Editorial

In this themed ‘open’ issue – our first in Volume 22 – we present reports on the interplay between language(s) and culture(s) of learners who use languages in two different types of context: young people who are exposed to new language(s) and culture(s) while studying programmes at foreign universities; and children and teenagers who use their newly learned languages to communicate within their family setting after settling in a new country.

Internationalising student learning in universities

The burgeoning wave of international travel and global communication which has taken place since the end of the Second World War in Europe has led to the circulation of young adults who have been able to leave school and move to a country of their choice, either for shorter exchange visits of 1–2 semester, or for degree programmes of 3–4 years. For many of us, these students are at the heart of our bread-and-butter pedagogic work; and multilingual and multicultural universities have long been hothouses for research into intercultural communication. Over time the signification of these educational flows has become reified by the single term ‘internationalisation’, perhaps coalescing the notions of modernity, scientificity and global solidarity. At its most optimistic, this intercontinental movement of young people can appear to fulfil our dreams of multiculturalism, global collaboration and the mutual learning of languages and cultures. However, as universities cut loose from their historical moorings to the collective state funding and financial support once provided by beneficiary nation states, these annual influxes of international students have become an easy way of bestowing economic benefit upon those institutions which are most successful in recruiting them within an ever more competitive marketplace of programmes and qualifications. Thus, other authors have described rather more bleakly in these pages how these potential forces for good have been harnessed, and even distorted, by the ‘neoliberal discourses’ of marketisation and commodification (e.g. Collins, 2018); some have even asked if the internationalisation of tertiary education can be called an intercultural endeavour at all (Young et al., 2017). This can create something of an ideological contradiction for some of our more critically-inclined colleagues who themselves engaged in these discursive practices as part and parcel of the day job (Ferri, 2022, p. 262). Different strands of thinking and research have therefore emerged within our field regarding the internationalisation of learning within universities. We begin this issue by presenting two contrasting case studies in internationalisation: one from Spain by Karin Strotmann and Claudia Kunschak, and one from China by Xu Jia and Fred Dervin.

Over the years, Language and Intercultural Communication has published numerous studies (e.g. Coperias-Aguilar, 2009; Mendez Garcia, 2012; Parks, 2018; Porto, 2019) and several special issues (e.g. Beaven & Borghetti, 2016) that have arisen from major research projects situated in what we might term the ‘mainstream’ European framework of intercultural communication, which largely builds upon frameworks for intercultural competence developed under the aegis of the Council of Europe (2001, 2018). In our first paper in this issue, Strotman and Kunschak continue in this tradition by reporting on data collected in a case study gleaned through an explanatory sequential research design which uses a mixed-methods approach. This draws on questionnaires, interviews and focus groups in order to investigate the interplay of language and culture which takes place in the development of plurilingual and pluricultural competence in students undertaking three bilingual or multilingual degree programmes in a Spanish university. Their research is situated solidly within the well-established theoretical frameworks for intercultural competence developed by Michael Byram (1997) and Darla Deardorff (2011). The authors’ purpose is not so much to challenge or extend these frameworks, but rather to improve policy implementation, curriculum development and student experience. Their findings reveal that although students demonstrated high levels of ability in a range of foreign languages alongside considerable awareness of linguistic and cultural difference, their practical engagement in these different languages and cultures tends to be more of an aspiration than an actuality. While still relatively small scale, this study offers persuasive evidence to support the range of curricular initiatives which the authors propose will expand students’ actual praxis of plurilingualism and pluriculturalism, thereby enhancing the ethos of the internationalised 21C university campus.

If the internationalisation of universities began mostly with arrangements to exchange students across Europe and the US, the flow of students in the two-way traffic which now takes place between these two blocs and Asian countries gathered momentum rather more slowly. Starting in Japan in order to cement the post-Word War II settlement with America, this gradually got underway in other countries and regions with ties to former colonies, such as Hong Kong, becoming fully embraced towards the turn of the last century with a sizeable annual dispersion of students worldwide from China, whence our next study by Xu Jia and Fred Dervin emanates. As in Europe and America, theoretical and pedagogical approaches to internationalisation in China have varied. Some universities and programmes have embraced the conventions of intercultural competence informed by the academic literature emanating from America and Europe. This transcultural flow of pedagogical ideas and praxis has most recently been bolstered with the large-scale RICH-Ed project (Resources for Interculturality in Chinese Higher Education) led by Jan van Maele, who with Lixian Jin will compile a special issue focusing upon this initiative in our next issue (van Maele & Lixian, 2022, see also https://www.rich-ed.com/). However some researchers have eschewed these, preferring the more fluid idea of ‘interculturality’ to intercultural competence and incorporating homespun approaches to intercultural education such as ‘Minzu’, a specifically Chinese form of multicultural education (Dervin & Yuan, 2021).

