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Universities in English medium instruction (EMI) settings are generally reticent about the linguistic diversity of their student body. Very often, a monolingual mindset dominates institutional thinking that casts linguistic diversity as obstacle rather than asset for the EMI curriculum. This has given rise to deficit models of English language provision in which language tutors are viewed as offering language support and ‘fixing’ language problems. It is timely to address these anachronistic views. In this paper, I do so by making the case for the multilingual agenda in EMI higher educational institutions. From a plurilingual perspective, I examine three narratives for developing the multilingual agenda: (1) ‘the institution as anglophone and multilingual’; (2) ‘students as plurilingual speakers’; and (3) ‘EMI curriculum and pedagogy informed by language-as-resource’. I argue that the significance of these narratives lies in treating them as interrelated and demonstrating their salience for enacting wider higher education agendas at the institutional level.

In this Special Issue, we present a series of articles on plurilingual approaches to teaching and learning in two Anglophone higher educational settings, the UK and Anglophone Canada. Universities ...

This paper sets out to develop a finer-grained understanding of the ‘plurilingual social actor’ within an Anglophone higher educational setting. Drawing on data collected as part of The Multilingua...

As universities in the Anglophone world attend to operating on a global stage, linguistic diversity in the sector has intensified. Historically, higher education has adopted language-as-problem orientations to managing linguistic diversity, viewing multilingual repertoires largely as an obstacle. An emerging body of work informed by language-as-resource orientations seeks to counter these deficit views. However, while timely, it risks treating the multilingual student population as a homogeneous group. This paper addresses this issue by developing a finer-grained understanding of student experiences of their multilingual repertoires with two groups of students from different socioeconomic backgrounds: working-class Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) undergraduate students and international postgraduate students from more socially elite families. By examining students’ experiences of their multilingual repertoires in the institution, I demonstrate how universities stratify the linguistic diversity in their midst, arguing that this is resonant with elite-plebeian views of bilingualism. I contend that language-as-resource informed curriculum and pedagogy needs to attend to institutional practices that stratify linguistic diversity to avoid reinforcing a situation in which the multilingualism of students from professional and socially elite groups is reinforced while little is gained when it comes to the multilingualism of working-class BME students.

This article examines how non traditional male undergraduate students from linguistic minorities perform gender on an academic writing programme and what this tells us about the significance of gender for the teaching of academic writing in the contemporary academy. I focus on how gender is performed in talk about academic discourse and reveal the attraction of ‘laddish’ identities. I aim to deepen understanding in EAP of the importance of the social world on classroom relations and contribute to research that has considered identity in relation to the written outputs of students and scholars. To gain a more nuanced understanding of gender, an intersectional approach is adopted, in which gender is viewed in intersection with social class. I argue that the gender-class nexus is of significance for teaching academic writing in that it reveals how the social world orients students to language learning and their positioning in deficit discourses. I demonstrate how understanding of these issues can be developed through fine-grained analysis of spoken interaction and contend that language-as-resource approaches to linguistic diversity offer a productive way forward for EAP and for teaching in contexts of linguistic diversity in higher education.

This seminar took place at the Institute of Education, University of London, 4 July 2014 (UCL Institute of Education from 2 December 2014).

An impact of globalisation on higher education has been an increase in diversity in the student population in universities in English dominant settings. The increasing diversification has impacted on the linguistic ecology of higher education, resulting in a wide range of linguistic repertoires among the student body. In some institutions, particularly those situated in urban areas, the multilingual classroom may well be the norm. Bi/multilingual university students form a heterogeneous group, encompassing temporary sojourners and members of linguistic minority communities resident in the host country. These students’ linguistic, cultural, ethnic and social class backgrounds impact on their knowledge and experience of using academic language in higher education. In this article, I examine academic language in relation to a group of working class undergraduate university students from linguistic minority communities in the UK. I focus on the ‘socio-symbolic functions’ (Morek and Heller, this issue) of academic language for the participants in the context of an academic writing programme. I consider their ascribed institutional identity, as remedial users of academic language, and their inhabited identities as bi-dialectal users of English, native speakers of English and as multilingual subjects. I discuss how the participants’ ascribed institutional identity erased their bidialectal and multilingual capital and argue that higher education needs to attend to the inhabited identities of working class linguistic minority students in efforts to foster the development of their relationship to academic language.