General Overview

Introduction

This book foregrounds language as a central rather than a peripheral player in the work of higher education. The empirical reality of language, its materiality, its uses in academic performance, its importance in intercultural communication and the cultural values associated with it, and performance in it, all play an important role in contemporary higher education in the United Kingdom. As such institutions have become increasingly international in recent years, the experiential reality of intercultural communication has reached larger numbers of students and staff. This has not always, however, been accompanied by richer ways of interpreting what is actually going on in many of the varied kinds of intercultural encounters that occur. It is one of the aims of the book to illustrate some of that variation and make the interpretative possibilities more widely available. This includes analyses of intercultural encounters between tutors and students, of student perceptions of those encounters, as well as the cultural background values that have motivated the linguistic behaviour or subject positions of those involved, along with discussion of frequently foregrounded topics of intercultural concern such as silence, being critical, individualist opinion giving or speaking in relation to group orientation. The empirical reality of intercultural communication, given its increasing presence in contemporary higher education is also seen as an important driver of change, even if unplanned, in the pedagogic practices of higher education.

A further important aim of the book is to frame language in the contemporary academy as an object of cultural theory. This is to some extent a counterfoil to the perception of language as a superficial practical concern. While the relentlessly practical nature of language work is not denied, and indeed seen in need of more positive evaluation, the fact that its issues circulate predominantly within a deficit discourse is subjected to critique. Reasons for the ready availability of this discourse are sought in intellectual cultural history, in particular in relation to how attitudes to knowledge developed through the scientific revolution and the European Enlightenment effectively made language invisible. This invisibilising process is theorised in Chapter 5 through what I have called 'occidentalist inscription'. The rhetorical values which have been formed in relation to this inscription, the rhetorical norms which have been set up, the evaluative metalanguage which corresponds to the rhetorical norms in the assessment of student writing and the rhetorical subject positions which academic writers are normatively obliged to take up are the focus of Chapters 5 and 6. The rhetorical norms are seen as part of wider cultural practices and the effects of social and political power, rather than as an independent codification of rules which must be adhered to.

Addressing the Institutional Interface between Language and Higher Education

From a pedagogical perspective, as those of us who work as language teachers of one sort or another in higher education will know, the empirical reality of language and intercultural communication lends a relentless practicality to the issues that need addressing. It is, however, also the case that such practical issues affecting pedagogy and curriculum in the different contexts of teaching and learning language or languages have already been prolifically identified and addressed in a wide range of publications, Byram (2004), Byram and Grundy (2003), Celce-Murcia (2001), Kramsch (1993), Nunan (1998) and Tudor (2001), to name but a few, as well as in journals too numerous to mention. While those practical and pedagogic issues of language, language teaching and learning have developed their own professional spaces, the institutional interface between language and higher education remains a neglected area. It is a major aim of this book then to address, and redress, this neglect.

Furthermore, while the ways students are expected to perform through language in higher education has been the focus of pedagogy and curriculum design in English for Academic Purposes (EAP), the cultural values inscribed in those expectations have themselves received little attention. For example, the question of why we evaluate academic writing in the way that we do is not often asked. The focus is rather on teaching its pedagogical genres and their rhetorical norms as if given. This is another unexplored topic, which the book takes on. It does this with historical reflexivity, locating specific sites in intellectual cultural history where conceptualisations of language were generated, which continue to hold sway, if only implicitly, in the institutional context of contemporary higher education. Furthermore, the preferred ways in which language is used in pedagogic academic contexts are seen as linguistic and rhetorical inscriptions of cultural values that have gained power, at specific moments, or over the course of intellectual history.

In putting the interface between language and higher education in the frame for cultural-theoretical research, the book constitutes an intellectual effort to make the workings of western academic culture, as it relates to how language is used and evaluated in higher education pedagogy and assessment, available to critical reflection and transformation. This is in marked contrast to the prevailing institutional discourse, whereby discussion of language issues circulates in a deficit discourse, and language work is marginalised.

Re-configuring Marginalisation

The teaching of EAP, or academic writing/academic literacy, as well as that of modern foreign languages, is routinely sidelined in the institutional discourse of higher education. All such pedagogic practices, whilst they have their own strong professional backgrounds, are, in institutional terms, seen as less important 'services' rather than as being of substantive academic merit in their own right. To foreground them at all then becomes a matter of institutional politics. In a small way, it disrupts the language/ content dichotomy that has grown up around language and languages. As has been shown in post-structuralist theorising, notably in Derridean...