Читать книгу Making Language Visible in the University - Bee Bond - Страница 8

Introduction: Contextualising the Problem, Defining Terms

In this Chapter I aim to provide a contextual backdrop to main the focus of this book, that is how language and disciplinary knowledge are perceived as intersecting and disconnecting within a taught postgraduate curriculum and how EAP practitioners can work, therefore, to make language more visible across the University. I outline in broad terms the concepts and global themes of inclusion, internationalisation and English for Academic Purposes, considering how they interplay across the Higher Education landscape and create the structural conditions and backdrop that led to the key issues I aim to address. In doing this I explicitly and deliberately position the local and contextualised scholarship project and findings within a much broader, global conversation that is relevant not only for Higher Education institutions within the ‘inner circle’ countries but for all institutions that have ‘internationalisation’ as part of their core strategy, particularly when part of this strategy demands elements of English as a medium of instruction.

Aims and Purposes

Macro level discourse around finances and student recruitment have a direct effect on the micro level of the classroom. It is here that the real impact of a university’s internationalisation policy is felt, as teachers and students need to learn, but often fail, to work together across and between cultures, languages and educational backgrounds. This book, then, aims to address the questions raised by this need in terms of student education, focusing on the nexus of language, disciplinary content and knowledge communication specifically at taught post-graduate (TPG) level. In doing so, I touch on key issues of internationalisation, inclusion and of teaching excellence in Higher Education.

I position language as central to all three concepts and argue that the teaching and learning of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) can be both a driver of and a solution to many of the questions arising from both internationalisation and inclusion agendas. In doing this, then, it is necessary to outline and problematise the label ‘international student’ and consider what issues are highlighted through working with these students, and whether they are any different to those raised by working with other student demographics. The drive for internationalisation should not be considered in isolation of a wider shift in approaches to higher education, and who should and does have access. The growth of an international student body (itself nothing new) has coincided with the push for access for all and an emphasis on social justice and inclusion. I therefore also consider internationalisation within a framework of inclusive education, outlining the current state of the debate here. It is this context we must begin with.

What is Inclusive Education?

In 2017 the UK government’s Department for Education provided guidance to the Higher Education sector to support them in ‘expanding their inclusive teaching and learning practice’ as a way of enacting the ‘Government’s social mobility agenda – [of] giving everyone, regardless of their background or circumstances, the chance to study at higher levels of education’ (Universities UK, 2017: 2). One of the main drivers behind this was the UK Government’s 2010 Equality Act which required ‘reasonable adjustments’ to be made to ensure those with disabilities were able to access education without discrimination. Whilst the guidance was produced by the Disabled Student Sector Leadership Group (DSLG), inclusive education is now understood to encompass far more than a consideration of what adjustments could be made to ‘usual’ teaching practices in order to accommodate those with a disability. Inclusive learning and teaching is a much broader concept, and requires a consideration of a diverse range of needs and potential barriers to accessing the curriculum that could be encountered by any student so that adjustments for difference do not need to be made. In this way, the inclusion agenda in Higher Education encompasses other access campaigns such as Widening Participation (WP), decolonising the curriculum, a focus on first generation students, as well as a concern for those with differing physical and learning abilities and mental health issues. Inclusion is thus defined as ‘issues relating to all students and to types of teaching and learning that fully and equitably include everyone in the classroom or in the programme cohort’ (Grace & Gravestock, 2009: 1) and ‘refers to the ways in which pedagogy, curricula and assessment are designed to engage students in learning that is meaningful, relevant, and accessible to all’ (Hockings, 2010: 1) Ultimately, inclusive learning and teaching acknowledges that the (somewhat mythical) ‘traditional’ student should not be the held up as the norm, and that consideration of diversity and of intersecting needs and differences should be made when planning a curriculum, programme or module, whilst also understanding that ‘students don’t want to stand out as different yet want to be recognised as individuals’ (Hockings, 2010). The drive for an inclusive curriculum must, therefore, include consideration of the similarly complex and intersecting needs of international students. In order to do this, however, it is necessary to understand, or at least problematise, what is meant by the term ‘internationalisation’ and ‘international student’.

