Transcript Conference on the reform of the European Union, Radical

Bi and multilingual universities –
Challenges and future prospects
Helsinki University 2005
English, a cuckoo in the European
higher education nest of languages?
Robert Phillipson
Faculty of Languages, Communication,
and Cultural Studies
Copenhagen Business School
EU policies for ‘Europe 2010:
A partnership for European renewal’
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a Europe of freedom
Knowledge economy
European education and research area
European public space
European Justice Space
Europe as polysemic: toponym, politonym,
ethnonym, econonym, or linguonym?
Europe not a meaningful concept for the young
Equally opaque: freedom, education, research
The Bologna process, the
internationalisation of higher education
45 member states, Australia and the USA as observers,
EU Commission as participant and funder
• Bologna 1999 … objectives - within the framework of
our institutional competences and taking full respect of
the diversity of cultures, languages, national education
systems and of University autonomy - to consolidate a
European Higher Education Area at the latest by 2010
• Bergen 19-20 May 2005: structural uniformity, quality,
mobility, recognition, joint degrees, attractiveness,
competitiveness
nothing on bilingual degrees or multilingualism
internationalisation = English-medium education?
President, London Metropolitan University
CAM Cambridge Alumni Magazine, Easter 2005
”As a result of the Bologna process, 45 European
countries have agreed to implement a
Bachelor/Masters degree structure. The concept
of the bi-lingual university is already being
widely discussed in eastern Europe;
you can now do a medical degree in English in
Hungary , for example.
And that’s a trend that is going to continue.”
• The emergence of English as the international
language of higher education has had an
enormous impact, agrees Liping Zhou …
who warns against an excessive focus on English.
The view from central Europe,
Miklós Kontra
• The concept of bilingual universities is NOT
widely discussed (conference last autumn), and
none exist (e.g. for linguistic minorities in
Carpathian basin).
• The medical degree in English in Hungary predates the fall of the iron curtain. Target
population is foreigners, mainly Third World,
now broader, since the quality is good, and
cheaper than in western Europe. Membership of
the EU may change all this.
• Teaching through English (and German) is pure
money-making.
European Association for International Education,
Occasional paper 17, July 2005. Michael Woolf, President,
Foundation for International Education, London
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I gotta use words when I talk to you:
English and international education.
internationalisation does not need to entail learning or operating
in a foreign language, i.e. English alone is enough,
privatisation and the law of the market are desirable, i.e. higher
education should no longer be seen as a common good,
English can be detached from its cultural origins and studied
merely as a tool, i.e. the language is promoted as though it is
culturally neutral and detached from the globalising,
internationalising forces that impel the language forward,
alternative views are based on ‘worn and tired assumptions’ that
contribute to ‘atrophy, irrelevance and stagnation’. Us lot?
Christensen, Nicolette deVille 2005. The role of English language in
international education: an American perspective
• “The citizens of the world have positioned English
language as a common bond not just for Anglo nations,
but for the entire world, so allow English to be the
language in which we can cultivate global literacy.”
• reciprocity in collaborative ventures involving a US
sending university and a European receiving university
is “to strive for academic excellence as defined by the
sending institution.”
• Cuckoos are parasitical, their fledglings the sole
survivors in the nests they occupy. But are they
environmentally sustainable?
Pirkko Vartiainen, The legitimacy of evaluation. A
comparison of Finnish and English institutional evaluations
of higher education. Frankfurt a M: Peter Lang, 2004.
University autonomy is effectively the norm in Finland
(a country with an exceptionally successful economy and
school system), even if largely funded by the state,
whereas in England it is the privilege of elite
universities, because of the coercive evaluation
procedures, designed to rank goodies and baddies, and
reward them accordingly, rather than seeing evaluation
as an ongoing process that can strengthen institutional
planning, mission and quality.
The ‘international quality’ that all universities are
supposed to strive for is not a gold standard but one that
can be reached by many routes, and that coercive
policies counteract.
An example of coercive funding in the British
higher education market, reported in CAM
Cambridge Alumni Magazine, Easter 2005
There are two universities in Cambridge.
As a result of the Research Assessment Exercise,
the Higher Education Funding Council for
England will allocate funding for 2005-2006 as
follows:
• Anglia Polytechnic:
£0.68 million
• University of Cambridge:
£92.4 million
All one’s eggs in one basket/nest?
(and thanks to Bourdieu)
• some universities have greater financial capital,
• which they can convert into intellectual capital, research
productivity and productive research environments,
• using and generating linguistic capital in the globally
most marketable language, English.
However,
• linguistic monocultures are not sustainable
• ALL universities need to build up multilingual linguistic
capital
• further analysis requires conceptual and empirical
clarification: Is English a lingua academica or a lingua
tyrannosaura? Are Danish/Estonian/French/German/…
being cuckolded?
