Skype notes, I’m struck by the terminology issues in every conversation. Is there a difference between ‘translanguaging’ and ‘translingual’; between ‘multiliteracies’ and ‘multilingual literacies’? Is ‘translanguaging’ the overarching concept in which ‘biliteracy’ needs to find its place, or should they be seen as separate phenomena in multilingual contexts? We still do not have a definite answer; or maybe it is better to say that we have many answers!

David: Yes, the email bug almost put a subtle end to the project before it started, and I’m very glad that Nancy intervened! I was keen to work with Christa on this book because her previous publications had focused on multilingual higher education in a way that I hadn’t come across before: questioning assumptions about English as the medium of instruction in so many universities worldwide.

Christa: We both wanted a variety of chapters from all corners of the world, but of course we had to be selective within the scope of one book.  We aimed to cover both majority and minority languages in contexts where language is a medium for developing knowledge rather than necessarily a focus of the course; in the end, the chapters highlight the use at university of literacy in Afrikaans, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, isiXhosa and other African languages, Korean, Maori, Polish, Spanish and Welsh.

David: Some of the contributors had already published in the area of biliteracy; some had been working with biliterate students and issues of biliteracy in university courses for some years, but came to engage with the issues in new ways through their involvement in the book. As the book developed, we encouraged contributors to read and comment on each other’s chapters, which brought some mutual adjustments and helped bring out common themes. All of us became aware of new perspectives to understand the experience of students and scholars, and fresh options for working with and for biliteracy. Guillaume Gentil, whose previous work provided inspiration for the book, kindly sprang into action once the rest of the book was complete, contributing a concluding chapter which draws themes together and points out some ways forward for research in academic biliteracies.

I’m grateful to Zayed University (UAE) for their support in travelling to Australia, Jordan and the UK in the course of preparing the book. Among many learning experiences along the way, I remember especially meeting up by coincidence with Christa at the AILA Congress in Brisbane – it was good to have a face to face meeting near the beginning as most of our later work together was by email or Skype. Another unforgettable and educative experience was taking part in a research conference at Cardiff University where most communication was in Welsh or Basque: having to rely on simultaneous interpreters and finding my usual language of academic/social communication suddenly minoritized, I suddenly found myself a ‘lurker’ in academic discussions!

Christa: For me, as a lecturer who code switches and uses two languages when teaching at Stellenbosch University, the active development of biliteracy in academic contexts is an important acknowledgement of the multilingual nature of twenty-first century higher education. Many students arrive at higher education institutions with a fully developed academic language that is not English and it would be a waste to ignore the enormous potential of that resource when making meaning of academic material.

We’ll look forward to hearing from readers of the book about how the issues relate to their own experiences as learners or teachers.

 

David M. Palfreyman: david.palfreyman@zu.ac.ae

Christa van der Walt: cvdwalt@sun.ac.za

 

For more information about this book, please see our website. If you found this interesting, you might also like Multilingual Higher Education, which Christa published with us previously.

 

Translanguaging in Higher Education

This month we are publishing Translanguaging in Higher Education edited by Catherine M. Mazak and Kevin S. Carroll. In this post, Catherine describes how the book came together.

Over the last several years the term translanguaging has gained traction in academia, particularly in the field of bilingual education. When I first encountered the term I was looking for a way to describe the bilingual classroom practices that were a taken-for-granted part of content learning at my university (the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez). It seemed to me that ‘code-switching’ just didn’t cover the complex, layered use of Spanish talk around English text, the use of diagrams labeled in English during a formal presentation in Spanish, or the common practice of using scientific keywords in English while defining them in Spanish. I became interested in understanding these practices as bilingualism, rather than dismissing them with a deficit perspective which treated them as simply strategies for coping with a lack of English skills.

Understanding the role of English as a real force in higher education globally, my colleague Kevin S. Carroll and I began to think about the ways that English in particular, and other colonial languages in general, must be inserting themselves into higher education classrooms around the world. We could imagine that some of the same translanguaging practices that we were seeing in our classrooms must be occurring in other socio-cultural contexts. We also knew that other practices may be taking place that were different from those we were seeing, and so might contribute to our understanding of translanguaging as a theory.

With this in mind, the idea for our book, Translanguaging in Higher Education: Beyond Monolingual Ideologies, was born. We envisioned it as a large cross-case analysis that would incorporate perspectives from diverse socio-cultural contexts around the world. By including chapters about South Africa, Denmark, Ukraine, Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, India, the United Arab Emirates, and the Basque Country, we hope we have accomplished this goal.

