Elite bilingual identities in higher education in the Anglophone world: the stratification of linguistic diversity and reproduction of socio-economic inequalities in the multilingual student population

ABSTRACT

As universities in the Anglophone world attend to operating on a global stage, linguistic diversity in the sector has intensified. Historically, higher education has adopted language-as-problem orientations to managing linguistic diversity, viewing multilingual repertoires largely as an obstacle. An emerging body of work informed by language-as-resource orientations seeks to counter these deficit views. However, while timely, it risks treating the multilingual student population as a homogeneous group. This paper addresses this issue by developing a finer-grained understanding of student experiences of their multilingual repertoires with two groups of students from different socioeconomic backgrounds: working-class Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) undergraduate students and international postgraduate students from more socially elite families. By examining students’ experiences of their multilingual repertoires in the institution, I demonstrate how universities stratify the linguistic diversity in their midst, arguing that this is resonant with elite-plebeian views of bilingualism. I contend that language-as-resource informed curriculum and pedagogy needs to attend to institutional practices that stratify linguistic diversity to avoid reinforcing a situation in which the multilingualism of students from professional and socially elite groups is reinforced while little is gained when it comes to the multilingualism of working-class BME students.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingual identities
• elite bilingualism
• linguistic diversity
• higher education
• social class
• international students
• Black and minority ethnic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Siân Preece is Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at UCL Institute of Education. Her research examines the relationship between language and identity, particularly the intersection of gender, ethnicity and social class, linguistic diversity and plurilingual approaches to pedagogy in higher education contexts. She is the author of Posh Talk: Language and Identity in Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan 2009), editor of The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity (Routledge 2016) and one of the co-authors of Language, Society and Power, 3rd edn. (Routledge 2011). She is Principal Investigator for the ESRC seminar series: The Multilingual University: The Impact of Linguistic Diversity on Higher Education in English-dominant and English Medium Instructional Contexts.

Notes

1. Institutional and participant names are pseudonyms.

2. International includes students from EU nation states that are not regarded as English-majority speaking as well as British students who normally reside and work overseas.

3. The NS SEC (National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification) is widely used to.

4. Coursera bills itself as providing ‘universal access to the world's best education, partnering with top universities and organizations to offer courses online’ (https://www.coursera.org).