Internationalisation and Multilingualism in Doctoral Education: Language Ideologies, Discourse and Positioning

In light of the growing linguistic and cultural diversity among students and researchers,
studies on multilingualism in higher education have been increasingly devoting attention to
how students and academics use their plurilingual repertoire for writing academic texts.
Framed by the internationalisation of higher education and its contributions towards a
knowledge-based society and economy in Europe, little is known about how students and
researchers conceptualise the role of the national language(s) and the linguistic repertoire(s)
vis-à-vis English as the lingua franca. In particular, how academic actors negotiate voice when
choosing a language for academic writing and publishing has not been closely examined.
To rectify this lacuna, this study focuses on the linguistic processes of doctoral publications
and outputs in the context of a multilingual university—the University of Luxembourg (UL),
where next to English also German and French are official academic languages. In view of the
increased usage of English for writing and publishing doctoral theses, questions arise about
the mechanisms and preferences underlying doctoral researchers’ linguistic choices, and how
such choices pertain to shifting academic norms.
Thus, the overall aim of this exploratory study is to show how doctoral researchers in a
multilingual research context—here, the University of Luxembourg—position themselves in
relation to macrolevel discourses about language and academic success within their complex
lingua-cultural and socio-economic setting. The data analysis is based on in-depth problemcentred
interviews with five plurilingual doctoral researchers from China, Germany,
Luxembourg and Russia. By applying discourse analysis to the interview transcripts, this thesis
makes three substantial contributions to the research field. First, it reveals that despite the
dominance of English, doctoral researchers continue to draw on their plurilingual repertoire
as a resource for their research and writing processes, however, for different reasons, which
are ideologically motivated. Second, the study shows that the choice for publishing in English
is mostly based on shifts in academic norms that focus on economic imperatives, such as competition and hyper-performativity. Therefore, the prevalence of English and the pressure
to publish in international journals seem to lead doctoral researchers towards limiting the use
of the totality of their plurilingual repertoire for writing and publishing theses. And third, this
research allows for a detailed understanding of underlying language ideologies of doctoral
researchers in higher education. In particular, it gives insights into the value of the theoretical
concepts of positioning and language ideology in discourse analysis for investigating the
negotiation of voice.