Internationalisation as a Driver for Change

Internationalisation has become increasingly prominent in Higher Education (HE) over the last decade. It is now deeply embedded in the structure and strategies of most Higher Education Institutions (HEIs); universities, at least in the UK, have become heavily reliant on the income brought by international student fees to support and maintain the institution. Many, if not most, HEIs have a Pro-Vice Chancellor (or equivalent) for Internationalisation, an International Office and an Internationalisation strategy which largely focuses on increasing international student recruitment and developing international research partnerships. While internationalisation in HE is seen as ‘the integration of an international or intercultural dimension into the tripartite mission of teaching, research and service functions of Higher Education’ (Maringe & Foskett, 2010 in Jenkins, 2013: 2–3), its main focus remains on developing a campus with a large number of international students, rather than on developing a truly international culture that is embedded across all HE practices.

Concurrently, the media focus on the internationalisation of UK campuses can be broadly separated into two strands. The more negative reporting around international students highlights individual institutional stories of issues with academic integrity, including plagiarism and contract cheating. Students from outside the United Kingdom are a frequent focus of the blame for increasing cases of fraudulent academic practice and the dumbing down of education (see, for example, The Guardian, 2019b; The Times Higher Education, 2019). Within these stories there is little nuance; ‘International’ students are represented as a problem.

When positive, the media focus is on the huge wealth these students bring into the country. In 2011, international students brought £10.2 billion in fees and spending to the United Kingdom (HM Government, 2013). Within the Higher Education press, these figures feed into the recurring debate with government around whether international students should be included in immigration figures or given visa extensions poststudy. Most of this debate seems to focus largely on the financial gains brought by the higher fees paid by these students and their spending power contributing to the national economy (see Adams, 2017 and Letters to Guardian Education, December 2016 for examples) and recent government policy echoes this focus. The picture thus created is of a choice being made in Higher Education where financial gain takes precedence over quality, integrity and academic rigour. Within all of this, there appears to be little focus on the cultural and knowledge gains of having an international student body; there is even less media attention paid to how we can work to fully engage and collaborate with these students (notable exceptions being Bothwell, 2017; Cooper, 2017; Mora, 2017; Moran, 2017), building a real sense of reciprocity and achieving the aim of showing ‘commitment to international solidarity, human security … [helping] to build a climate of global peace’ (Fielden 2011, in Margolis 2016: 52).

Thus, the media image is in sharp contrast to the ideal of a global campus presented on most University websites, where a range of cultures and languages come together, either physically or virtually, to share ideas and to learn and conduct research together. Given the increasingly globalised and interconnected world outside HE, is difficult to argue with the ideal of an institution that reflects this representation and works to prepare its students for success within a globalised economy. Thus, ideals of knowledge exchange develop an ‘elective affinity’ (Zepke, 2015) with the more cynically financial push to increase international student numbers and benefit from their higher fee-paying structures. This ‘elective affinity’ is the essence of neoliberal policy making that EAP practitioners and international students increasingly find themselves at the sharp end of, arguably being seen as the physical embodiment of the marketisation of higher education across the globe.

As the drive to internationalise increases, it is necessary to stop and question which of the pictures described above (if any) is the current reality, and to highlight how the shift is impacting both students and staff as they work and study together.

Who is an International Student?

There is a large body of literature debating the terminology and implications behind the label ‘international student’ (Baker, 2016; Carroll, 2015; Margolis, 2016; Montgomery, 2010; Ryan, 2011). Many are now arguing that any student studying at tertiary level could and should be viewed and view themselves as an international or a global student (Leaske, 2013; Jenkins, 2013). Recent studies indicating the learning gain and increased employability attached to a period of study abroad (Universities UK, 2017) have added weight to the arguments around the concept of ‘internationalisation at home’ (see Beelan & Jones, 2015; Leaske, 2013), where opportunities for an international experience are provided to all students. From this perspective, all students, whether at university in their country of birth/citizenship or not can and should see themselves as international. Here, being an international student provides opportunity that is not currently available to all; the aim to open up the opportunity of global mobility to others is based within concepts of widening participation and education for social justice.

