Teaching staff's views about the internationalisation of higher education: the case of two bilingual communities in Spain

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2013Suggested citation
Lasagabaster Herrarte, David;
Cots Caimons, Josep Maria;
Mancho Barés, Guzmán;
.
(2013)
.
Teaching staff's views about the internationalisation of higher education: the case of two bilingual communities in Spain.
Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, 2013, vol. 32, num. 6, p. 751-778.
https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2013-0036.
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The process of internationalisation of higher education can be seen as
fluctuating between two main discourses: economic competition and academic
internationalisation (Bolsman & Miller 2008). Within the former type of discourse,
internationalisation is constructed as a means to generate income, in
competition with other institutions, through the provision of research and
teaching services of a high quality to as many ‘clients’ as possible. From the
point of view of academic internationalism, internationalisation is represented
as a joint enterprise by institutions from different countries for the advancement
of human knowledge and intercultural understanding. In this paper we
aim to explore the views of the teaching staff of two bilingual universities in
Spain in connection with the process of internationalisation of their institution,
placing a special emphasis on its impact on language policy. The sample for
this study was made up of 173 university teaching staff who completed a questionnaire
in which they were asked to express their views on issues such as
internationalisation at higher education institutions, academic mobility and
their attitudes towards multilingualism. The participants belonged to two officially
bilingual universities in Spain, namely the University of Lleida (UdL) and
the University of the Basque Country (UBC). Variables such as the sociolinguistic
context, gender, mother tongue and age were considered when scrutinising
the participants’ answers with a view to drawing a picture of internationalisation
which included opinions on academic mobility and multilingualism from
the teaching staff’s perspective.