Scandinavian moves to strengthen
multilingualism in schools
Gymnasieskolans fördjupningskurser i matematik
och andra moderna språk än engelska bör ges ett
större värde vid antagning till högre utbildning.
Utbildnings- och kulturdepartementet
14 juni 2005, www.regeringen.se
Språk åpner dører! Strategi for styrkning av
fremmedspråk i grunnopplæringen 2005-2009
Utdannings- og forskningsdepartementet, Oslo, juni
2005, www.publikasjoner.dep.no
Rektorkollegiet Internationalisering af de danske
universiteter, vilkår og virkemidler, 2004
• To retain and attract the best students in
competition with foreign universities;
• to persuade government to provide universities
with better conditions for internationalisation;
• to strike a balance between the role of
universities as Danish research and teaching
institutions, using Danish for these purposes, and
the need to strengthen international collaboration
in research and teaching, which requires
competence in foreign languages, particularly
English.
Rektorkollegiet Internationalisering af de danske
universiteter, vilkår og virkemidler, 2004
1. choice of languages of instruction for specific degrees,
2. the languages of teaching materials,
3. quality control when English is used by non-native
speakers, and in-service training,
4. Danish for foreign students,
5. the languages of university publicity and regulations;
proficiency requirements for university employees
dealing with foreign students, teachers and researchers;
6. the language competence of new students, and teaching
and research staff, including access to Danish.
7. strengthening the foreign language and intercultural
competence of all students,
8. languages of publication by researchers.
Development strategy of the Estonian Language
2004-2010: Higher education objectives
• to be able to continue to offer Estonian-medium
higher education
• to promote this by supporting all specialities with
terminological dictionaries and Estonianlanguage educational literature,
• to ‘publish major research results also in the
Estonian language’,
• to avoid the development of the exclusive use of
foreign languages in any field of science,
• to ensure a high level of proficiency in Estonian
among university graduates.
UK economy at risk, warns British Council,
if it doesn’t invest in
international education
• The goal is 8 per cent annual growth
across the sector, and to double the
present number of 35,000 research
graduates contributing to the UK’s
knowledge economy by 2020.
• 500,000+ attend language learning
courses p.a.
<www.britishcouncil.org/mediacentre/apr0
4/vision_2020_press_notice.doc>
Corporatisation:
Education as a market opportunity
• ”The British Council is the United
Kingdom's international organisation for
educational opportunities and cultural
relations.”
• Registered in England as a charity.
• The UK economy benefits by £11 billion
p.a. directly, and a further £12 billion
indirectly, from international education.
The economics of language:
transfers to the UK & Ireland
The current dominance of English results in quantifiable
• privileged market effects
• communication savings effects
• language learning savings effects
• alternative human capital investment effects
• legitimacy and rhetorical effects
Continental countries are transferring to the UK
& Ireland at least € 10bn per year, more
probably about € 16 to 17 bn a year (cf budget
rebate of € 5bn annually)
Grin, François, à paraître/forthcoming 2005: L'enseignement des
langues étrangères comme politique publique. Rapport au Haut
Conseil de l'évaluation de l'école, Paris, n° 19,
Australian higher education expansion
• ‘international’ students have increased by over
600% over a twelve-year period, providing an
income for Australian universities of over 2
billion Australian dollars in 2002.
• Of the 185,000 international students, one third
are ‘offshore … who study largely within their
own countries’ (ibid.).
Harman, in Ninnes, Peter & Meeri Hellstén (eds.) 2005.
Internationalizing higher education. Critical explorations of
pedagogy and policy, Hong Kong: Comparative Education
Research Centre, The University of Hong Kong, and Springer.
Something fishy offshore?
John Simpson, chief editor of the Oxford English
Dictionary, reports that in international activities, his
English is ’more difficult to understand than the English
of my continental colleagues, simply because this is a
functional language for communication between secondlanguage users, and my variety is a functional language
for communication between native speakers.’
Need for research into ’English as a Lingua Franca’,
both in speech (Anna Mauranen, Juliane House,
Barbara Seidlhofer) and in writing (Mauranen, John
Swales).
Need for research into the English of native speakers
involved with ’international students’?
International Students in UK Universities and colleges:
Broadening Horizons, 2004 www.ukcosa.org.uk
• non-English students have difficulty in getting British
students to recognize that their ways of being and
perceiving are equally relevant: UK students ‘always
feel that they are on the right side in terms of opinion,
and in the way of thinking’, cited by Hilary Footitt in
the Newsletter of the Subject Centre for Languages,
Linguistics and Area Studies, University of Southampton,
8, February 2005, <www.llas.ac.uk>.
• The study of foreign languages in higher education in
UK needs strengthening so as to ensure that
‘internationalisation’ is not merely seen as ‘cultural
colonising’.
Multilingual higher education?
