The CALPIU Research Center: Studies of Cultural and Linguistic Practices in the International University

Beskrivelse

The CALPIU Research Network is a network of about 50 scholars in about 20 countries which will be consolidated into a Research Center funded by the Danish Research Council for Culture and Communication from mid-2009 on. Network and Center join projects whose common aim is the study of cultural and linguistic aspects of the consequences of transnational student mobility.

Central to the CALPIU effort is the collection of data into a large corpus, with special emphasis on recordings of naturally occurring speech. These data will be collected in four fields of practice:

1. The practice and self-conception of the university in a multilingual world,

2. Teacher-student relations,

3. Student-student relations, and

4. Administrative staff-student interaction.

The data will also document the use of several languages: international languages as lingua francas (prominently English), the local languages and the students’ first languages. Drawing on theories of language choice and language alternation, the projects are trying to describe aspects of these cultural and linguistic practices both on a macro and a micro level, touching on social and linguistic capital, language hierarchies, hegemonic discourses, multilingualism both as a resource for the speaker and a ‘medium’ in discourse, and social order in language alternation both between and within speech events.

In my paper I will illustrate this by presenting some preliminary results from different sub-projects.