The Englishisation of higher education in Catalonia: a critical sociolinguistic ethnographic approach to the students’ perspectives

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the attitudes towards Englishisation displayed by 30 students enrolled in a Combined Languages degree, including English and another language, in a top-ranked bilingual university in Catalonia, where Spanish and Catalan coexist complexly, and where foreign language medium instruction is relatively new. Through a two-year fieldwork project, I report on how the institution implemented this partial English-medium instruction program for the first time in Spain, following its internationalisation mission. I then focus on the students’ perspectives towards the officialisation of English as the third language of the Catalan university system. Via a Domain and Emotion Coding analysis of 30 essay-writing assignments, I show that students mobilise a series of predominantly favourable discourses on Englishisation which conflictingly interplay with negative attitudes towards it. They envision English as a post-national ‘democratising’ lingua franca and as an asset for employability and educational excellence, but they also construct it as a politicised threat to linguistic diversity. These perspectives contribute to a nuanced understanding of the students’ range of ambivalent stances concerning the established sociolinguistic orders of globalised universities in Barcelona and the neo-liberal linguistic regimes of the European Higher Education Area, which call for policies providing a more balanced ecology of languages.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual higher education
• internationalisation
• Englishisation
• student attitudes
• Catalonia

Acknowledgements

I am very thankful to the UAB academic and administrative staff at the Faculty of Letters for their help with this project and to the informants who kindly participated in this study. I am also grateful to Michael Kennedy for having shared his teaching materials, and to David Block and Josep Maria Cots, for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Any shortcomings are, of course, mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Maria Sabaté-Dalmau http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6058-7227

Notes

1. Catalan is considered a minority language in the sense that it is a linguistic code which has been historically, socio-economically and politically ‘minorized’ (see Bastardas, 1996), as explained at the end of the Introductory section.

2. At the time of writing, there was a general increase of EMI courses from 5.5% to 13.2% at the UAB (General Directorate for Language Policy, 2013, p. 26). Apart from the Combined Languages Degrees in English, the Business Management and Administration, Economics and Primary Education official majors also offered the EMI option, and 25% of all MA programs were offered in English, too (Àrea de Comunicació i Promoció, 2015a).

3. This gender imbalance in language-related degrees has been attested in many Catalan universities (see, e.g. Llurda et al., 2015).

4. In 2014, the English Studies degree had registered 324 first- to fourth-year students; French Studies, 46; Spanish Studies, 151; Classics, 75; and Catalan, 68. This was considered a success, given the fact that most language Departments at the UAB had been experiencing a decrease in the number of enrolments, for philology-related studies were becoming non-popular, in Catalonia.

5. No confidential information of the institution under analysis has been displayed. The informants’ data were gathered with both oral and written informed consent. All names used are pseudonyms in order to preserve their anonymity, strictly following the guidelines for academic research established by the UAB Ethics Committee.

6. These tasks were part of the syllabus established for all C1-level instrumental English courses by the Faculty of Letters at the UAB. Here is an illustrative small sample of the exercises done in class prior to the take-home essay-writing activity:

• Reading comprehension activities: ‘Summarise the text in one sentence’; ‘What motivations for having an official language organ are mentioned for France, Canada, Israel and Iceland?’

• Vocabulary exercises: ‘What is the function of a lullaby (paragraph a)?’ ‘What would be a synonym in the expression “ … has often stirred very strong feelings” (paragraph g)’?

• Speaking activities in groups: ‘Language is never about language. Discuss’.

7. Cases in which this classification was difficult to conduct were addressed by means of ethnographic fieldwork, for example, by observing the students’ linguistic behaviours and contributions in classroom debates or by asking them further about Englishisation in tutorial sessions, over the two-year fieldwork project.

8. The unemployment rate among people aged 16–29 was 32.2% in 2014 (Observatori Català de la Joventut, 2015, p. 11).

9. Phrases removed for space constraints are indicated with [ … ].

10. Author's translation. Original quote: ‘En primer año de inglés [los profesores] nos machacan con Usos bàsics como tendría que ser con todas las demás asignaturas’.

11. The overall price of a degree within the disciplines of Humanities increased by 172.25% between 2007 and 2014, in Catalonia (OSU, 2013, p. 13).

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by two research grants awarded by the Catalan Department of Economy and Knowledge and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. The former was granted to the research group Applied Linguistics Circle (CLA) at the University of Lleida (reference 2014SGR1061), and the latter to the research group Intercultural Communication and Negotiation Strategies (CIEN) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (reference FFI2011-26964).