This paper examines Tibetan ethnicity by studying the language ideologies among Tibetan students and their persistent roles in shaping ethnic boundaries at a Minzu University (MU). MU attracts the highest achieving ethnic minority students throughout China and explicitly aims to turn them into patriotic minority cadres. Hosting extremely…

Recent research has shown that increasing the number of international students and staff in universities does not necessarily make the campus more "international". Ladegaard and Cheng (2014) found that local and non-local students live completely separate lives on campus and do not work together, let alone socialise, unless forced to do…

Set within the context of a global pursuit towards the internationalisation of higher education, this paper critically examines student discourse in a globally connected classroom between learners in the USA and Singapore. It makes salient some of the cultural assumptions and tensions that undergird students' discourse in collaborative…

Although significant attention has been devoted to the notion of facework and its functions, facework among L2 speakers, whose cultural backgrounds and language proficiencies vary, has remained unexplored. The present study attempts to explore situations of intercultural communication in which facework is used as a way to remedy moments of…

Linguistic landscape (LL) research seeks to account for the visible displays of multilingualism on public signage. While surveys of signage in the LL produce quantitative descriptions of language contact in a given area, such analyses shed little light on people's interpretations of multilingual signs. Moreover, even within more qualitative…

The rapid increase in English medium instruction (EMI) in higher education has resulted in the need for a greater evidence base documenting EMI in practice spanning a range of settings. Studies of EMI focusing on linguistic issues are beginning to emerge but there are few comparative studies looking at multiple sites, levels and stakeholders. In…

While current conceptualisations of the inextricable connection between language and culture in English language education are largely informed by complex sociocultural theories that view culture as constructed in and through social practices among people, classroom practices continue to be influenced by mainstream discourses of culture that…

We draw on Rampton's "Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents" (2014. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge) notion of "crossing" to explore contestations in ethnolinguistic, cultural and racial affiliations at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), a university built for "Coloureds" in apartheid South Africa, but…

Internationalisation is a buzzword in European higher education, and many universities work hard to devise and implement strategies that will help facilitate increased transnational student mobility. In this context, English is commonly seen as the "natural" choice for university internationalisation, and English is accordingly promoted…

Examines native Hebrew- or Arabic-speaking students' translations from English into their native language as a means of evaluating reading comprehension. Results show that mistranslations in vocabulary, expressions, and utterance-level were good indicators of lack of comprehension. (Author/CB)