Internationalization of higher education is being adopted increasingly by universities across the world, but there is limited sociolinguistics literature examining the perspectives of key participants in the process – faculty members across disciplines. Disciplinary faculty with no language training face daily a “superdiverse” (Blommeart and Rampton, 2011) student population in their university classrooms. Drawing on qualitative data from interviews with 24 faculty members across four faculties within a mid-size university in western Canada, this paper will explore some of the tensions content area faculty live when engaged with the linguistic realities of internationalization in today’s globalizing world.
The paper will trace challenges these faculty face in serving a gate-keeping function when working with international students whose sometimes difficult socialization in the norms of a North American academic institution is perceived as deficiency in language proficiency. Creative and efficient practices that some faculty members improvise and employ in their daily work with linguistically diverse students will serve as hopeful examples to ponder upon in envisioning more equitable higher education institutions caught in the expansion of internationalization in times of globalization.
As data suggest that content area faculty overwhelmingly espouse normative perspectives on language and language matters, including faculty who promote critical and poststructural perspectives and embrace diversity in their own research and teaching, the role critical sociolinguistics might play in addressing such views is discussed. The paper will consider possibilities to dispel homogeneous notions of language by promoting understandings of language as an invention (Makoni and Pennycook, 2007) and prompting self-reflections on disciplinary identity among content area faculty.
References:
Blommeart, J. and Rampton, B. (2011). Language and superdiversity. Diversities, 13 (2), 1-22.
Makoni, S. and Pennycook A. (2007). Disinventing and reconstituting languages. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
