English as an academic lingua franca and intercultural awareness: student mobility in the transcultural university

ABSTRACT

The increasingly international orientation of many higher education (HE) institutes and the growing role of English as an academic lingua franca have far-reaching implications for how we conceptualise universities and student mobility. In this paper, it is argued that the complexity and diversity of languages, communities and cultures present in many HE institutes mean we can no longer assume a connection between the language of instruction, a local host community and a national culture and language. This is particularly the case in English medium instruction programmes outside of Anglophones settings but also in international universities in Anglophone settings, both of which will be the focus of this paper. The term transcultural university is adopted to reflect this complexity and to move beyond nation-based conceptions of universities. In educating students for mobility in such environments, it is suggested that pedagogy needs to go beyond essentialist language, culture and nation correlations. Intercultural awareness is proposed as a crucial element in preparing students to negotiate the diversity and fluidity of communicative practices in transcultural universities in which mobile students need equally mobile communicative resources.

KEYWORDS:

• English as an academic lingua franca
• intercultural awareness
• student mobility
• transcultural university
• education
• intercultural communication

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Chittima Sangiamchit for the Thai translation in this article as well as the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Will Baker is the Deputy Director of the Centre for Global Englishes, Modern Languages, University of Southampton. He is the convenor of the ‘MA in Global Englishes’ and ‘MA ELT: Online’ and also supervises doctoral students in these subjects. He is co-editor of the book series Developments in English as a Lingua Franca (De Gruyter Mouton). His current research involves English as a Lingua Franca, Intercultural Communication, English medium instruction and ELT, and he has published and presented internationally in all these areas. His latest publication is ‘Culture and identity through English as a Lingua Franca’ (De Gruyter Mouton).

Notes

1. Ryan (2011) has also proposed a ‘transcultural’ approach to understanding international universities and there are many similarities in her suggestions, for example, sharing a perspective of going beyond the bounded ‘inter’ perspective on culture. However, Ryan neglects to mention language anywhere in her discussion. A major omission, in my opinion, since the spread of English is a key part of internationalisation and thus language and multilingualism are at the core of any transcultural approach.