Abstract
Within the last decade, many universities in non-Anglophone Europe have developed new language policies in order to sharpen their international profile. Since 2008, the University of Copenhagen has been guided by a parallel language strategy aiming at a balance between English and the national language Danish. In addition, the university has recently decided to develop a new strategy which introduces several other languages as potentially relevant for students in their academic programs and when they target the Danish or the international labor market. At an institutional level this is seen as a way of promoting quality of programs and securing the university’s position in the international market. However, neither all languages nor all four language skills are equally important for all purposes. Therefore a careful needs analysis is an important first step in order to decide which languages and language skills to include in the actual planning. At the University of Copenhagen the needs analyses involve students as well as instructors and members of study boards. These different participants in the academic community are often motivated by different perspectives on teaching and learning issues, e.g., on curricular priorities and traditions, but also hold individual preferences. Based on a language-in-education perspective, this paper will focus on the different organizational levels involved when developing and implementing a new language strategy and the possible alignments and mismatches between these levels. As an example it will look at the role of the French and German languages as mentioned by different stakeholders and compare this with the situation for English.
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Notes
- 1.
Within the Nordic region, Finnish universities include a mandatory foreign language element in all BA-programs, and Roskilde University in Denmark has experimented with French, German and Spanish Language Profiles as an option in the humanities and social science and as an alternative to studies in English or Danish (Daryai-Hansen, Barfod, & Schwartz, 2016).
- 2.
The strategy was set up as a 5-year project under the UCPH Prorector for Education, Lykke Friis, running from 2013–2018, and anchored at Faculty of Humanities under the Associate Dean for Education, Jens Erik Mogensen. In practice, an administrative unit (the project team) was established at the University’s Centre for Internationalization and Parallel Language Use. This meant that the project activities could draw on the Centre’s research base as well as its expertise in developing tailor-made courses in English and Danish for staff and students.
- 3.
In Denmark PhD students are considered employees on 3-year contracts and not students.
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Holmen, A. (2018). Shaping a Danish Multilingual University’s Language Policy: Gatekeepers and Drivers of Change. In: Siiner, M., Hult, F., Kupisch, T. (eds) Language Policy and Language Acquisition Planning. Language Policy, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75963-0_8
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