The role of languages in internationalised higher education classrooms

This chapter explores how internationalisation is articulated in the language practices of higher education (HE) classrooms and, at the same time, offers suggestions as to how educational developers (EDs) may support lecturers teaching in multilingual learning contexts. The transmission model not only runs counter to the understanding of learning as co-construction of knowledge, but also to 21st-century contexts of learning and teaching where learning online, collaborative projects, distance learning, and peer-to-peer instruction also play an important role. A classroom can be seen to have a broadly agreed set of common goals, a wide variety of means of communication and mechanisms for providing information and feedback, and a specific set of genres or text types used for communication. Educational development is, of course, naturally focused on the way in which information is presented to students. In international classrooms, all participants, whatever their communicative competence, need to be able to adjust their communication to interact with others and learn successfully.