The discursive representation of the International Baccalaureate in the global press: a computer-assisted discourse analysis

ABSTRACT

As part of the global education industry, the International Baccalaureate (IB) plays an important role in education systems around the world. Although laudatory descriptions of the IB abound, knowledge about it remains vague and superficial, relying predominantly on information produced by the IB organization or its affiliates. To gain fresh insight into the IB phenomenon, this study combines corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis to examine representation of the IB around the world in non-IB generated data. Based on the principle that choice in language is not random, meaning is intimately connected with the way words are used, a 23 million word corpus of global press articles and Sketch Engine, patterns of typicality are analyzed to uncover values associated with the IB that are taken for granted. Findings show hegemonic ways of talking about the IB in highly positive terms tied to corresponding discourses of deficiency surrounding other education systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Corpus linguistics
• critical discourse analysis
• CADS
• International Baccalaureate
• global education
• media

Introduction

For over 50 years, the International Baccalaureate (IB) has played an important role in education systems around the world despite facing acute financial difficulties and potential bankruptcy in its early years. Now encompassing a diverse clientele totaling 5,525 schools in 159 countries, it is a key player in the ‘global education industry’ (Verger, Lubienski, & Steiner-Khamsi, 2016), where private organizations provide a range of services from teacher training and curriculum development to international large-scale assessments such as Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS). The IB’s success in this domain seems to depend on a corresponding narrative that frames local education systems as being deficient in some way, with the IB offering a natural solution regardless of context (e.g. Fitzgerald, 2018; Hahn, 2003; Maire & Windle, 2022). The IB also seems to have an appeal in diverse countries regardless of social or political contexts: from Tanzania to Canada, Singapore to Australia, the consensus seems to be that the IB can benefit local education systems. This could be due to the IB’s claims to independent status, i.e. as it claims allegiance to no single country, the IB is free from national curricular constraints and thus can work for the benefit of all by delivering an ostensibly universal twenty-first century set of skills versatile enough to be applied in any context, whether at home, abroad, in school or in the workplace (IBO, 2015), as well as standardized measurements to gauge outcomes and enable comparisons across countries (IBO, 2022).

Previous research on other transnational education enterprises such as PISA and TIMMS that measure decontextualized skills show that these global rankings tend to appeal to governments, policy makers and the general public across countries because they provide seemingly objective information about the quality of education in each particular country (e.g. Steiner-Khamsi & Waldow, 2018). Studies also found that results tended to be interpreted according to different agendas, thereby imbuing them with a power to influence local decision-making or ‘soft law’ (Biesta, 2015). In addition, press reporting of PISA results is often big news with wide coverage celebrating or criticizing national performance relative to the rest of the world, which researchers have focused on to emphasize the importance of media discourse in terms of how these global rankings are shaped for local consumption (Pizmony-Levy et al., 2017). The present study contributes to this research by examining the key role that language plays in shaping attitudes in an effort to explain the IB’s appeal across diverse contexts.

Although the IB plays an important role in education systems around the world, knowledge about it remains vague, superficial, and local (Doherty & Shield, 2012; Fitzgerald, 2017b), with little research on how it is perceived globally despite its 52-year history. The aim of the present study is to address this gap by examining how language and communication about the IB reflect and shape public opinion and the impact this has on local or national education systems. The study is part of a larger research project that initially focused on perceptions of the IB in Canada and now examines the IB in the rest of the world as well. Using a 23-million word specialized corpus of global newspapers as an unsolicited window into public opinion (Mautner, 2008), analysis of linguistic patterns was conducted using the online corpus tool Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014) as a way to uncover values and assumptions typically associated with the IB, and which have come to be taken for granted. Importantly, in an effort to be maximally representative, the corpus included not just powerful elite sources, but letters and opinion pieces from different members of the public. The unsolicited nature of the data provides an important contrast to the interviews and surveys that tend to dominate IB research. In addition, the data-driven nature of the analysis allowed for a level of objectivity, as the researcher was directed by the data and had to account for both dominant as well as minority patterns. This is the first project to use ‘big data’ in an analysis of the IB and the global education industry’s impact on national education systems. A key contribution of this study is to evaluate claims about the IB using a dataset of texts that are not produced by the IB organization, thereby enabling more comprehensive understanding of IB discourse. A key finding in this study is that, despite the dataset including numerous countries and qualifications, there is a hegemonic way of talking about the IB.

