The language affiliations of mobile students in the international university

ABSTRACT

The internationalisation of higher education has led to widespread adoption of English as a medium of instruction in European universities, and this strategy is supporting increasingly diverse student mobility. Many students undertaking short-term Erasmus+ mobility see this as an opportunity to develop their English language skills but may lack interest in learning locally significant languages. However, contemporary universities are complex multilingual spaces. This paper explores how far mobile students’ language affiliations are aligned to languages’ wider geopolitical significance, and how far they are influenced by personal and sociocultural factors, and the study abroad (SA) experience itself. The study draws on a corpus of narrative interviews with mobile students in diverse European settings. Participants generally sustained strong affiliations with English. Affiliations with other international languages were more mixed. Some expressed a heightened affiliation to their home language arising from SA experience; others described new affiliations arising from local contacts and student friendships, with a local language, or with other international students’ L1. Overall, the study found that language affiliations showed some flexibility, and might derive from personal biographical factors, cultural values and personal relationships as well as from the instrumental value of internationally significant languages.

KEYWORDS:

• Language affiliation
• language hierarchy
• study abroad
• student mobility

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all the participants, and to our SAREP colleagues for their generous collaboration: Ana Beaven, Griet Boone, Josep Maria Cots, Anu Härkönen, Sanja Marinov, Višnja Pavičić Takač.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a research networking initiative of the European Union, funded through Horizon 2020. The SAREP project ran from 2016 to 2020 as COST Action 15130.

2 The term ‘mother tongue’ has been widely used in the European Union to apply to speakers’ primary language of socialisation. It was the preferred term of our participants and we have therefore adopted it here.

3 Quotations are presented in conventional orthography and to aid readability, hesitations and repetitions have been removed.