• Leuven, Belgium: ‘a language policy, which departs
from the conviction that the introduction of Englishmedium instruction will be unproblematic, will most
probably not lead to the hoped for internationalisation
of the university’ (Sercu, 553);
• Maastricht, the Netherlands: ‘merely offering
programmes through a foreign language without setting
performance targets in the use of content-related
language puts the quality and the reputation of both the
programme and the institution at risk’, (Wilkinson, 10).
Wilkinson, Robert (ed,) 2004. Integrating content and
language: Meeting the challenge of a multilingual higher
education. Maastricht University, the Netherlands
The invading cuckoo: domain loss
• Domains: commerce (corporate language), research publication
(monolingualism), higher education (medium of instruction),
media (Hollywood McDonaldisation), EU affairs, …
• pilot studies of the Nordic languages: Höglin, R. (2002) Engelska
språket som hot och tillgång i Norden. Copenhagen: Nordiska
Ministerrådet.
• Domain loss: a seemingly innocuous term, deceptive, like
‘language spread’, implying a natural, agent-less process.
• (Linguistic) capital accumulation by dispossession, (Harvey, The
new imperialism, 2005, chapter 4). As in the commercial world in
its global pursuit of markets and profit, some combination of
internal motivation and external pressure contributes to this
trend.
• The extent of domain loss/dispossession is unknown.
Factors contributing to the increased use of
English in Europe
• Table 1 of English-only Europe? Challenging language
policy, lists 10 structural, 5 ideological
• many push and pull factors, glocalisation, multiple
agents
• different cosmologies in national linguistic cultures
• diverse university & research world policies
• immobility at the supranational EU level:
language policy ’explosive’ (the French)
language policy ’emotional’ (the Germans)
strengthens market forces and English, as do the
working practices of the European Commission.
Naidoo & Jamieson’s review of higher education
identifies three major trends globally (2005, 44)
• 1. the public university as a public good is under attack,
• 2. the tandem of GATS decreeing that education is a
commodity and corporations converting this claim into
reality,
• 3. eLearning is facilitating these processes;
together these are ‘resulting in the gradual
commodification of higher education’ (ibid.)
• 2000 corporate universities worldwide, including 200
‘for-profit higher education corporations in Poland; 600
in Malaysia; and 625 in the USA’
Ninnes, Peter & Meeri Hellstén (eds.) 2005. Internationalizing higher education.
Critical explorations of pedagogy and policy, Hong Kong: Comparative
Education Research Centre, The University of Hong Kong, and Springer.
Brave new higher education world?
Suggestive trends in Denmark
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Payment for Masters degree courses and/or modules
Payment for Open University courses
Non-EU students to pay fees
’The market for fee-paying degree students is a growing
one. The CBS must capture a share of this in order to
build a profile as a truly international university… a
market-based price on our programs… The next – and
far more difficult – step would be to introduce tuition
fees for EU students and (in order to avoid
discrimination) Danish students.’ (CBS draft
internationalization Strategic Plan, June 2005)
Journalistic presentation
Finland’s postgrads shun mother tongue
Half of the masters courses offered by Finnish
universities during the next academic year will
be taught in English, according to education
ministry planners. Originally developed for
foreign students, these courses are now popular
with local students.
The Guardian Weekly, Learning English
supplement, 19 August 2005
This development does not necessarily mean linguistic
dispossession for the individual or the instutition - cf.
Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, and the explicit language
policy of Finnish universities, e.g. Jyväskylä.
Fluidity in language policy in Europe
• unresolved tension between linguistic nationalism
(monolingualism), EU institutional multilingualism, and
English becoming dominant in the EU
• competing agendas at the European, state (national),
and sub-statal levels
• increasing grassroots and elite bi- and multilingualism,
except in the UK and among the older generation in
demographically large EU countries,
• largely uncritical adoption of englishisation, lingua
economica/americana
• rhetoric of language rights, some national and
supranational implementation, and advocacy of
linguistic diversity.
One Europe? One language?
Spanish Foreign Secretary, Ana Palacio, El País,
16 December 2002
“The motto ‘One Europe’, solely in English, requires a
reflection. Even though Copenhagen did not face the
question of languages, this is one of the pending
subjects that sooner rather than later must be debated
for the very survival and viability of this project of
Europe with a world vocation. Within it, Spanish, one
of the official UN languages, spoken by more than 400
million people in more than 20 countries, must take on
the place it is entitled to.”
Linguistic unification of Europe?
The most serious problem for the European Union that
it has so many languages, this preventing real
integration and development of the Union.
USA ambassador to Denmark, Mr Elton, 1997
English should be the sole official language of the
European Union
Director, British Council, Germany, 26 February 2002, in
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Newsweek interviewer, 31 May 2004:
A unified Europe in which English, as it turns out, is the
universal language?
