Language Attitudes and Choices of Students for Learning Purposes in Multilingual Higher Education Environment

Abstract

Multilingual higher education has become quite a wide-spread phenomenon. Considering language ‘as a resource’ (Ruiz, 1984), a lot of tertiary institutions in multilingual countries around the world are adopting English as a medium of instruction (EMI) as a part of globalization and internationalization. Thus, most of them use English as a lingua franca, which creates a new space for multilingual practices in the educational context. However, this particular study addresses the problem of ‘accelerating Englishization in multilingual higher education without any gains in multilingualism’ (Van der Walt, 2013). In particular, it takes the case of Nazarbayev University (NU), which represents an English-medium institution with international faculty and a small number of international students. It should be mentioned that due to the post-Soviet context, Kazakhstan hosts more than 100 nationalities and most of the people speak at least their native language and Russian as a language of communication. However, even though most students are multilingual due to the context, classrooms in NU can be a unilingual (English-only) space. It can be assumed since English is not the first or even the second language of most students, that they may use different aspects of their linguistic repertoire to understand the material and complete their academic tasks. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify how students in the multilingual higher educational environment of NU use languages from their repertoire and the attitudes that underpin those choices when it comes to learning strategies inside and outside the classroom. In order to explore that matter, a qualitative study was conducted with a series of semi-structured interviews among several students of NU from different backgrounds. The transcripts of these interviews were analyzed by means of direct coding. The research found out that NU students use different parts of their linguistic repertoires in learning and everyday contexts, and EMI does not reduce their multilingualism (even vice versa).