Language Practices in Multilingual Legal Education: A Case Study at the University of Luxembourg

Doctoral thesis (2016)

Abstract in English The effects of globalisation include the internationalisation of universities, executed for the purpose of quality improvement, restructuration or upgrading. At the higher education ... [more ▼]

Abstract in English The effects of globalisation include the internationalisation of universities, executed for the purpose of quality improvement, restructuration or upgrading. At the higher education level, internationalisation may be visible in the outline of the curriculum, the superdiversity of students’ and teachers’ origins and languages, as well as the establishment of student and staff exchange programmes. All these aspects lead to the need for communication in different languages and, in an increasing numbers of cases, the presence of languages of teaching and learning which are not the first languages of the teachers, students and administrative staff involved. Therefore, the trend towards internationalisation of universities around the world goes hand in hand with re-structuring related to language use and language choice. In other words, language being an essential component of education has become a major point in governance. The topic of the present thesis is situated in the area of the role of languages and multilingualism in higher education. The study addresses the problem of using a specific instructional language, French, English or German in our case, to learn content subjects in contexts where some of these languages may be a foreign language to students and teachers and in a field, which in many countries is traditionally considered bound to the nation-state and hence to a national language. With regard to the field of law, the situation in the multilingual country Luxembourg is particular in that the Luxembourgish law is formulated in French, to some extent in German but the national language is Luxembourgish. The study sets out to describe the linguistic practices applied in learning and teaching the law at the trilingual university of Luxembourg and investigating how students and teachers view these practices. Using a range of ethnographic methods, the study examines classroom practices in a specific multilingual context and the way participants view them, rather than assessing the appropriateness of the pedagogical means selected or applied by teachers in a normative sense. However, matters of general and legal pedagogy and legal theory will be accessorily although not thoroughly discussed. We hope that the study will contribute to increase the knowledge on this subject in general and be useful for this specific research terrain (Luxembourg) as well as for other similar contexts worldwide. [less ▲]