Situating the IB

Despite its significance, the IB is less well-known outside the domain of the ‘IB World’, as the ‘seismic’ impact of COVID-19 on education systems worldwide revealed (Fitzgerald, 2022). When schools and governments around the world cancelled examinations and moved education online, questions arose about what the IB is and who is responsible for it. This lack of clarity stemmed partly from the complex and transnational structure of the IB organization, with its headquarters in Switzerland, assessment centre in the United Kingdom, and regional centres in the Netherlands, Singapore, and the United States, which led to questions about jurisdiction and governance regarding the IB in different countries. That is, while it was clear that governments in different countries were responsible for their local or national education, less clear was regulation around a private transnational entity such as the IB.

The scope of the IB as a global provider of education can be seen in the number of countries in which it operates. Although the IB is promoted as a singular standardized brand that provides the same services everywhere, each national situation is different with respect to issues of curricular offerings, teacher availability, and cultural and geographic issues, further determined by cost and country needs (Steiner-Khamsi & Dugonjić-Rodwin, 2018). That is, despite its apparent global reach, in practice the IB gets localized. Nevertheless, the IB succeeds in uniting political and social groups across the ideological spectrum (Conner, 2008; Gilliam, 1997), pointing to a polysemous nature that allows it to mean different things in different contexts, according to stakeholder need.

Also important to note is that for the first 40 years of the IB’s history, much of the research available was published by the IB organization itself (Cambridge, 2008), describing the IB in highly positive terms relative to other local or national curricular offerings (Doherty, 2009). Such comparative statements tend to foster a perception of IB superiority, the impact of which on local national education systems is little understood. The aim of this study is to examine how language and communication about the IB reflect and shape public opinion, and in turn, impact education systems around the world.

Disambiguating IB language

To mark its 40th year, in 2008 the IB organization changed its name from ‘IBO’ to simply ‘IB’, launching a new visual identity (Bunnell, 2011). Although at present the IB comprises four different programs, for the first 30 years there was only the diploma program, referred to as ‘IBDP’ or simply ‘IB’. The addition of other IB programs, also often referred to by the same ‘IB’ acronym, has led to some confusion and conflation (Fitzgerald, 2018). This can be seen in how ‘IB’ is used to refer to (a) the organization itself; (bi) the whole system of education from kindergarten to diploma; or (c) individual programs without specification, thereby conflating different curricular requirements and standards.

The use of ‘IB’ to refer to all aspects of the brand has meant that, over time, ‘IB’ has become a fixed phrase, functioning as a label that not only serves to consolidate disparate elements into a unified standardized whole – the same product, regardless of context – but also appears to connote social attitudes more than curricular aspects (Fitzgerald, 2017a).

The aim of the present study is to tease apart ‘IB’ by examining large amounts of real-life language use in order to discover underlying values and attitudes that have come to be taken for granted. In contrast to the generally small-scale and fragmented studies that dominate IB research, this article presents a large-scale data-driven analysis of global representations of the IB. What makes this study unique is its global data-driven view of IB representation as generated by the different countries in which the IB operates, thereby contributing new empirical evidence to this research domain.

This study looks at how the IB is represented in a 23 million word specialized corpus of global press articles by examining the linguistic behaviour of the node words baccalaureate and international, to uncover underlying values and assumptions or ‘non-obvious meanings’ (Partington, Duguid, & Taylor, 2013) that become visible through large amounts of data. The choice of newspapers was directly related to the important role the media play in informing and influencing public perception about educational and other social issues (Baroutsis, Riddle, & Thomson, 2019; Brookes & Baker, 2021). Furthermore, as powerful and influential social institutions, newspapers can provide an important unsolicited window into public opinion (Mautner, 2008) and thus a way to gain fresh insight into how the IB is constructed in different social domains. In addition, the corpus data include multiple voices and perspectives on the IB that more accurately reflect the diversity of participants involved in the complex and dynamic formulation of public policy (Ball, 2008; Potts & Semino, 2017).

This study is guided by the following overarching research question: how is the IB represented around the world? Specifically, the study examines the types of linguistic patterns that surround the node words baccalaureate and, to a lesser extent, international, taken individually, and the contexts in which they appear in a corpus of global newspapers. The focus on baccalaureate was based on preliminary examination of the data, which showed that the unmarked usage of the word almost always referred to the IB, as can be seen in the following examples:

Example 1: Diocesan is the ninth New Zealand school to offer the baccalaureate (IB) programme.

Example 2: The baccalaureate was developed in the 1960s for children of diplomats studying in schools around the world to give them a consistent standard to study for.

Although in both examples the word ‘international’ is absent, it is clear that the referent is the IB. These examples also provide a useful first glimpse into an alternative use of terminology (i.e. simple reference to ‘baccalaureate’ with ‘international’ implicit) and consequently the need to separate the two lexical items that have become fused together into ‘IB’.