Over the past few years, Fred Dervin and colleagues working with him in China have explored and developed counterpoints to the Euro-American models of intercultural education. Our next paper, fronted by Xu Jia, and doubtless building on her day-to-day experience working in the International Office of a Chinese university, carries out an investigation into the construction of interculturality by their Chinese ‘buddies’ – student peers who are tasked with playing host to international students who are visiting for the summer from universities in Africa, America, Europe, and other Asian countries. Xu and Dervin adopt a twin pronged critical approach to their study. To inform their theoretical framework, the authors take the two overarching concepts which inform their descriptions of their buddies’ experience – hospitality and interculturality – and deconstruct their more conventional Eurocentric meanings. Drawing on Proto-Indo-European, Greek, Latin, and Chinese etymology, they conceive of hospitality as a ‘polysemic notion’ which straddles the different languages according to context. In the Chinese context the relationship between host and guest is not predicated so much as one of reciprocity, as suggested by the European tradition, but more as one of superiority – in keeping with the etymology of the Chinese words for ‘host’ (主:zhŭ) and ‘guest’ (客:kè) (after Chen, 2018). Here, interculturality is conceived of as a process which is positioned on an evaluative continuum between the dual poles of essentialism and process. Xu and Dervin then conduct focus groups with a small cohort of Chinese buddies. Not taking what their participants say at face value (Dervin, 2011, p. 39), for their methodology they employ a critical discourse approach known as ‘enunciative pragmatics’, which was developed in France by linguists such as Benveniste, Culioli and Ducrot, and popularised within the English-speaking world by Johannes Angermuller (2014). With reference to some of the salient linguistic signifiers established within enunciative pragmatics, the authors describe how their buddies discursively construct the acts of hospitality which they perform on behalf of their international visitors, and how they evolve their experience of interculturality from a more ‘culturalist’ position to one which transcends the ‘blocks’ that can be thrown up as impediments between discursively differentiated cultural positions (after Holliday & Amadasi, 2020).

Multilingual children in the family

If most international students arrive at their foreign universities having succeeded within the education system of their home countries and being well grounded in its dominant language(s), most children and teenagers who grow up in migrant families are faced with a more complex and challenging multilingual and multicultural environment. Every day they can end up moving between two different contexts: the school, where they are exposed to the language(s) spoken in their new country in both the formal talk of the classroom and the informal talk of the playground; and the home, where communication with their parents or carers often takes place in their ‘heritage languages’, i.e. the language(s) of their original country. Knowing how to use these different languages strategically in different contexts for different purposes, and being able to switch between them, requires a highly specialised and still insufficiently regarded set of skills on the part of the millions of children who carry this out every day in different countries around the world. Despite this, younger language learners have taken rather longer to emerge as a focus for research interest in intercultural communication, and the literature on them is rather less than that which focuses on older language learners in higher education. However, it is now becoming increasingly apparent to sociolinguists that the children in migrant families play an important role in mediating to their parents the language and culture of their families’ new social context. Not least, because the old adage still seems to hold that – particularly through their intensive exposure to schooling in the family’s new language – children often acquire new languages much more easily than the elders in their families.

The second theme of this open issue focuses on the role that children play in the families of ethnic minority communities, and in particular the ways in which migrant children use multiple languages in their family. One study is carried out in the vibrant multilingual, multicultural region of Catalonia in the North-East of Spain; and one study is carried out in the ‘sanctuary city’ of Glasgow in Scotland, UK. Catalonia and Scotland make an interesting pairing as contexts for ‘languaging’ (after Phipps, 2006). Both these political and geographic entities have for some time been attempting to gain greater autonomy from the overarching nation state in which they are situated, with a significant number of either population aspiring to complete cessation. Both entities have very positive, and highly visible, policies towards the reception of inward-migrating families. And both entities are to varying degrees inhabited by a vibrant combination of a hegemonic national language (Spanish; English), a range of heritage languages spoken by migrant communities, and an autochthonous language which has taken on greater significance in the years since the drive towards greater political autonomy has been revived (Catalan; Scots & Gaelic). Under this theme, we present a survey on ‘child language brokers’ in Catalonia (Rubi-Carbonero, Vargas-Urpí & Raigal Aran); and a case study into the use of metaphor by the children in Polish immigrant families in Glasgow, Scotland (Zacharias).

