Critical perspectives on teaching in the multilingual university (co-editors: Ibrar Bhatt, Mbulungeni Madiba and Khawla Badwan)

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For all societies aiming to play a part in the global economy, language policy in higher education teaching is emerging as an important area of critical inquiry. Language carries much more than communicative value; it carries ideology, symbolic power, and can act as a tool for symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1991). In the case of global higher education, what has come to be a particular fixation with the English language—specifically, an anglophonic ‘native speaker’ variety— has carried with it dominating constructs of knowledge production within institutional policies and in teaching and research practices. Language ideologies, that is to say, the beliefs and ideas about language which expose relations between people, institutions and the social world, are therefore of key importance in the contemporary higher education landscape.