Corpus-assisted discourse analysis (CADS)

Studies combining corpus linguistics and (critical) discourse analysis have gained in popularity over the past decade, harnessing the synergy of quantitative and qualitative approaches to examine a wide range of social issues and policy topics such as obesity and stigma (e.g. Brookes & Baker, 2021), drought and rainfall (e.g. Dayrell et al., 2022), transgender identity (Zottola, 2018), end of life care (Potts & Semino, 2017), hate speech and social media (Hardaker & McGlashan, 2016), and political issues (e.g. Parnell, 2021).

The power of this approach is that it enables large-scale quantitative and in-depth qualitative analysis of everyday language in use, allowing researchers to move from linguistic patterns found in the data (bottom up) to interpretation and explanation based on the wider social context (top down). Using this combined approach, it becomes possible to discover patterns of language use that provide insight into the shared values and assumptions of a given society. As Stubbs (2001) argues, ‘repeated patterns show that evaluative meanings are not merely personal and idiosyncratic, but widely shared in a discourse community’ (p. 215). The contrasting notions of language as a set of rules and language as free choice make analyses based on frequency of linguistic occurrence an important way to get at underlying assumptions, by highlighting the (conscious or unconscious) linguistic choices made by a speaker. One of the key aims of critical discourse studies (CDS) is to uncover power and ideology hidden in everyday language. As Wodak and Meyer (2016) explain,

In everyday discussions, certain ideas emerge more commonly than others. Frequently, people with diverse backgrounds and interests may find themselves thinking alike in surprising ways. Dominant ideologies appear as ‘neutral’, linked to assumptions that remain largely unchallenged. (pp. 8–9)

By examining the frequency of words and identifying repeated patterns, it becomes possible to see how values and assumptions are reified, and how a society’s particular values and attitudes are discursively constructed.

Specialized computer software tools direct the researcher to recurring patterns of language that would not otherwise be noticed in a small sample of texts. This study follows Baker and McEnery’s (2015) integrated model of corpus-based discourse analysis, which comprises description (identifying linguistic patterns through frequently occurring words and phrases), interpretation (how patterns contribute to discourses), explanation (in-depth analysis situated in the wider social context), and evaluation (social impact).

Analytical framework: collocation and concordance

Central to this study is the concept of collocation, which refers to words that tend to occur near or next to each other more frequently than chance would permit and that form part of the meaning of a word, i.e. meaning does not solely reside in an individual word but is influenced or affected by the words that tend to occur with it. Observing the behaviour of words in relation to their collocates also allows for unexpected or surprising findings about seemingly innocuous words. For example, Mautner (2007) found that the word ‘elderly’ tended to co-occur with groups of words related to the semantic domain of disability, frailty and care, thereby giving the word a ‘negative semantic load’ (p. 59), as well as revealing attitudes and assumptions that have little to do with chronological age. Different statistical measures help to identify collocations with strong bonds that can be useful in understanding a word’s semantic load. Such strong bonds suggest that co-occurring words are linked in people’s minds, acting as triggers for unconscious associations, thereby providing insight into the kind of ideological work these co-occurring words are doing. As noted by Stubbs (1996), ‘if particular lexical and grammatical choices are regularly made, and if people and things are repeatedly talked about in certain ways, then it is plausible that this will affect how they are thought about’ (p. 92). Collocations can become ‘fixed phrases that represent a packaging of information’ (Hunston, 2002, p. 119) and as they get repeated, contribute to the ‘incremental effect of discourse’ (Baker, 2006) that is more difficult to challenge or perhaps even notice.

Also important for this study is the concordance, often referred to as ‘key word in context’ (KWIC), which forms the more qualitative part of the analysis, linking micro-level linguistic choice to macro-level social practice. A concordance is a list of all the occurrences in a corpus of a search term or ‘node’, presented in context with a few words to the left and right. Concordance lines vertically arrange all instances of the search term in their context and can be sorted alphabetically to the left or right of the search term, making it possible to identify patterns (see, for example, the concordance in Table 3 below). The analysis can iterate between quantitative (e.g. frequency information) and qualitative (e.g. individual concordance lines or entire article/text), with the KWIC providing the link between quantification and interpretation.

Data and method

Articles for the IB global media corpus were downloaded from the online news database LexisNexis using the search term ‘international baccalaureate’.¹ All English language newspaper articles were included to allow for the broadest possibility of voices and perspectives (e.g. parents, students, schools, governments), and thus provide maximum representation of public attitudes and perceptions of the topic available in this database (McEnery & Hardie, 2012) and avoid any potential selection bias. The corpus thus contains linguistic data produced by the media in different countries rather than generated by the IB organization. For the analysis, articles were not sorted by sub-register (e.g. letters to the editor, obituaries) but grouped together, since the aim of the study was to examine how the IB is talked about in the main register of newspaper writing rather than in specific sub-registers. Once data were cleaned and duplicates removed, the final IB global media corpus contained 29,491 articles from 916 newspapers in 55 countries, dating from 1980 to 2019, with a total of 23,178,137 words.

