Multilingual Life on a Monolingual Campus: Phase Two
Multilingual Life on a Monolingual Campus: Phase Two
January, 2022
An Ethics Center-sponsored research project, being carried out by a group of Brandeis undergraduate and graduate students, continues into its second phase during the Spring 2022 semester. “Multilingual Life on a Monolingual Campus: exploring the linguistic experiences of international students in English language-medium universities” aims to shed light on how, in a space that is predominantly English-speaking, international students use all the linguistic resources at their disposal and respond to language challenges and opportunities in their academic and social lives.
The team of Brandeis undergraduate and graduate student researchers, Ji Chen ’23, Nhi Le MA ’23, Anh Nguyen MA ’22, Ella Russell ’22, Angela Self ’22 and Will Simmons ’22, developed a survey in the fall designed to elucidate various realities and challenges experienced by international students. A publicity campaign resulted in over 300 Brandeis undergraduate survey takers, a substantial response rate that has yielded a significant amount of data.
The team is currently analyzing October 2021 Zoom meeting of the Brandeis, Macquarie and Birmingham research teams.this data and selecting respondents for follow-up qualitative interviews. The findings of this research project, including recommendations for how Brandeis can be a welcoming campus for international students, will be presented in a public event in late April 2022.
Multilingual Life on a Monolingual Campus is enriched by running alongside parallel projects at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia and the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Both universities, like Brandeis, are English language-dominant spaces with large international student populations. The three teams meet and share insights and best practices in designing and administering surveys, as well as on qualitative interview techniques.
Read more about the transnational aspect of this project and hear from the faculty leads at the partner institutions in the Summer/Fall 2021 Ethics Central. See page 1: “Multilingual Life on Monolingual Campuses.”