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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Policy is what happens while you’re busy doing something else: introduction to special issue on “language” indexing higher education policy

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Traditionally, language has had three functions in higher education. It has been seen as a medium of teaching; as a means of archiving knowledge in different text depositories like books and libraries; and as an object of theoretical study (Brumfit 2004, 164). Brumfit’s typology acknowledges the fact that language somehow crosses the everyday experience of everyone working, studying or otherwise engaged at universities—in other words, in knowledge production. In recent years, however, two major trends in higher education policies have challenged Brumfit’s classification and called for attention to language in a new way: internationalization and globalization policies on the one hand, and knowledge society and knowledge economy policies on the other. Both internationalization (with its connotations to intercultural linguistic contact and communication) and knowledge economy or knowledge society (composed of the informational and cultural contents of immaterial labour; Williams 2010) are highly language-intensive phenomena. This highlights the need to rethink the role of language in when practices and policies of higher education are studied. Empirically, language in higher education policy research has been studied mainly in the context of internationalization, in the frame of Brumfit’s first category of language as a medium of teaching. In Higher Education, 35 articles have in the years 2000–2014 somehow focussed on language. However, majority of these lack the policy dimension, and deal with English language learning in the context of internationalization, and the (usually