Modelling socio-linguistic profiles in multilingual Higher Education Institutions (HEI)

Abstract

Globalisation affects all sectors of the society including higher education. Teaching staff and students are getting increasingly mobile, which results in the linguistic diversity in institutions. This, in its turn, invokes the necessity of accommodating populations with diverse and heterogeneous language skills. The issue of multilingualism in education concerns not only learning and acquisition of additional languages. It also entails the challenges of use of several languages in educational institutions both for daily communication and for learning/teaching various disciplines. However, this direction is currently largely neglected. Dealing with multilingualism in education, information technologies have been applied mainly to language learning and on the automated production of translation of educational content and resources. The attempts to represent the multilingual competences of teachers and learners in a digitally compact and manageable way are scarce. This flies in the face of the sufficient practical need to adapt educational services for all the students and to improve the reception of foreign students in an institution. In this article, we propose to fill in this gap by utilizing an approach from the field of multilingualism: the Dominant Language Constellation (DLC). This concept offers many avenues for application in the education sector. We draw inspiration from this sociolinguistic perspective and demonstrate how to produce, analyse, and use students' sociolinguistic profiles with the help of information technology. We then show some further applications of the IT-enhanced DLC approach to improve the services offered to foreign students at an international University of Geneva, as a case study.