ABSTRACT
Universities in many parts of the world including Japan nowadays promote themselves as ‘international’. A key result of the internationalization of higher education is diversity, with myriad students on campuses outside their own countries. Universities celebrate this diversity on their websites. However, when it comes to language, they assume the lingua franca of international higher education – English – should be the ‘standard’ English of its small minority of native, or national, speakers.
English is thus the ‘elephant in the room’ on international university campuses. That is, many people do not think about it at all, beyond the outdated notion that differences from native English are errors. Others are aware that there is a problem, but do not wish to address it, often because they consider it too complex, or because it presents risks to their own vested interests. It is therefore (national) business as usual in (international) higher education.
In this chapter, I explore the findings of three empirical studies of my own (Jenkins 2014), consider how the prevailing approach to English disadvantages both non-native and native English university students/staff, and discuss what can be done to internationalize universities linguistically.
