Introduction

Abstract

During the past two decades, universities around the world have taken part in a new era of explicit and conscious internationalization. While university research has always been international in scope and focus, students travelling abroad from their home universities, or experiencing an increased intake of non-domestic students in their home classrooms, are a relatively newer phenomenon, at least at the scale on which this is now taking place. More than four million people were studying outside their home country in 2011, a fourfold increase since 1999 (OECD 2011). The CALPIU project (Cultural and Linguistic Practices at the International University), housed at Roskilde University and funded by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities from 2009–2013, included in its ambit, among other interests, a particular focus on student experiences and practices in university education (e.g. Hazel & Mortensen 2013; Mortensen & Fabricius 2014; Mortensen 2014), and with the present volume we gather a wide range of locations together in a series of empirical studies of internationalized university contexts. This volume thus sets out to place the international student experience in concentrated sociolinguistic focus.