Plurilingual resources for ‘welcoming’ at a university service for international students

Abstract

This paper studies the situated meaning given to a so-called 'welcome' service for international students at a Catalan university. The official business of the service is to offer support with bureaucratic procedures and information about available services, including those for learning Catalan. However, the complex range of overlapping activities emerging in interactions at the service leads us to question how participants themselves (i.e. service providers and student users) understand the business of 'welcoming'. Furthermore, the use of different languages in the interactions brings us to ask what role participants assign to their plurilingual resources in accomplishing this business. The results allow us to describe the 'welcome' service as a complex and significant place for the language socialisation of newcomers to the university, as well as the central role of plurilingual resources in achieving this aim, in constucting the multilingual order and in accomplishing internationalisation. These results provide insights for policies aiming at the management of linguistic diversity in scenarios of internationalisation.