Session Information
31 SES 02 A, Language Attitudes and Learning: From primary school to higher education
Symposium
Contribution
This paper explores language attitudes and ideologies related to the use of English in Dutch higher education. Historically, the Netherlands is a country with a multilingual society in which German and French played an important role. more recently, however, the Netherlands may be seen to be moving towards becoming a more bilingual society with English being more and more entrenched in the functions of Dutch society (Edwards, 2016; Van Oostendorp, 2012), not least in the functions of Dutch higher education. In recent years, a lively debate has been taking place about this development in the media and in the context of Dutch higher education itself, with different stakeholders taking different positions (lay people and experts alike; see for an example De Groot, 2017). Besides rational and moral arguments, sentiments and emotional arguments also feature in the debate. Accents and language variation are known to trigger language attitudes (see e.g. the FTA literature; Bailey, 1984; Rubin & Smith, 1990; Jensen et al., 2013). This research focuses explicitly on the role of language attitudes (e.g. status, solidarity (Dragojevic, Giles, Watson, 2013)) and ideology (communicative, national, personal, educational and cognitive dimensions (Schmied, 1992)) in the debate described above; in order to explore how these dimensions may be seen to play a role in how people make sense of or rationalise linguistic diversity considering use of English in Dutch higher education. The three main research questions in this study are: 1. What attitudes do teachers have towards the use of English in Dutch higher education?; 2. What language ideologies related to the use of English in Dutch higher education are reflected in the debate taking place about this topic in the Dutch printed press?; and 3. What factors play a role in the development of these language ideologies and language attitudes? This contribution summarises findings from 20 semi-structured interviews with teaching staff working at a Dutch University of Applied Science (30-45 minute interviews taken during the academic year September 2016 to August 2017), findings from a small corpus of 69 media articles with an average word count of 795 words per article, found in major Dutch newspapers across a 6 year timespan (timeframe January 1st, 2012 to January 1st 2018), and findings from a survey exploring language attitudes and ideologies amongst staff employed by a Dutch University of Applied Science.
References
Bailey, K. M., (1984). Foreign Teaching Assistants in U.S. Universities. Washington: National Association for Foreign Student Affairs. De Groot, A. (2017). Nederlands moet: over meertaligheid en de verengelsing van het universitaire onderwijs. Retrieved from: https://www.scienceguide.nl/2017/11/nederlands-moet/ Dragojevic, M.; Giles, H.; & Watson, B.M. (2013). Language ideologies and language attitudes: A foundational framework. In Giles, & Watson, 1–25. Edwards, A. (2016). English in the Netherlands: Functions, forms and attitudes (Varieties of English around the World, vol. G56). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Giles, H., & Watson, B.M. (eds.) (2013). The social meanings of language, dialect, and accent: International perspectives on speech styles. New York: Peter Lang. Schmied, J. (1991). English in Africa. An introduction. New York: Longman Linguistics Library. Rubin, D. & Smith, K. (1990). Effects of accent, ethnicity, and lecture topic on undergraduates’ perceptions of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 14, 337-353. Van Oostendorp, M. (2012). Bilingualism versus multilingualism in the Netherlands. Language Problems and Language Planning (36)(3): 252-272.
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