We also sought to contribute to the current academic conversation around translanguaging, which has tended to focus on K-12 education. As we attended conferences and presented our work, we kept hearing questions about translanguaging itself. What does it mean exactly? Is it really new? Isn’t it just code-switching?

In the book, I attempt to answer the question, ‘What is translanguaging?’ And here’s my answer from the book’s introduction:

(1) Translanguaging is a language ideology that takes bilingualism as the norm.

(2) Translanguaging is a theory of bilingualism based on lived bilingual experiences. As such, it posits that bilinguals do not separate their ‘languages’ into discrete systems, but rather possess one integrated repertoire of languaging practices from which they draw as they navigate their everyday bilingual worlds.

(3) Translanguaging is a pedagogical stance that teachers and students take on that allows them to draw on all of their linguistic and semiotic resources as they teach and learn both language and content material in classrooms.

(4) Translanguaging is a set of practices that are still being researched and described. It is not limited to what is traditionally known as ‘code-switching’, but rather seeks to include any practices that draw on an individual’s linguistic and semiotic repertoires (including reading in one language and discussing the reading in another, and many other practices that will be described in this book).

(5) As such, translanguaging is transformational. It changes the world as it continually invents and reinvents languaging practices in a perpetual process of meaning-making. The acceptance of these practices – of the creative, adaptable, resourceful inventions of bilinguals – transforms not only our traditional notions of ‘languages’, but also the lives of bilinguals themselves as they remake the world through language.

If you are interested in translanguaging as a developing construct, in bilingualism and bilingual education, in multilingual higher education, in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), the internationalization of higher education, educational language policy, or languaging across diverse socio-cultural contexts in general, I think you will find this book of interest. Kevin and I accept questions, concerns, and comments here on this post or by email at the addresses below.

Catherine M. Mazak catherine.mazak@upr.edu
Website: www.cathymazak.com 

Kevin S. Carroll kevin.carroll@upr.edu
Website: http://kevincarroll.weebly.com

For further information about this book, please contact the authors at the addresses above or see our website. 

The Debate on Brexit and the Potential Impact on Academic Publishing

Alongside the meetings and stalls at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which Tommi and I attended last week, there were also talks and discussions on topics of general interest to publishers. One that caught our eye on the Publishing Perspectives stage was entitled “Debate on Brexit and the Potential Impact on Academic Publishing” and I went along to hear the discussion. The panel comprised Richard Fisher, an academic policy correspondent, Richard Mollet from the RELX group and Andy Robinson from the publisher Wiley.

The general feeling among academic publishers is that the UK’s vote to leave the European Union is troubling and of great concern so the panel began with the discussants being asked if it is all doom and gloom as we suspect, or if there are in fact some silver linings to the situation. The panellists managed to come up with 4 positives, such as the short term currency gains which publishers with high exports are enjoying, potential beneficial changes in VAT laws, a renewed focus on emerging markets and UK research possibly being able to reposition and rebuild itself – particularly in some areas of science research, such as clinical trials, where the UK’s formerly strong output has fallen apart. We were also reminded that there were pockets of support for Brexit among some UK academics and that we need to respond to and work for the 52% who voted for the UK to leave the EU.

The panel on the Publishing Perspectives stage

The above positives aside, the discussants identified several major concerns of Brexit for the publishing industry which were grouped into 3 main areas: people, funding and regulations.

The UK publishing workforce has a higher than national average percentage of workers from abroad and we do not know what the implications of Brexit will be for employment. The same goes for researchers at UK institutions and EU students, who bring growth for our economy as well as numerous other societal benefits. The panel mentioned anecdotal evidence of academics now refusing positions at UK universities and UK academics being taken off grant applications or side-lined within existing projects. Furthermore, the UK will now be relegated to the position of an observer rather than a participant on discussions around matters such as Open Access in academia.

Regarding the concern of funding, the panel felt that the sector needs to make a clear case to the government for research funding to be maintained and provided, especially as the terms of Brexit are negotiated and we are in a state of flux. Universities shouldn’t resort to pleading and requesting a special case, but rather they need to stress to the government the importance of the industry to our society and economy.

Finally, on the topic of regulation, the conversation moved to areas such as copyright law, data protection and medical trials, all of which are currently governed to some extent by EU law but which need not be in the future. We were reminded that the UK has traditionally had a good research reputation but, where Britain now goes the world won’t follow. Our decreased voice on topics of international concern is troubling.

The session was wrapped up with an optimistic view that British publishing is international in scope and outlook and that that is unlikely to change, especially in the humanities where relations are as much transatlantic and global as they are European. Brexit will no doubt have an impact on the industry but perhaps not as much as other concerns of 21st century publishing, such as mass piracy and green open access, but those are topics for discussion another time!

