CALPIU is pleased to announce the publication of a book which, during the three years of its production, has been known as the “CALPIU’12 volume” because the idea of it arose in the wake of the international CALPIU conference held in April of 2012.

The book, edited by Anne H. Fabricius and Bent Preisler, and to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in July of 2015, is entitled Transcultural Interaction and Linguistic Diversity in Higher Education: The student experience. More information available at palgrave.com here

CALPIU’s scope of interests includes a particular focus on student experiences and practices in university education. The internationalization of higher education is being spearheaded by the millions of students all over the world who travel abroad from their home country in order to take up studying at a foreign university, for a limited period of time, as part of their formal education.

Their numbers are on the increase: More than four million students were studying outside their home country in 2011, which was four times as many as in 1999 (OECD 2011). As a result, national universities whose educational practices have by tradition been based on national languages as working languages, and whose traditions of foreign language learning have been nationally and historically determined, are now facing an increasing need to teach, supervise and even conduct administration in English (though they are yet to discover the potential use and usefulness of other languages as higher education lingua francas).

At the transnational political level, the ultimate motivation behind these developments is the possibility to create a flexible global workforce able to negotiate cultural differences and global dynamics.

Not surprisingly, international higher education has developed into an area of empirical interest where applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and other fields of approach can make significant contributions to the understanding and theorizing of the processes and challenges involved in educating a transiently mobile student population.

This volume contains thirteen studies representing the current state of the art for research which inquires into the sociolinguistic consequences of the internationalization of higher education, vis-à-vis an increasingly mobile university student population. The focus on “the student experience” is intended to foreground this particular area as a counterfoil to pedagogical studies of, for example, teaching or project supervision in internationalized university education, or studies focusing on higher education policy making or administrative communication in internationalized university settings.

The CALPIU’12 volume gathers a wide range of locations together in a series of empirical studies of internationalized university contexts, as it sets out to place the international student experience under a sociolinguistic microscope. These studies, organized as chapters, examine aspects of the present-day internationalized student experience from start to finish, covering in turn the initial phase of a sojourn abroad, various teaching and tutoring (or supervision) situations and the challenges that arise in classrooms and other scenarios of university life, until the final chapter which concentrates on the impact of international study on career choices and possibilities.

The chapters employ an eclectic set of methodologies ranging from the quantitative to the qualitative, but are united in a concern to highlight the student experience as the more recent focus point of internationalization efforts at the present time.