New understandings of the rise of English as a medium of instruction in higher education: the role of key performance indicators and institutional profiling
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Anna Kristina Hultgren
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Robert Wilkinson
Abstract
The rise of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) has prompted concerns over linguistic injustice, educational disadvantage, societal inequality and epistemic homogenization. As EMI tends to generate heated debates, its drivers need to be better understood. Borrowing conceptual frameworks from political science, this article proposes a new understanding of the drivers of EMI, pointing to the introduction of new steering tools in the 1980s to govern Europe’s higher education institutions. Conducting Process Tracing in a Dutch university, and drawing on document analysis and interviews with nine “elite participants” – Ministers of Education, University Rectors, Members of the University Executive Board, Faculty Deans and Programme Leaders – we argue that the very first EMI programme at our case university may be traced back to a set of governance reforms in the Dutch higher education sector that introduced key performance indicators and institutional profiling. Responding to calls for linguists to engage with the political economy, we identify previously under-illuminated links between political processes and EMI. We conclude that close attention to the political economy is key to understanding the rise of EMI, and more generally language shift, and ultimately to tackling linguistic injustice that may follow in its wake.
Funding source: UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship
Award Identifier / Grant number: MR/T021500/1
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Research funding: This research was funded by UK Research and Innovation under a Future Leaders Fellowship (grant reference: MR/T021500/1).
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© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Linguistic justice and global English: theoretical and empirical approaches
- English as a lingua franca and linguistic justice: insights from exchange students’ experiences
- Unequal English accents, covert accentism and EAL migrants in Australia
- New understandings of the rise of English as a medium of instruction in higher education: the role of key performance indicators and institutional profiling
- English as a global language?: Naturalization of English through intellectual habitus in Korean academia
- Both necessary and irrelevant: political economy and linguistic injustice of English in higher education in Kazakhstan
- The value(s) of English as global linguistic capital: a dialogue between linguistic justice and sociolinguistic approaches
- Varia
- Aboriginal linguistic exchange in an Australian city
- Language labeling and ideology in Indonesia
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Linguistic justice and global English: theoretical and empirical approaches
- English as a lingua franca and linguistic justice: insights from exchange students’ experiences
- Unequal English accents, covert accentism and EAL migrants in Australia
- New understandings of the rise of English as a medium of instruction in higher education: the role of key performance indicators and institutional profiling
- English as a global language?: Naturalization of English through intellectual habitus in Korean academia
- Both necessary and irrelevant: political economy and linguistic injustice of English in higher education in Kazakhstan
- The value(s) of English as global linguistic capital: a dialogue between linguistic justice and sociolinguistic approaches
- Varia
- Aboriginal linguistic exchange in an Australian city
- Language labeling and ideology in Indonesia