Romano Prodi:
It will be broken English, but it will be English.
Europe is multilingual
English, in fact, is not and will not be
the “language of Europe”.
Etienne Balibar, We, the people of Europe,
Reflections on transnational citizenship,
Princeton University Press, 2004, 177
Translation is the ‘idiom of Europe’
Steiner, Eco, Balibar, Bauman
Nordbors språkliga rättigheter
• at tillägna sig ett samhällsbärande språk
• förståelse av de skandinaviska språk
• språk med internationell räckvidd, som
engelska, spanska, franska m.fl.
• att bevara och utveckla sitt modersmål
målen – språkforståelse – parallellspråkighet –
mång- och flerspråkighet – Norden som språklig
föregångsregion
Language rights of Nordic residents
• to learn the language of society as a whole
• comprehension of Scandinavian languages
• languages of international utility, like English,
Spanish, French etc.
• maintaining and developing the mother tongue
goals – comprehension – parallel competence –
multi- and plurilingualism – the Nordic region
as a language model
EU Commission
Promoting language learning
and linguistic diversity: An Action Plan 2004-2006,
24 July 2003
• learning one lingua franca alone is not
enough
• English alone is not enough
• In non-anglophone countries recent
trends to provide teaching in English may
have unforeseen consequences on the
vitality of the national language.
EU Commission
Promoting language learning
and linguistic diversity: An Action Plan 2004-2006,
24 July 2003
The range of languages for learning:
• the smaller languages as well as the larger ones
• regional, minority and migrant languages as
well as those with ’national’ status, and
• the languages of our major trading partners
throughout the world.
Nederlans Taalunie website
• essential to guarantee that Dutch language can
remain a ‘full-scale’ language (…) The first and
foremost challenge … is to see that Dutch can
remain a language of instruction in higher
education
• National language policy cannot do all the work
– the framework is European - we need to
convince governments and the European
institutions of the necessity of a real European
language policy.
Obstacles to supranational, Europe-wide
language policy (1)
• poor infrastructure nationally (except possibly in
Finland and Catalonia, perhaps in Sweden after
legislation) and supranationally
• weak infrastructure in research
• international coordination among national
language bodies is in its infancy
• language policy is politically untouchable at intergovernmental level; it remained untouched by the
Convention on the Future of Europe and in the
draft Constitutional Treaty
Obstacles to supranational, Europe-wide
language policy (2)
• EU translation and interpretation services are impressive
in many respects, but subject to an economic rationale,
see themselves as a service function rather than policymaking, and are detached from international research
• The language of EU written texts is increasingly under
attack (Koskinen, Tosi, Lundkvist & Gabrielsen), even if
the translation industry and translation technology are
of increasing importance (see Michael Cronin
Translation and globalization, Routledge 2003)
• The rhetoric of EU multilingualism and linguistic equality
is seen as a charade by some political scientists (de
Swaan) and sociolinguists (Chaudenson)
Towards longer term
language policy formation?
• European Agency for Linguistic Diversity and
Language Learning (Yellow Window Management
Consultants)
• Member states report back to the EU on
implementation of the Action Plan
• Jan Figel is the first Commissioner with a direct
responsibility fo language policy, but with the
exception of some language services, the EU does
not live up to ideals of multilingualism, linguistic
equality or equity
• Universities and governments must therefore act
Linguistic neoimperialism
• Linguistic neoimperialism: the maintenance of
inequalities between speakers of English and other
languages, within a framework of exploitative
dominance, through penetration, fragmentation,
marginalisation, and supremacist ideologies in
discourse;
• explores these phenomena in the information society
with corporate globalisation and multiple networks,
analysing (discourse, agency,…) how power is
inequitably created through linguistic hierarchies,
debunking myths of ’choice’, of English as ’neutral’;
• in education and English teaching, anglocentricity
(form, hegemonic symbols) and the disconnection
from power hierarchies (functions) continues.
Cuckoos must be kept in check by the vitality of the
species on which they are parasitical
• Universities must remain a public good and resist
commodification and coercive policies
• Many languages must continue to serve as lingua
economica
• English as a lingua academica must be in balance
with strong local language ecologies, which
presupposes strong national language policies
• The education system must evolve strategies for
students and staff to become effectively trilingual
(at least) in a diverse range of languages
Living with cuckoos
There are 127 species of cuckoo worldwide, of
which 42 in Europe. This matches pretty well
with Englishes worldwide, and in Europe –
except that new species of English are evolving
rapidly. We need to learn to live with them, and
promote biological and linguistic diversity.
All language communities have the right to
preserve their linguistic and cultural heritage,
Dalai Lama
Words are no deeds, William Shakespeare
Multilingual universities: living with
cuckoos without being cuckolded
I am adapting the text of my lecture so
that it can appear, in a slightly modified
form, as an article in the
European Journal of English Studies.