However, within the UK HE context, the label ‘international student’ is used institutionally as a financial differentiation, denoting those students who are expected to pay higher fees because they hold a passport from a country outside the EU. University websites include pages specifically for ‘International’ students and include advice on, for example, visa applications, police registration and qualification equivalencies. In this sense, the label is simply of administrative use, allowing institutions to signpost those who need it towards the relevant information necessary to allow them to gain access to their chosen site of education.

Although the administrative differentiation, working along financial lines, separates students into groups based on whether they are ‘Home’, ‘EU’ or ‘International’, these lines become blurred and almost irrelevant once learning begins. This differentiation does not, crucially, neatly separate those students for whom English is an additional language from those who use English as their dominant or only language. It also does not separate those who have studied within an educational culture which is the same or similar to that of their current University. It is at this point that the label ‘international’ when applied to students studying in the United Kingdom can take on multiple shades of meaning. At times it is used to describe any student coming from outside the UK, but more commonly it is used as shorthand for any student who is studying in English when English is an additional language. At this point, the labels ‘home’ and ‘international’ become interchangeable with native (NS) and non-native speaker (NNS).

However, the terms native and non-native speaker have been also widely critiqued within linguistic research literature (Kachru, 1982; Holliday, 2010, 2011; Seidlhofer, 2011) and do not provide a clear distinction between those students who, for example, speak one language at home (their ‘mother tongue’), yet have been educated in a second language and are proficient in both – often with greater expertise in writing their ‘second’ language as it tends to be the language of their education. When simplistically understood, the terms can, at their worst, be racist. At its best, the ‘commonsense view’ (Davies, 2003: 24) of a native speaker does not incorporate or question the multiple terms that should be implied, including the multiplicity of Englishes used across the globe ranging from English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) which involves communication in English that is negotiated between individuals who are all ‘non-native’ speakers of the language, to the concepts of bilingual codeswitching, translanguaging or even to regional dialect (see Canagarajah, 2013; Jenkins, 2013, 2015; Mauranen, 2012; Seidlhofer, 2011). All of these ‘Englishes’, whilst valid, may contribute to a student encountering difficulty in accessing certain elements of a UK university curriculum (Lillis et al., 2015; Ivanic, 1998). There have been some recent empirical and pedagogically oriented studies on ELF and translingualism (for example, Flowerdew, 2015; McIntosh et al. 2017), although there remains disagreement as to whether this is simply a reframing that ignores prior research findings (see Matsuda, 2014; Tardy, 2017 and Tribble, 2017). Davies (2003: 8) suggests that native-speaker membership is one of ‘self-ascription not of something being given’ and is largely a sociolinguistic construct relating to levels of confidence and identity. It is thus, he suggests, a boundary that is ‘as much created by non-native speakers as by native speakers themselves’ (2003: 9). However it is understood, the binary use of the native and non-native speaker label is clearly as problematic and contested (if not more so) as the term international student.

Thus, when using the term ‘International student’ it is important to recognise the power structures and cultural capital (both in terms of opportunities and prejudices) that lie behind it. It is not benign and can be used to separate out and ‘other’ specific groups of people as well as to provide access to support. There is also no one label that can be used for this group of students that is not seen as denoting some kind of deficit differential, as any label must by its very nature be seen to separate one group from another, and measure one group against what is currently accepted as a standard norm.

There is not, therefore, one term which succinctly defines the students that this book is mainly concerned with, other than to suggest that at one time or another it is likely to relate to all students regardless of their nominal linguistic background. However, for the sake of ease, I will use the terms International student and, more frequently, EAL (English as an additional language) student1 to denote those students who have traditionally accessed English for Academic Purposes classes and whose difficulty in accessing or voicing their understanding of the knowledge base of their discipline is more likely to be perceived as being due to their English language proficiency. Most commonly, but not always, these students enter University in the United Kingdom with an IELTS2 level of 6.5 overall, or B2 on the CEFR3.