Laura

Language Policy in Higher Education

English is becoming more and more common as the language of instruction in universities all over the world. However, in many countries efforts are being made to preserve indigenous languages. In this post, F. Xavier Vila and Vanessa Bretxa, the editors of our recent book Language Policy in Higher Education outline the recent debates within language policy that form the basis of their book.

In 2012, the leading Italian public university Politecnico di Milano attracted headlines from all over the world when it announced it would move to all-English instruction. The announcement stirred the growing debate going on all over Europe about the convenience of increasing the role of English as the vehicular language in non-English-speaking countries. One year later, it was France’s turn to discuss the issue of the Franglais row: Is the English language conquering France?, to the extent that the national government had to make a decision about the role of English in French universities. Simultaneously, on the other side of the ocean, in the now economically booming Bolivia, the first promotion of students from the three recently created indigenous universities were preparing their graduation theses neither in Spanish or English, but rather in the indigenous Aymara, Quechua and Guarani languages. Their graduation in August 2014 was welcome as a crucial step in order to promote social cohesion and wealth redistribution and overcome centuries of external and internal colonialism.

What’s going on in the field of language policies in higher education? Once the realm of Latin, in the 19th and 20th centuries universities adopted massively the national and colonial languages following the heyday of the Western nation states. Universities formed the intellectual elites that led the cultural and scientific progress of the last century, and produced the leaders and the cadres that ruled the world. But globalization and the commodification of knowledge are transforming the environment for higher education also in its linguistic dimension. English-medium courses are proliferating all over the world, sometimes due to the genuine desire to attract international talent, partly also as a strategy to obtain resources from abroad. But is the development of English-medium education just part of a more complex story?

In a context where the major languages are said to be succumbing to the urge of English, what are the prospects of medium-sized languages that have achieved the status of lingua academica to retain it? Will they find a place in the new world of higher education, or will they rather be reduced to the status of mere vernaculars in a near future? And what about those that have still not made it? Is it still sound to spend time and money to raise their status or would it be more adequate to try to content their speakers with a reasonably stable functional distribution of languages? Is it still worth increasing the number of linguae academicae?

These and other related questions are tackled in the volume Language Policy in Higher Education: The Case of Medium-Sized Languages by a team of well-renowned specialists in language policy. Based on the close examination of a number of medium-sized languages from Finland to South Africa and from Israel to Catalonia, the volume compares the trajectories of languages that have made it in higher education and others that didn’t, analyses their current state, and seeks to extract lessons of general applicability. And while their results may be read from different perspectives, one of them seems to be clear: in the era of globalization, there seems to be ample room for multilingualism in academia, but it will probably never be the way it used to be.

For more information on this book please see our website. You might also be interested in Survival and Development of Language Communities edited by F. Xavier Vila.

Multilingual Universities in South Africa

This month we are publishing Multilingual Universities in South Africa edited by Liesel Hibbert and Christa van der Walt. Here, one of Liesel’s colleagues, Carol Christie from the Department of Applied Language Studies, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa, gives us her view on the book as well as a bit of background on the complications of language and identity in South Africa.

Hibbert and Van der Walt have dedicated their book, to be released in April 2014, to Neville Alexander who believed that languages other than those of the original colonisers should be given power and status in South Africa and Africa more broadly. The reality that most of us who teach in South Africa experience, however, is one in which the Constitution provides for the equal status of eleven official languages but business and teaching is done in English (or, to a limited extent, Afrikaans). The parents of our students choose, when they can afford to do so, to send their children to English-medium schools, and most of our students tell us that they prefer to study in English because ‘it is the universal language’, ‘it will give me access to the job market’, ‘I have always studied in English’ or ‘Xhosa is just too difficult’.

Much has been written about the potential detriment to students of not being given the opportunity to develop literacies in their home language before being expected to study in a second or third language. However, those of us who teach in contemporary South Africa also know that terms such as ‘mother tongue’, ‘first language’ and ‘home language’ no longer mean the same thing (if they ever did) and cannot be used to allocate students to uncomplicated categories. A young person in South Africa may very easily have had a Xhosa-speaking mother but consider English to be her home language because it was the main language spoken in the home and Afrikaans to be a first language because she studied it at ‘first language’ level at school. And we all have students who consider themselves to be ethnically Xhosa (or Afrikaans or Venda or Zulu or Pedi etc.) while the primary language they use is English. We cannot return to apartheid-era ethnic and race categories which define us as having a particular ethnicity and therefore having to be taught a particular curriculum in a particular language.

