This one-day conference will explore how university language policies transfer from one geographic area to another, from one stakeholder to another, in the context of the globalisation of higher education.

Universities worldwide have become more international in the past decades, with more linguistic diversity on campuses and in classrooms. In Europe, such supranational organisations as the Council of Europe and the European Union have been accompanying the increase of transnational exchanges in the academic world by publishing the CERFL, creating the ECML, setting up various programmes, and by co-funding consortia initiatives. Not only have such policies been implemented differently across the countries of Europe depending on higher education policies and traditions, but the CERFL’s influence has also extended well beyond Europe, in America as well as in the Asia-Pacific region, as shown by Byram & Parmenter (2012). 

Numerous stakeholders play a part in university language policy. According to Spolsky's categorisation (2009), these are: students and student organisations, teachers, universities themselves, the army, legal institutions, local governments, activist groups, language management agencies and academies, so that policy change may occur as a result of bottom-up implementation as well as top-down. This blurs the difference between policy and practice. Transfer may thus occur between two or more stakeholders, whether institutions or even individual teachers as those can “formally (in the form of policy text creation) and informally (at the classroom level) appropriate policy in creative and unpredictable ways” (Johnson 2013:55). When students or professors take initiatives locally to promote one or several languages, how do such initiatives affect the organisation's overall language policy?

Policy transfer research has recently emphasised the importance of context to understand the processes at work, and the conceptual difficulties this creates. Individual actors may have become more international, participating in several cross-border networks (Rappleye et al. 2011). The human factor in language policy transfer between states, organisations and organisational levels has also been found paramount (Alderson et al. 2009). At the same time, the distinction between human and organisational factors in language policy transfer may be usefully supplemented by other approaches, for instance anthropological, that account for the fact that "human actors create structures" (Rappleye et al. 2011:5).

Contributions are welcome on the following issues: 

- Theoretical approaches to university language policy transfer 

- Relationships between Europeanisation, globalisation and internationalisation of the multilingual and multicultural learning space; the dynamics of such notions 

- Qualitative and quantitative analysis of university language policy transfer 

- Influence of the CERFL and other Council of Europe instruments on language education in the Anglophone world, particularly in Africa and Asia 

- Influence of state traditions on academic language practices 

- Role of individuals, and of institutions, in language policy transfer 

- Impact of university language policies on other stakeholders

- Impact on academia of language policies carried out by the army, particularly regarding digitalization, and by legal institutions, companies and other stakeholders

- Contrarianism and resistance to the globalisation of university language policy in Anglophone and non-Anglophone countries. 

Please send 400-word proposals to univ.lpt@gmail.com. The abstract should include a short bio-bibliographical note with the affiliation of the speaker, as well as a contact email address.

Deadline for submitting a proposal: 30 June 2017

Contact: anne.marie.barrault.methy@univ-poitiers.fr

References 

Alderson, J.C., ed. 2009. The Politics of Language Education. Individuals and institutions. Bristol, Buffalo, Toronto: Multilingual Matters.

Byram, M., Parmenter, L. 2012. The Common European Framework of Reference. The Globalisation of Language Education Policy. Bristol, Buffalo, Toronto: Multilingual Matters. 

Johnson, D.C. 2013. Language Policy. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.

Rappleye, J., Imoto, Y. and Horiguchi, S. 2011. 'Towards ‘thick description’of educational transfer: understanding a Japanese institution's ‘import’of European language policy'. Comparative Education, 47(4), 411-432.

Spolsky, B. 2009. Language Management. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.