"Critical Perspectives On Teaching In The Multilingual University

This book critically and reflectively engages with the ‘Language Problem’ in the contemporary multilingual university. It paints a complex picture of the lived multilingual realities of teachers and students in universities across geographies such as Pakistan Timor-Leste South Korea Bangladesh Somaliland Afghanistan Fiji Colombia and the UK (including Northern Ireland) and focuses on three overall analytic themes: language and colonial epistemologies language policies and practices and language and research. Globalisation global knowledge economy and neoliberal governance has significantly impacted higher education by elevating colonial languages particularly English to a global academic lingua franca. Universities now collaborate and compete globally with English emerging as the dominant language for education and research. The imposition or uncritical adoption of English poses profound political cultural and epistemic challenges for those who have to use the language in everyday university administration research and teaching and also intertwines with issues of race gender coloniality and social class. This volume addresses this as higher education’s multifaceted Language Problem which requires interdisciplinary collaboration and critical debate and ultimately aims towards understanding multilingualism in higher education across both the Global North and South. The contributions to this book continue to remind us of the coloniality of language and of the linguistic stratification that governs epistemological structures and power relations in the academy. It will be of interest to scholars researchers and practitioners of higher education applied linguistics education policy and politics and sociology of education. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Teaching in Higher Education. |Critical Perspectives on Teaching in the Multilingual University