Whilst these students have diverse profiles, motivations and needs, it is that they are using English as an additional language, as a medium of instruction, for academic purposes, that defines them as a distinct group. It is this language use that is perceived by the students themselves and the staff who work with them as the main barrier to being able to access their education. In most UK HE institutions, the work to reduce or bridge this barrier is done by English for Academic Purposes practitioners.

The Position of English for Academic Purposes

English for Academic Purposes (herein EAP) is widely defined as ‘the teaching of English with the specific aim of helping learners to study, conduct research or teach in that language’ (Flowerdew & Peacock, 2001a: 8) and more recently as the means of giving ‘students access to ways of knowing: to the discourses which have emerged to represent events, ideas and observations in the academy’ (Hyland, 2018: 390). In theory, then, EAP practitioners work to enable international, EAL students and, less frequently, staff to access the content of their disciplines and bridge the language gap that is perceived to be the main cause of academic and disciplinary exclusion for this group of students.

However, while there is little disagreement over what EAP teaching is (or at least should be), there is less consensus over how, when and where EAP teaching should take place, or indeed who an EAP practitioner should be. Tribble, for example, has suggested that ‘accounts of what is meant by EAP’ are ‘fragmented and sometimes contradictory’ (2009: 400); Ding and Bruce (2017) have provided a comprehensive overview of the marginal position that EAP practitioners currently occupy within University structures and suggest that this lack of status is, to a degree, self-inflicted. While there is a broad knowledge base for EAP to draw on – which Ding and Bruce suggest specifically are the research areas of: Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL); genre theory; corpus linguistics; Academic Literacies and Critical EAP (2017: 66) – they also argue that this knowledge base is under-explored by teachers and the divide between research and practice in EAP has reached a critical point.

EAP practitioners, according to Ding and Bruce (2017), by not getting truly involved in scholarship find that they are not viewed as an integral part of the academy (and often don’t view themselves as such). In this way, EAP units open themselves up to threats from outside, private providers and a de-valuing of the work they do. This occupancy of the margins of the academic space also often leads to a physical and structural confusion around the place and value of EAP. While many EAP units, when not outsourced to private companies such as Into or Kaplan, are housed in ‘Language Centres’, these centres themselves are housed in a variety of University spaces – or ‘third spaces’ as Hadley suggests (2015). In the UK, these include being part of an Academic Development Unit, a separate service unit, part of central student services; a ‘wing’ of an Academic School (usually Education or Languages and Cultures, but occasionally in less obvious places like Business Schools) as well as being fully integrated into an Applied Linguistics department. Depending on the positioning within the structure of the University, an EAP practitioner will have greater or lesser impetus, time and resources to engage in developing a knowledge base that takes them beyond the delivery of provided EAP materials and working to bridge the research practice divide.

This position is exacerbated by two further external influences. The first is the nature and timing of the EAP teaching year. Financially, the most lucrative teaching period for EAP is the summer, when international students arrive to take a pre-sessional programme for, commonly, 6 to 12 weeks prior to joining their academic programme in midto late September. The purpose of these pre-sessional programmes is to prepare international EAL students for the linguistic and literacy demands of university study in English; in the main however, the students who attend pre-sessionals do so because they have not yet met the language proficiency requirement of their academic programme via an IELTS or equivalent test score and are able to use pre-sessional assessments as an alternative. Pre-sessionals are intense periods of teaching and learning, involving both an exponential increase in student numbers for the EAP unit, and a commensurate increase in staff to teach them. This means either that an EAP teacher is engaged to work on short-term contracts and has limited job security and is thus denied the financial and institutional resources and support to engage in activities that enable them to develop and deepen their knowledge base, or, for those fortunate to have more permanent contracts, the traditional time for reflection on practice and for scholarship that is available to others on teaching and scholarship contracts, is not available. This context perpetuates the position of the EAP practitioner as just ‘a “language teacher” with no connection to political and social issues’ (Gee, 1990 in Turner, 2004: 107).

