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Abstract
The demand for internationalization puts pressure on Danish universities to use English as the language of instruction instead of or in addition to the local language(s). The purpose of this study – though proceeding from the belief that true internationalization seeks to exploit all linguistic and communicative resources available within the institution – is to offer potential directions in the search for the “best practice” of Danish and other non-native English-speaking university teachers who have lately had to switch to English in transmitting their academic expertise to students of the multicultural and multilingual classroom. This case study concerns Danish university teachers' spoken discourse and interaction with students in a Danish-language versus English-language classroom. The data are video recordings of classroom interaction at the University of Roskilde, Denmark. The focus is on the relationship between linguistic-pragmatic performance and academic authenticity for university teachers teaching courses in both English and Danish, based on recent sociolinguistic concepts such as “persona,” “stylization,” and “authenticity.” The analysis suggests that it is crucial for teachers' ability to authenticate themselves through appropriate communicative strategies that teacher and students share some relevant cultural frames of reference, and that limitations in teachers' use of appropriate communicative strategies may impede their authenticity, affecting their academic authority.
Acknowledgements
This study was conceived and carried out at Roskilde University (Department of Culture and Identity) within the conceptual and organizational framework of the international research center for ‘Cultural and Linguistic Practices in the International University’ (CALPIU). I am greatly indebted to Janus Mortensen for his help in setting up the recordings that provided the empirical data of the study, as I am to him and Hartmut Haberland for reading and commenting on earlier versions of the manuscript. Any remaining errors or shortcomings are mine and mine alone.
Notes
1. “Transnationally mobile” is sometimes used as a more apt designation for such students and teachers than the traditional label, “international.” A group, such as a “class,” of transnationally mobile students will often be multicultural (e.g., if composed of Norwegian, German, and Chinese students).
2. No corresponding statistics for university teachers seem to be in evidence, but the percentage of Danish PhD graduates who go abroad fell between 1997 (3.8%) and 2011 (1.3%), i.e., the percentage of all Danes who at the time held a PhD. Of those, 45% were gone less than three years (Nyt fra Danmarks statistik [News from Statistics Denmark] Citation2012).
3. Available statistics are sporadic. Thus, Mobilitetsstatistik for de videregående uddannelser [Mobility Statistics for Higher Education] (Citation2011) is careful to point out that it does not include mobility statistics for PhD programs. The Copenhagen University Annual Report Citation2013 (CU is the largest university in Denmark) does not treat PhD students separately, stating only that the number of students going abroad in 2013 was 2102 (the university has approximately 40,000 students). The Aalborg University Annual Report for Social StudiesCitation2013 (AAU is one of the smaller universities) reports that eight out of 23 PhD graduates had studied abroad for more than one month as an integrated part of their program.
4. In Soren's (Citation2013) teacher cognition model of university teacher identity, “professional authority” (illustrated by the heuristic question, “Do others see me as the expert?” [p. 139]) is a component of the teacher's professional identity.
5. EFL = English as a foreign language; ELF = English as a lingua franca.
6. Choice of the language norm carries social indexicality, too (as when the learner's attitude to the language is more or less integrative rather than just instrumental [cf. Gardner Citation1985]), but that is another story.
7. The terms “multilingual” and “multicultural” are not necessarily interchangeable: a monocultural group can be multilingual, and (less commonly) a multicultural group can be monolingual.
8. See also Kuteeva (Citation2014, 341) on competent education and research in non-native English at Swedish universities.
9. The importance of cultural understanding and pragmatic competence in foreign language interaction was discovered early on in foreign-language pedagogical research: “Perhaps the fascination that the study of crosscultural pragmatics holds […] stems from the serious trouble to which pragmatic failure can lead. No ‘error’ of grammar can make a speaker seem so incompetent, so inappropriate, so foreign as the kind of trouble a learner gets into when he or she doesn't understand or otherwise disregards a language's rules of use” (Rintell and Mitchell Citation1989, cited in Trosborg Citation1995, 3).
10. Natural Science Basic Studies.
11. There is of course no telling whether or how often he has actually done this in the past, though it would seem highly unlikely that this would not have happened before from time to time.
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Bent Preisler
Bent Preisler is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Sociolinguistics, Roskilde University. He holds a Dr. Phil. (Habilitation) from Aarhus University, 1987, where he was an Assistant/Associate Professor and Reader from 1974 to 1992. At this point he was appointed full Professor at Roskilde University, a position he held until his retirement in 2012. He was a Visiting Professor/Scholar in the USA during 1984 (State University of New York, Binghamton) and 2000 (University of California, Santa Barbara). His research includes works on the structure and functions of English, including gender-based variation in the spoken language, the concept and functions of Standard English, English as an international language, and the influence of English on other languages. He is the founder and former director of the CALPIU international research center (“Cultural and Linguistic Practices in the International University”), funded by the Danish Research Council.