English language use at the internationalised universities of Northern Europe: Is there a correlation between Englishisation and world rank?

Abstract

European universities have, since the late 1990s, undergone dramatic changes centred on internationalisation, harmonisation and competition. This paper is concerned with two specific consequences of these changes and their interrelationship: rankings and Englishisation, the latter defined as an increase in the use of English at universities of nation states where English is not the official language. Despite a recent surge in research into Englishisation, it is not yet clear to what extent current organisational changes inevitably entail an orientation towards both rankings and Englishisation or whether a high rank can be attained without the use of English being increased and vice versa. Using as a case study Denmark's eight universities, this paper examines the relationship between the combined rank on seven well-known ranking lists of each of Denmark's eight universities and the extent to which English is used in them, drawing on recently compiled government statistics. The findings suggest that while there is some evidence in support of a correlation, in that lowerranked universities are, on the whole, less likely to use English than higherranked ones, there are some notable exceptions. It is suggested that the findings may shed light on whether Englishisation at the universities of Northern Europe is best explained in terms of unintended consequences or rational choices.

Higher education teachers’ attitudes towards English medium instruction: A three-country comparison

“…We were also surprised that the issue of university rankings (Hultgren, 2014;Unterberger, 2014) did not emerge more powerfully in relation to EMI and internationalisation in view of the virtual absence of all three countries from the top 200 rankings. In other words, the teachers themselves did not appear to consider rising in the rankings an important issue, even if their managers perhaps did.…”

“…However, a causal link between the introduction of EMI and successful "internationalisation" has not yet been established, and in Denmark Hultgren's (2014) study suggests that there is no clear correlation between the introduction of EMI and higher-ranked universities.…”

English-Medium Instruction in European Higher Education

“…It is worth noting that drivers of Englishization may or may not be explicitly recognized as such. At one end of the spectrum we find strategic decisions to offer courses and programmes in English to tap into the lucrative non-EU student market (Hultgren 2014b), at the other we find those decisions where no-one seems to have contemplated or predicted the vast linguistic implications. It has often been pointed out, for instance, that the Bologna Declaration did not devote a single word to language-related issues, despite the undeniably huge linguistic consequences engendered by promoting mobility within the European higher education area (Phillipson 2006;Ljosland 2005;Saarinen and Nikula 2012).…”

“…They are documents that try to regulate a particular area of social reality, establishing clear aims, objectives and actions to be taken by particular stakeholders in order to shape reality in a specific way and achieve certain results. Internationalisation objectives tend to bring with them also different forms of standardisation: university rankings, for instance, can be considered one such form, as detected also by Piller and Cho (2013), since they are clear and 'objective' documents that promote a vision of competition and a scale against which one can measure a particular university's performance (see also Hultgren 2014b).…”

“…In Denmark, for instance, government policies have placed considerable emphasis on internationalization as this tends to be equated with excellence. Institutions have often operationalized this as increasing their intake of international staff, which also leads to Englishization (Hultgren 2014b). Institutional policies may also decide to offer EMI as a way to equip their domestic students for a global job market, what some have referred to as "internationalization at home" (e.g., Söderlundh 2010).…”