The corpus was uploaded to Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014), an online software tool that allows a corpus to be uploaded, grammatically annotated and analyzed for salient patterns using the ‘word sketch’ feature. A word sketch is a ‘one-page summary of a word’s grammatical and collocational behaviour’ (Kilgarriff, Rychly, Smrz, & Tugwell, 2004) and provides an overview of how a word is typically used, with collocates organized according to their grammatical relations with the node word (e.g. modifiers, object or subject of a verb). Collocates are identified based on typicality or strength of relationship using the logDice statistical measure, which takes into account the frequency of the node word, the frequency of the collocate, and the frequency of the collocation (i.e. the combination of the node + collocate). The higher the score, the more exclusive the relationship between the node word and the collocate, i.e. the two words tend to occur together more often than separately, indicating a strong bond. The word sketch displays the strongest collocates organized into grammatical categories sorted by typicality score from highest to lowest, thereby immediately providing dominant patterns of a word.

The analysis was conducted in three stages. First, a word sketch for the node word baccalaureate was generated which provided a semantic profile of the node word organized in 12 different grammatical relations. For the purposes of this paper, I focus on three collocational patterns (cf. Baker, Gabrielatos, & McEnery, 2013; Balfour, 2019): (a) words that modified baccalaureate; (b) words that were modified by baccalaureate; and (c) a recurring three-word cluster (lexical bundle) predicating attributes of baccalaureate. Together, these frames reveal patterns of language that can shed light on social values and attitudes that may not be noticed in casual encounters with the topic (Baker et al., 2013). For the second stage of the analysis, each collocate was examined in detail by means of concordance lines, sorted left and right of the node to discover patterns of use. In the third stage of the analysis, the top 25 collocates from (a) and (b) were manually grouped according to semantic categories that emerged based on their meaning in context. Group (c) displayed a lexical bundle with eight collocates that were all analyzed using concordance lines. Although the process of grouping is subjective, it helps to draw out semantic preferences and related discourse prosodies (Stubbs, 2001) through the range of semantic fields with which a word or phrase is associated. The final stage of the analysis involved examining the strongest collocates of the node word international to get a picture of the IB as a whole.

Findings and analysis

Pattern 1: top 25 modifiers of baccalaureate

The word sketch showed the node baccalaureate occurring most typically with a modifier. The top 25 modifiers were grouped into three broad semantic fields as shown in Table 1: types (12), attributes (10), other (3). The largest group consisted of lexical items indicating different types of baccalaureates (e.g. English Baccalaureate, Welsh Baccalaureate). There is a clear pattern of nationality found here, with baccalaureate modified by lexical items related to countries and regions, suggesting that International Baccalaureate is frequently mentioned in connection with other national education systems or curricula. In-depth analysis of concordance lines revealed three main contexts in which the IB appears in connection with other national curricula, as can be seen in the following examples: as a model for education reform (dissatisfaction with national curriculum or ‘falling standards’ discourse) (Example 3); as one of many possibilities or an alternative (discourse of choice) (Example 4); and in comparative or evaluative statements (discourse of superiority) (Example 5).

Example 3: The time has come to ditch the A-level exams and replace it with a British version of the International Baccalaureate … When details are finalised, [head teachers] will press the government to replace A-levels with the ‘British Bacc’.

Example 4: A senior secondary qualification called the Victorian Baccalaureate, which would offer a broader education than VCE [Victorian Certificate of Education], could also be introduced … The International Baccalaureate diploma, an alternative to the VCE recognised by universities worldwide, is offered at 15 Victorian private schools … 

Example 5: ‘cafeteria style’ curriculum: school programs that lack focus, rigor, and academic content; a multiplicity of miscellaneous courses offered to high school students in the United States. International Baccalaureate, ‘the IB’: educational equivalent of a power breakfast, lunch, and dinner … 

In addition, references to the plural baccalaureates were also found in these contexts, typically in terms of definitions or explanations about this type of educational system, as can be seen in the following example:

Table 1. modifiers of baccalaureate

Semantic field	Collocates
Types	International, English, Welsh, French, British, Scottish, AQA [Assessment and Qualifications Alliance], Australian, European, Victorian, Cambridge, European-style
Attributes	prestigious, rigorous, broad, challenging, demanding, popular, world-renowned, two-year, Swiss-based, Geneva-based
Other	authorized, pre-International, Primary

Example 6: Baccalaureates are broad-based programmes that combine academic subjects with components designed to develop skills. The International Baccalaureate is a qualification that is available throughout the world.

