Internationalisation and Multilingualism within a UK University context: An interview with Maxine Gillway, Director of CELFS

by Nick Roll

As part of my own research investigating student and teacher attitudes towards the use of L1 in multilingual EAP classes, I recently interviewed Maxine Gillway, the current Director of The Centre for English Language and Foundation Studies (CELFS) at the University of Bristol.

Purpose of CELFS within an internationalised University

It was interesting to learn how Maxine’s past experience in EFL and EAP contexts may have influenced her own teaching beliefs. These are partly articulated in the “CELFS principles” (development, reflexivity, autonomy, collaboration, transparency, transferability) and also appear to have informed her contingent attitude to the use of L1 in the classroom, the main aspect of my research interest. Much of the conversation chimed satisfyingly with the bigger picture that surrounds this theme regarding the extent to which internationalisation has led to the University becoming an increasingly multilingual, multicultural site of learning where multiple languages, including various “Englishes”, fluidly overlap within and between classes and beyond.

My interviewee immediately addressed the evolving purpose of our department and her own attitudinal stance within the University context. She stressed that CELFS should not be perceived as a separate entity to the rest of the University simply supplying language support to so-called “non-native” or “deficient”, Foundation and pre-Masters students.  Integration with the University was emphasised, so she strongly argues that the primary purpose of CELFS under her directorship aims to offer “academic literacy development opportunities to everyone” around the University. This entails working with staff, “home” students and international “mobile” students, the latter term suggesting greater agency and value to the University community.

 Cautious L1 tolerance

Maxine pointed out that for many “mobile” students, content knowledge is their primary goal rather than linguistic perfection.  They will use whatever best serves their primary communicative purpose, be it English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), another language or a blend.  We discussed the potential benefits and challenges of allowing some use of L1 in an EAP classroom to reduce cognitive load and enable scaffolding and Maxine’s prompted responses suggest that she stands towards the tolerant side on the “cline of L1 (in)tolerance” in a University context.

 

Nevertheless, she also highlighted the dangers associated with this, citing a specific recent example when dominant students abused their opportunity to use L1 by insulting their peers and staff in their “secret code”. This is perhaps worthy of further investigation and may influence my own research focus.

 

Research

Finally, my interviewee’s principled passion for research in our context through “habitual reflexivity” (Sweetman, 2003 cited in Hall, 2012) was exemplified in our tentatively constructed closing exchange. Maxine revealed that she is a pragmatist in terms of research approach and methods but leans towards the qualitative side as seems increasingly common in the field of education. Her main advice to busy practitioner-researchers like myself was to persist in pursuing a subject one is passionate about while remaining open to unexpected findings and potential changes in focus. And this is indeed what is happening as I sift through the fascinatingly diverse student and teacher questionnaire responses and interview transcripts. As a taster, here are three early thought-provoking examples of differing attitudes expressed by International Foundation students in April 2018 and which rather eloquently echo some of the themes that emerged in my discussion with Maxine in the winter of 2017:

 

L1 should not be used in classrooms …Some students don’t understand and it can get rude at times when it’s constant.

 

Although the use of L1 could disturb the learning process for other students, we cannot be forced to not use it in our daily lives, L1 for us is culture, religion, life.

 

My classmates are really interested in my L1 and they enjoying learning it, I feel pleased to teach them.

 

So, fellow EAP practitioners, what’s your response to the above and where do YOU stand regarding the use of L1 in the multilingual EAP classroom? Here are some further questions to ponder:

 

1. When, if at all, do you allow students to use L1 in the classroom? Why/why not?
2. (Why) do we tend to discourage the use of bilingual dictionaries or L1 sources?
3. Could we be blinded by our predominantly monolingual attitude and bias partly due to our Celta/Delta indoctrination of CLT as the default methodology?
4. Could there be any place for “pedagogical translanguaging” (Probyn, 2015), i.e purposeful mixing and switching between languages within a lesson, in a multilingual British University context?
5. Should students be able to add their L1 own “voice” in their academic writing and challenge rigid academic conventions?
6. Should/could University assessment reflect multilingual reality?

 

In short, should our multilingual “mobile” students, as Maxine describes them above, be granted some established “translanguaging space” (Li Wei, 2011) within the classroom or should the seemingly natural process of translanguaging be left to occur outside the class only?

As always, to be continued…

 

 

 

 

References:

 

Hall, J.K. (2012) Teaching and Researching: Language and Culture, 2nd edn, Abingdon, Routledge.

 

Li Wei, (2011) ‘Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain’, Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 43, no.5, pp.1222-1235.

 

Probyn, M., (2015) Pedagogical translanguaging: Bridging discourses in South African science classrooms. Language and Education, 29(3), pp.218-234.