The strength of the book is that it provides examples of how languages other than English can be used in university teaching in South Africa and can help students to learn even when the only language that all have in common is English. The book showcases current multilingual teaching and learning innovations in higher education in South Africa. Although language-in-education policies for multilingual contexts have been in place for some years, and have been discussed and critiqued, there is no overview which highlights the processes and success stories and the case studies conducted. This book fills this gap, by showcasing work done ‘on the ground’ by higher education practitioners and by examining how they develop ways of drawing on all available discourses and languages for strategic and systemically supported multilingual and biliteracy development in the formal tertiary education sector. The case studies presented by the next generation of up-and-coming mainstream academics are extremely valuable in terms of the blueprints they offer and in terms of the range of exemplary practices modelled. A very wide international audience is envisioned for this book, as similar contexts currently occur everywhere, due to global migration. In terms of the African continent, the book clearly testifies that the continent is inventing its own practices on an ongoing basis and that these are highly informative for language practitioners located anywhere.

The reality is that almost all of us are multilingual (or at least bilingual) and it is in this context that the editors’ use of the term ‘multilingual’ in the title must be considered. What is a multilingual university and are any universities in South Africa (as distinct from their teachers and students) truly multilingual? Hibbert is based at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, where the management acknowledges Xhosa and Afrikaans, in addition to English, as the predominant languages in the area while almost all business and teaching is done in English and students will only submit work in Xhosa or Afrikaans in courses to do with these languages and their literatures. Van der Walt is based at the University of Stellenbosch, long considered the intellectual home of Afrikanerdom, where the taaldebat (language policy debate) continues and many staff, students and alumni continue to be anxious about it moving away from being an Afrikaans-medium university.

Bilingual education, at least in Afrikaans and English, has a long history in South Africa but the point is that it has only been done extensively in English and Afrikaans and not in the other South African languages. The status of Afrikaans was also an important aspect of Afrikaaner nationalism and it is arguably in this context that those in the taaldebat who bemoan a perceived move away from Afrikaans are campaigning for the rights of Afrikaans as a minority language. In contrast, however, most black South Africans, in spite of an often-asserted ethnic identity, do not appear to be asserting their right to be taught in ‘their own’ language. It is in this complicated context that Hibbert and Van der Walt present a number of case studies which describe and discuss attempts at and strategies for the use of multilingualism in university courses and classrooms in South Africa and this is a particular strength of the book: it provides examples of strategies that we can all consider using in our teaching.

Although, of course, being able to read and write in one or more languages does not necessarily make one critically literate. For instance, in the chapter titled “An exemplary astronomical lesson that could potentially show the benefits of multilingual content and language in higher education,” what is meant by an “astronomical lesson” (as opposed to an astronomy one) when it’s at home and surely if something “could” do something then it already has the potential to do so? This type of criticism from someone whose mother tongue, home language, first language and primary language of study have always been the same is, however, perhaps exactly what the authors and editors of this book are addressing: we gain much more from the use of a variety of languages and literacies (even if that use is nonstandard in semantics, syntax, register and idiom) than we stand to lose from the universal use of English.

For more information about this book please see our website. If you found this interesting you might also like Christa van der Walt’s previous book Multilingual Higher Education.

CLIL in Higher Education

Earlier this month we published CLIL in Higher Education by Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez and we asked her to tell us a little about how she came to write the book and how it contributes to the field of research into multilingual education.

The first idea to write a book like CLIL in Higher Education: Towards a Multilingual Language Policy was due to the fact that almost everything that had been published up to that moment, four years ago, was related to primary and secondary education and it lacked a solid theoretical basis. I observed that the research on CLIL in Higher Education starting at that moment was focused on practical experiences and the literature reviews were often confusing and misleading. They were based on research carried out in North America or Canada, or on the few theory based studies on CLIL in pre-university education.

In Spain, however, CLIL is having a great influence at the moment in all stages of education although  most research is focused on secondary school experiences.

Thirdly, the intention of this book was to gather all the perspectives CLIL has taken in recent years especially around language as medium and as object of instruction, pedagogy and language policy. I think nobody up to this moment has taken such a wide perspective in a single authored volume.

This book tries to review what multilingualism and multilingual education means in several parts of the world, in order to provide a context to the situation of a bilingual community in Spain. Secondly, it provides the theoretical background for the several perspectives of CLIL: language, pedagogy and participants, and socio-historical context. Thirdly, it provides some proposals for a multilingual language policy for a university, Universitat Jaume I, taking into account all the factors described.

I hope this volume is of interest to students, researchers and policy makers interested in multilingualism in higher education from the perspective of the integration of language and content.

If you liked this book you might also like Multilingual Higher Education by Christa van der Walt.