Catalonia is officially a bilingual society; and in the region of Barcelona where this study was carried out, Catalan is the main language used by teachers, with other formal classes being given in Spanish, which is also used in some interaction with their peers. However, Catalonia also hosts a range of heritage languages spoken by families who have migrated from a variety of different countries. Immigrant families, therefore, have to master the complexities of communicating day-to-day in a society in which they will encounter not just one, but two new languages, alongside maintaining their heritage languages. It is well known that children and younger adults often acquire new languages more quickly than their older, adult parents. This is possibly due to biological factors such as greater brain plasticity in young people, although sixty years of research into second language acquisition still leaves a considerable degree of uncertainty as to just how this might be the case. However, it is certainly true that these children and teenagers do have a greater and more systemic exposure to these new languages at school and often end up helping their parents and other adult family members to communicate in the newly encountered languages of their host society. This is often referred to as ‘child language brokering’ (after Antonini, 2015). This engagement with language brokering can enhance young peoples’ awareness of the complexities of the multilingual environment which they are required to navigate. Gema Rubio-Carbonero, Mireia Vargas-Urpí and Judith Raigal Aran therefore report on both qualitive and quantitative data which they garnered through a multimethod approach using questionnaires, interviews and a focus group. The authors shed light on the participants’ lived experience of multilingualism by investigating the attitudes of child language brokers towards the different languages they speak, and exploring how young peoples’ engagement in language brokering for their family members impacts upon their language development. The conclusions from this study support the thesis that immigrant children in the province of Barcelona almost invariably experience some form of multilingualism; and that their engagement in language brokering both enhances their awareness of the languages they speak locally, and revives their awareness of the languages and cultures they have experienced earlier in their lives.

Like Catalonia, Scotland is a country which can lay historical claim to three languages: Gaelic, Scots and English. Gaelic is the autochthonous language mostly still spoken in the North-West of the country and, in the wake of legislation for the creation of a Scottish Parliament being passed in 1998, a number of both primary and secondary Gaelic-medium schools were opened across the country. The status of Scots as a language in its own right has also been bolstered across a range of studies (e.g. Anderson, 2013; Corbett, 1999). The final study in this issue was carried out in Glasgow, in the Central Region of Scotland, which also happens to be Malcolm’s own family hometown. Here English and Scots intermingle, coloured by a highly distinctive Glaswegian dialect which, as in many cities, is even localised to different areas of the city. Like Barcelona, Glasgow hosts a number of refugee and migrant communities which have originated from many countries around the world, including the Polish community which is the ‘most common non-British nationality’ in Scotland (National Records for Scotland, 2021). As part of the Creative Multilingualism project, The Moon in narrative, metaphor and reason, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, Sally Zacharias zooms in on two ‘transnational’ Polish families who have settled in the city. As the title of the project would suggest, the focus of this study is upon the ways in which children use language ‘to express their thoughts in family discourse and the effect it has on other family members’. Zacharias takes a finely grained, contextualised case study approach in order to adopt a contemporary ecological approach to metaphor research. The theoretical framework for the paper combines metaphor theory and cognitive linguistics, with aspects of critical sociolinguistic theory which are staples of these pages; in particular symbolic power (e.g. Bourdieu, 1991; see also Zhu Hua & Jaworska, 2022) and symbolic competence (Kramsch, 2016, 2021; see also Hansen-Pauly in this issue). In her study, Zacharias analyses examples of the way in which children negotiate the complex metaphorical meanings associated with the moon in their families. In so doing, she traces the shifts that take place in the power dynamics of each conversation in order to bring about changes in the family interaction and in so doing illustrates the highly creative use of ‘symbolic competence’ displayed by these Polish-English transnational children. This paper therefore provides further evidence that, far from being a deficit, these modes of bilingualism can be assets ‘that should be valued both in schools and in the wider society’.

Conclusion

We draw this issue to a close with three book reviews. First, Marie-Anne Hansen-Pauly nicely complements our last study with a consideration of Claire Kramsch’s most recent 2020 monograph, Language as Symbolic Power, published by Cambridge University Press. Shaoqiang Zhang then continues the theme of symbolic power, this time in Jinhyun Cho’s (2021) Intercultural communication in interpreting: Power and choices, published by Routledge. We conclude with Ana Simões’ review of Adrian Holliday’s eagerly anticipated autoethnography. This is a detailed, reflective account of the author’s journey from his early days as an English language teacher in Iran to the development of his most recent ideas relating to the ‘blocks’ and ‘threads’ of intercultural communication (Amadasi & Holliday, 2017; Holliday, 2016; Holliday & Amadasi, 2020) and the emergence of his third space methodology (Holliday, 2022). We thank our three reviewers for their labours in keeping us up to speed with recent developments in the field.

As hard copy of this issue hits your pigeon-holes in August, delegates will be feverishly attending to their presentations for the 22nd IALIC conference. Taking place at the Institute of Education, University of Lisbon, it will be the association’s first face-to-face conference in three years. Selected papers on the conference theme of Diversity and Epistemological Plurality: Thinking Interculturality ‘Otherwise’ will be compiled by the conference organiser and guest editor, Ana Sofia Pinho, for publication as LAIC 24.1. Even if you can’t make the conference, you can check out the programme and follow proceedings at https://ialic2022.wixsite.com/ialic2022/.