Spotlights on 'practiced' language policy in the internationalised university

Universities in the UK are often adopting ‘internationalisation strategies’ to adapt to the continuous transnational movements of staff and students. As a result, multilingualism is now a key characteristic of higher education in the UK. However, as UK universities are traditionally shaped by English monolingual discourses and English as a medium of instruction, little is known as to whether the ethnolinguistic diversity of staff and students is reflected in daily teaching and learning activities. This chapter takes the case of two taught Master’s programmes in a UK university where there is a high percentage of international students, especially from mainland China. As part of a larger project on the investigation of language policy in the multilingual university (Bonacina-Pugh, Barakos and Chen, forthcoming), this study aims to shed light on the ‘practiced’ language policy (Bonacina-Pugh, 2012, 2020) observed in a corpus of audio-recorded classroom interaction. Taking a Conversation Analytic approach with a focus on language choice acts and shifts of participation frameworks applied by the teacher and students in classroom interaction, our study reveals how languages other than English (e.g. Mandarin) were used and legitimised by a ‘practiced’ language policy developed at the local level of the classroom and support students’ learning.