Language Centres at a Crossroads

Place: Room 31

This paper will explore how language centres and language programmes both in the UK and across Europe can influence a broadening of the concept of internationalisation to our individual and collective advantage.

For UK Universities, Internationalisation has long been focussed on: a) the recruitment of students from outside the United Kingdom, and b) the development of international partnerships for research and education. On occasion, this has included the establishment of overseas campuses, trans-national education programmes, or overseas recruitment offices. These strategies focus on reputation and brand, with aspirations to be a "global University". However, language policy has remained largely absent, with an assumed monolingual approach using only English. Meanwhile, across Europe, many Universities have mature language policies. However, with growth in EMI (English as a Medium of Instruction), language policies often reflect a situation where native language(s) + English predominate.

Language centres have an opportunity to influence university internationalisation strategies, whilst at the same time encouraging Universities to become genuinely multilingual and multicultural institutions that reflect the diversity of their staff and their students. This includes evolving strategy in the following areas:

• Encouragement and facilitation of language learning for global citizenship
• developing multilingual language skills to support research
• developing inter-cultural competence and awareness for staff and students
• internationalising the curriculum
• supporting student mobility facilitating cross-cultural contact between home and international students
• developing the University's global culture

This presentation will discuss the opportunities for language centres to play a leading role in evolving narratives of internationalisation in their respective universities across Europe. These opportunities will involve language centres in playing their part in institutional cultural change within their universities. Meanwhile language centres have opportunities to review their own practices within new institutional strategic and policy frameworks, as vehicles to support both traditional teaching and novel language learning opportunities, with newly defined roles for language teachers and in supporting new spaces in which we can draw together all the linguistic and inter-cultural endeavours that can and should define any ‘global' University.

Mark Critchley is Director of the Centre for Foreign Language Study at Durham University, and current Chair of the Association of University Language Communities in the UK & Ireland (AULC).

Jocelyn Wyburd is Director of the Language Centre at the University of Cambridge, and a former Chair of the University Council for Modern Languages (UCML) in the UK.