The second largest group of modifiers shown in Table 1 consisted of adjectival attributes typically associated with the node word baccalaureate. With very few exceptions (discussed below), these were attributes describing the IB rather than any of the other national or regional baccalaureates. The dominance of this type of pattern is illustrated in the following example for the strongest collocate in this group of attributes, prestigious (see Table 2).

Notable in this pattern is that all instances of prestigious only occurred with International Baccalaureate not with any of the other baccalaureates. Similarly, all but one instance of rigorous occurred with International Baccalaureate. These types of positive attributes are a recurring feature of IB discourse and form a dominant pattern in descriptions of the IB. As noted by Doherty (2009), the repeated reference to the IB in laudatory terms ‘casts a shadow on others and intertextually builds an implicit criticism of local curricula’ (p. 85). In addition to these positive evaluative attributes, there are frequent references to Switzerland, occurring in clusters such as the Swiss-based or Geneva-based International Baccalaureate. Although at first glance this may appear to be geographical information, in-depth analysis revealed values linked to a moral discourse of internationalism (Doherty, 2009; Fitzgerald, 2017a). Furthermore, the emphasis on Switzerland masks the fact that half of the world’s total number of IB schools are located in the US and Canada.

Table 2. Concordance for modifier prestigious

college as a base for the prestigious International	baccalaureate	an internationally recognised pre-tertiary qualification
An ‘A’ student in the prestigious International	baccalaureate	academic program at Hillsborough High School
Academically demanding and prestigious International	baccalaureate	(IB) Program, which gives juniors and senior

Interestingly, there were two collocates in this modifier frame that were not connected to the IB but referred exclusively to the English and Welsh baccalaureates: own and true, both occurring in debates about education reform, as shown in Table 3.

Table 3. Concordance for collocates of other baccalaureates

Wales is going to pioneer its own	baccalaureate	Will England follow, asks Peter Kensington
to replace GCSEs with his own English	baccalaureate	(EBacc) in the core subjects from 2015, with the
have at the moment is not really a true	baccalaureate	It is not comparable with the international baccalaureate
In their place, what we need is a true	baccalaureate	at 18. Just as the International Baccalaureate

These two collocates index different and possibly opposing aspects of the debate, the first reflecting calls to create a domestic baccalaureate rather than adopt an external one such as the IB, and the second criticizing the national version for not providing the kind of educational content offered by the IB. As mentioned above, such comparative statements form a recurring pattern in debates about education reform. In both cases, however, the word baccalaureate appears to carry meaning, denoting assumptions about the kind of education this type of system might or should include.

The final group of modifiers shown in Table 1 consisted of IB terminology specifically relating to the process of certifying schools to offer the different levels of IB curricula (e.g. authorized International Baccalaureate Primary Years Program). Only schools that have received approval from the IB organization can offer any of its programs, a process that takes several years. Once a school is approved, it becomes part of the ‘IB World Community’ governed by IB organizational standards. This type of ‘transnational accreditation’ (Steiner-Khamsi & Dugonjić-Rodwin, 2018) forms an important part of the global education industry’s appeal for governments and other stakeholders (see accreditation below).

In sum, the word sketch shows how the node word baccalaureate is typically modified, revealing that there are many other types of baccalaureates apart from the IB, that only the IB attracts positive adjectival attributes, and institutional accreditation is a key feature of IB discourse.

Pattern 2: top 25 nouns modified by baccalaureate

The second strongest pattern in the word sketch showed baccalaureate in its adjectival form modifying other nouns. Once again, the top 25 collocates were grouped into broad semantic fields as shown in Table 4: curriculum (12), institution (5), award (3), and people (5).

The strongest group of noun collocates modified by baccalaureate related to curriculum, with the most frequent being program. An examination of concordance lines showed that all instances of program (10,187) referred to the IB (i.e. International Baccalaureate program) as did all but one instance of programme (1,558). The almost exclusive association between program/me and International Baccalaureate is notable bearing in mind the non-specific node word, and may contribute to the notion of a singular or standardized curriculum, which obscures the disparate elements that make up the IB.

The second most frequent noun collocate in the Curriculum group, diploma (1,831) showed 11 occurrences of Welsh Baccalaureate diploma and one of English-style baccalaureate diploma. The remainder (1,819) all referred to International Baccalaureate diploma. The popularity of the diploma over other IB programs remains high and is reflected in the strength of this collocation. Aside from the dominant descriptions of the IB as a program or diploma, there were also other curricular associations such as the occurrence of course and class. At first glance, these appeared to describe individual offerings or uptake, which might indicate some variation in how the IB is described. However, in-depth analysis of concordance lines showed that these words tended to be used synonymously with program, as can be seen in the following examples:

Example 7: Tasmanian Government to set up a committee to look into establishing an international baccalaureate course in Tasmanian schools … The two-year international school certificate course, recognised by tertiary institutions around the world … 

Example 8: [Superintendent] suggested cuts also would slash the program’s money for substitutes and equipment and would eliminate the international baccalaureate class, a high-intensity, advanced program … 

Despite different word usage, the descriptions in the examples above relate to the curricular requirements of the IB diploma program which, as we have already seen, form the dominant way the IB is described. Thus, linguistic patterns reveal how the strongest lexical items associated with the IB in its adjectival form work together to construct the IB as a singular standardized curriculum.