The second, powerful external force, is the relative hegemony of the IELTS exam as an indicator of language proficiency for international EAL student entry into UK education. Although in some contexts, Universities are beginning to accept other measures of language and academic literacy skills, EAP practitioners frequently find themselves having to build their teaching around the impact of this exam – whether it be moving students away from habits developed as a result of studying for the test (which, for example, requires students to write only 250 words of unreferenced argument in response to a generic ‘essay’ question), or helping students prepare for the test itself. EAP teaching and IELTS teaching are often wrongly conflated. Outside the EAP and language teaching community, there is only a vague understanding of what the different IELTS levels mean (Benzie, 2010; Murray, 2016a). Thus, academics and students alike can often work on the assumption that the stated entry level for TPG study (typically in the United Kingdom 6.5 overall with no less than 6.0 in any of the four skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening) equates to a level that will enable access to the study content with no further need for language development. In fact, contrary to this belief, IELTS itself suggests that at 6.5, for a ‘linguistically demanding academic course’ that ‘English study is needed’; for ‘linguistically less demanding academic courses’, the student’s level of English is ‘probably acceptable’ (IELTS, 2017). This does beg the question as to what kind of TPG programme could be classified as linguistically less demanding, particularly if it is one studied in the United Kingdom, alongside a global community of peers for whom English is the only common language for knowledge and social exchange.

This conflation between IELTS and EAP places EAP practitioners in a difficult position because, arguably, it devalues the complexity of the work involved in de-coding disciplinary knowledge communication discourse and in working with students to enable them to access the academy. Critically, it is often the EAP unit that becomes the target of blame when students on a programme are deemed to be struggling due to language proficiency. Thus IELTS and concurrently language is viewed as the ‘catch-all term for problems with unmet standards, and the need for remediation’ (Turner, 2004: 99) which Turner also argues results in the denial of academic respect to EAP teachers and their students. ‘The dilemma for the academic literacy pedagogies is that they are only tolerated while they remain remedial … the remedial positioning of language work is necessary in order to maintain the culturally embedded and socially embodied “habitus” of being academic’ (Turner, 2011: 37), in other words language is seen as part of the physical embodiment of an academic; it is ‘who they are’ or ‘who you become’ implicitly rather than something that can be analysed, de- and then re-constructed explicitly and expertly. I argue that it is part of the role of EAP practitioners to change this perspective amongst their academic colleagues that few are, as yet, fulfilling.

Thus, while many international students, are struggling to access their own academic ‘community of practice’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991) because the current apprenticeship does not explicitly acknowledge its shared language as something to be learned and are thus facing perceptions of being in deficit linguistically and feeling culturally excluded, their first point of contact is often with EAP teachers who are also relative outsiders to the academy. Many of these practitioners, particularly over the summer pre-sessional period, are employed with little experience, little time to equip themselves and occasionally dubious credentials. This does, then, raise the question as to how well EAP does the job it is tasked with doing, of giving ‘students access to ways of knowing’ (Hyland, 2018: 390). If EAP units, and language learning and teaching, are disconnected from and undervalued by, the rest of the academy, how do students, EAP teachers and content teachers understand where language and content knowledge connect and disconnect? How does this view of language and its place in knowledge communication impact on their teaching and learning practices and their identity as members of an academic community? And how can teaching and learning be truly inclusive and international if a focus on the (globally dominant English) language used to communicate the knowledge being gained is outwith the written curriculum? Within this book, I aim to draw out these complex themes and questions, demonstrating how they overlap, intersect and, at times, contradict. In doing so, the narratives and experiences I present feed into a global conversation and hopefully present some clear suggestions as to how to think differently and work more collaboratively to ensure that language becomes more visible across the higher education curriculum and that all students are better supported in accessing and demonstrating their own emerging knowledge.