Another notable pattern found in the curricular semantic field was the occurrence of five collocates in the top 25 related to examinations (exam, test, result, examination, score), which highlight their importance within IB discourse and are a reminder that its original name was the International Schools Examination Syndicate. According to Peterson (1972), the original conception of the IB was that it would be an international university entrance examination. In addition, examinations provide the bulk of revenue for the IB organization and thus play a crucial role (IBO, 2021a). However, this pragmatic aspect tends to get backgrounded in dominant descriptions of the IB that emphasize its ‘irenic agenda’ (Bunnell, 2010).

The second group of noun collocates modified by baccalaureate shown in Table 4 related to the semantic field of Institution, clustered around IB organization/organisation, IB school and IB accreditation. Together, they highlight the central role of the IB as an authority and proprietor of IB programs. As mentioned earlier, the accreditation process takes several years and is mandatory for schools seeking to offer IB programs. The lengthy and complex process involved in obtaining approval from the IB helps to confer an image of quality assurance in a way that is set against the ‘falling standards’ notion of mainstream education discourse, as can be seen in the following examples:

Example 9: To win International Baccalaureate accreditation, a school must send teachers to intensive training workshops with other educators from around the world and show that its campus has top-notch facilities such as its library and laboratories.

Example 10: Applying for IB accreditation means demonstrating to the IB organization that a school has the staff to support the academic component and the community has the energy to promote student involvement.

Such references to aspects of quality suggest that the IB organization holds schools to a higher standard than other regulatory bodies. As Steiner-Khamsi and Dugonjić-Rodwin (2018) argue, this type of ‘transnational accreditation’ has grown in popularity and contributes to the ‘scandalization of public education’ (p. 602).

Table 4. nouns modified by baccalaureate

Semantic field	Collocates
Curriculum	program, diploma, programme, course, exam, curriculum, class, test, result, examination, system, score
Institution	organisation, organization, school, magnet, accreditation
Award	certificate, degree, credit
People	student, candidate, coordinator, graduate, teacher

In the third semantic category, relating to Awards, collocates indicated different types of qualifications linked to the IB, such as degree, as shown in Table 5.

Table 5. Concordance for collocate degree

earn a prestigious International Baccalaureate	degree	which usually is equal to one year of college
graduate with an International Baccalaureate	degree	the equivalent of a year’s worth of college
The International Baccalaureate	degree	is awarded to students who complete the program
two years for their International Baccalaureate	degree	which incorporates community service work

The appearance of a qualification usually associated with university or college in the vicinity of IB points to a misuse of terminology in which IB coursework is conflated with post-secondary degrees (which can also be two years in length), thus suggesting an equivalence between the IB and university/college level studies. As noted by Baker (2006), frequent pairings of words in naturally occurring language point to the existence of underlying hegemonic discourses. In this case, placing IB school qualifications on the same level as university or college contributes to the idea of a seamless transition from school to university and reinforces the notion of IB students’ likelihood of success in post-secondary studies.

The final semantic group showed noun collocates relating to people being modified by baccalaureate, e.g. IB student, IB coordinator, IB teacher. This pattern reveals how different social actors are labelled with the IB name. Previous analysis of this nomination strategy (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001), i.e. how groups are named, revealed how an in-group/out-group discursive strategy constructed through group membership worked to privilege some and disadvantage others (Fitzgerald, 2018).

In sum, quantitative and qualitative analysis of baccalaureate in its adjectival form makes visible how the IB is discursively constructed in different contexts as a curriculum, an institution, an award, as well as group membership, and thus how it varies according to purpose, providing some insight into its protean nature.

Pattern 3: baccalaureate is a … 

The third pattern of note was a three-word cluster showing eight typical instances of the recurring phrase baccalaureate is a … , shown in Table 6.

Table 6. baccalaureate is a … 

program, foundation, qualification, alternative, model, programme, course, curriculum

While individual collocates in this group resemble those found in Pattern 2 above, detailed examination of concordance lines revealed a different discursive construction. Descriptions of the IB routinely contain explanations about what the IB is, a discursive strategy that allows for different aspects of the description to be foregrounded or backgrounded according to purpose. Concordance lines for the strongest collocate program show how descriptions of the IB tend to vary in different contexts (see Table 7).

Table 7. Concordance for baccalaureate is a program

completing the state certificate. The International	baccalaureate	is a purpose-built program to prepare kids for un
can take for college credit. The International	baccalaureate	is a rigorous international diploma program
and writing as honors courses. International	baccalaureate	is a two-year international honors program similar
and San Jose High Academy. International	baccalaureate	is a nonprofit program that runs in 138 countries

These varying descriptions of the IB (e.g. is a purpose-built program; is a rigorous program, is a two-year program) shed some light on how or why the IB appeals in so many different political and social contexts. Typical descriptions of the IB tend to follow a pattern where a definition or explanation is provided about what it is, revealing how dominant IB discourse patterns may be constructed through definitions and rhetorical questions.

Pattern 4: international

For the final stage of the analysis, a word sketch for the node word international was generated to get a sense of the whole term IB. This showed that the strongest noun collocate was baccalaureate, as expected. Although at first glance the collocates in this frame appeared to be the same as those found in the baccalaureate + noun frame (see Table 4), another group of strong collocates was also found: relation, perspective, standard. These collocates emphasized ‘international’ elements of IB curriculum and assessment, for example in the recurring phrase international standards as a benchmark for students, schools, and even teachers, as shown in the following examples:

Example 11: Our teachers have undergone extensive IB training to ensure international quality standards are maintained.

Example 12: International Baccalaureate (IB): A program based on international standards and considered more difficult than the regular material teachers teach.

The emphasis on the IB’s international aspect is again reinforced by the second strongest collocational pattern with the coordinating conjunction and in pairings such as national and international, local and international (Table 8).

Table 8. Concordance for international and/or

performance on examinations written by national and	international	organizations over which they have no control
School is in the process of a national and	international	search for high school teachers with international
Two thousand students in 29	international	and local schools took the IB exam, according to
Used across 131 countries by local and	international	schools, the IB program offers a global curriculum

This type of recurring juxtaposition serves a differentiating function, discursively placing the IB outside the boundaries of its immediate local context by emphasizing its global aspect. Furthermore, the noun form internationalism also repeatedly occurred with and, but in this case, paired with tolerance, respect for other cultures, interculturalism, global citizenship, and social justice. The appearance of this group of words in the context of the IB help make visible how the ideology of internationalism is strongly associated with the IB, an aspect also noted by other researchers (e.g. Doherty, 2009).

Discussion

This study examined the language used to talk about the IB in everyday public discourse as evidenced in a corpus of 29,491 newspaper articles from around the world. As a first large-scale view, it presents important empirical evidence and new insights into how the IB is talked about and thought about around the world. The aim was to uncover the semantic and ideological load associated with the name as a way to understand how or why it appeals to the diverse clientele evidenced by the range of countries in which the IB operates. The power of the corpus approach helped make visible occurrences of IB-related discourse that would not otherwise have been noticed, as linguistic patterns were brought to light through frequency of occurrence in the large dataset. In other words, analysis at scale made the systematic and sustained impact on local national education visible. Based on the idea that the words ‘international’ and ‘baccalaureate’ have become fused together and reified in ‘IB’, this study examined the linguistic behaviour of the node words baccalaureate and, to a lesser extent, international. Previous studies have tended to focus on the ‘international’ part of the name (e.g. Cambridge & Thompson, 2004; Tarc, 2009), but ‘baccalaureate’ is a similarly fluid term that has not been looked at in the IB context.

The first dominant pattern of note showed that baccalaureate was associated with different countries (e.g. Australia, France, UK). This is interesting because, as mentioned earlier, the corpus of newspaper articles were selected based on the single search term and not through any other country-specific parameters. Therefore, what becomes immediately evident from the global perspective is that the International Baccalaureate is typically mentioned in the context of other national education systems. The presence of such an array of nationally-linked baccalaureates suggests that the term baccalaureate has meaning or carries some weight in different national contexts, which may influence how the IB is understood. For example, in France it refers to a mandatory national exam whereas in the US it can mean a college degree or a sermon. In addition, the occurrence of the plural form baccalaureates as a generalizing term linked to particular characteristics suggests that there are assumptions associated with the term, such as ‘baccalaureates are broad-based programmes’. Thus, we can see baccalaureate as a meaning-bearing term that gets modified according to context such as nationality. However, also notable was that the unmarked baccalaureate referred to the IB, indicating that in some contexts, the word is solely associated with the IB and carries all the positive attributes as well. Thus the polysemy of the term might occasion some of the conflation around the IB, as was found in the occurrence of the collocate degree (Table 5).

Also important in this pattern is that repeated reference to International Baccalaureate in the context of other national baccalaureates works to further emphasize the IB’s elevation above national boundaries, amplifying its global outlook and reach, while the national curricula appear more parochial in comparison. As the IB is repeatedly juxtaposed with national baccalaureates, what gets emphasized is its international aspect, such that International Baccalaureate appears to transcend national identifiers. This is further emphasized in the recurring phrases national and international, local and international, which serve a differentiating function, discursively placing the IB outside the boundaries of its immediate local context. Thus the IB appears as though free of local governmental constraints, enacting the ‘international passport to education’ (Blackburn, 1991) that was central to its creation. However, what gets masked or obscured in these recurring descriptions of international mobility and freedom is that IB programs are operationalized in local contexts and subject to local vicissitudes, whether national education requirements (Resnik, 2019) or financial cost (Steiner-Khamsi & Dugonjić-Rodwin, 2018). Patterns around international show it being used in a variety of different ways, most notably to differentiate the IB from national systems of education, even though in the vast majority of cases it is embedded within these same national systems. Importantly, a moral discourse of internationalism also became visible, encoded in lexical items such as internationally-minded, international mindedness, global citizens, common humanity, peaceful world. The appearance of these words in the context of the IB helps show how the ideology of internationalism is strongly associated with the IB.

As there are many different national baccalaureates that occur alongside the IB in this corpus, the IB is typically found in the context of debates about education systems, where the national curriculum is compared to the IB through the three main themes mentioned earlier. For example, the dominant pattern of positive attributes shows that in such comparisons, only the IB is talked about in highly positive terms. According to Steiner-Khamsi and Dugonjić-Rodwin (2018), the growth of government partnerships with private education providers such as the IB is closely tied to the ‘scandalization of public education’, where national curricula are attacked for a range of deficiencies such as curricular rigour, teacher quality, and grade inflation. In such contexts, the IB is presented as a model or solution for whatever the problem might be. Thus in the US, where ‘cafeteria-style’ curricular choice is the problem, the IB’s strict requirements and structure are emphasized. In the UK, on the other hand, where A-levels are criticized for being too narrow and specialized, the IB’s breadth and choice are emphasized. Thus, through corpus analysis of large amounts of non-IB generated data, we see how global organization and local government/education system co-construct the IB according to their need, with the IB’s polysemy creating a space for a ‘projection screen’ (Waldow, 2019) allowing stakeholders to see aspects of the IB that suit their particular context.

The second most frequent pattern showed baccalaureate in its adjectival form, with the IB functioning as a label modifying a range of lexical items, and thus constructing the unified and homogeneous ‘IB World’. These groups of noun collocates were also found in previous studies, revealing not only how different aspects of the ‘IB World’ are constructed (e.g. IB program, IB school, IB student), but also how these dominant ways of talking about the IB repeat across countries. The similarity of IB language has been noted by researchers as a key aspect of constructing an ‘IB World’ identity and forms part of the mandatory training workshops that IB schools have to undergo (Bunnell, Fertig, & James, 2020). Importantly, these similar ways of talking about the IB provide a veneer of standardization, uniformity, and equality across borders, but in reality mask the differences that lie at its heart and make each IB school different.

Conclusion

The impact of the global education industry on national education systems has been garnering more attention recently, particularly in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and renewed calls for twenty-first century skills. A recent spate of articles about the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and PISA point to concerns about the influential yet hidden power (also known as ‘soft power’) of the global education industry on education policies in different countries (Sorensen, Ydesen, & Robertson, 2021; Waldow & Steiner-Khamsi, 2019). Key points of concern are the decontextualized comparisons made across education systems around the world leading to simplistic and reductive generalizations about best practices based on so-called successful systems. The large-scale data-driven analysis in the present study has shown how such comparisons serve to construct the IB as an international provider of education that is able to benefit local education systems.

For the 2018 PISA, which included a ‘global competence’ dimension (something the IB has long championed), the OECD and IB organization joined forces. According to the IB website,

… the OECD included the International Baccalaureate (IB) as a model that promotes global understanding. Given the IB’s expertise in international education and emphasis on international-mindedness, IB staff members contributed to the development of the PISA global competence framework. (IBO, 2021b)

As this corpus-based discourse analysis has shown, the perception of the IB’s expertise in ‘international education’ and ‘international mindedness’ is a result not only of qualities attributed to it based on its name, but also of the context of its deployment as an alternative to national baccalaureates against which it is seen as superior, which is one possible explanation for its global scale and spread over the past 52 years.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Tony McEnery, Michael Fitzgerald, and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under Grant number 756-2019-0176.

Notes

1 Because Canadian newspapers have been examined separately (see Fitzgerald, 2017a), they were excluded from the present study.