HOW TO PROMOTE HIGH QUALITY MULTILINGUALISM IN AN ENGLISHDOMINATED RESEARCH WORLD? CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES
HOW TO PROMOTE HIGH QUALITY MULTILINGUALISM IN AN ENGLISHDOMINATED RESEARCH WORLD? CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Summary/Abstract: There is a clear dominance of English as lingua franca in the most cited research journals, as well as in various international communication contexts in academia. This does not mean, however, that high quality university education does not continue to exist and flourish in other languages, including German, French or Spanish as lingua franca. The academic context selected for analysis in this paper is an internationally accredited German MBA programme in Romania, where the dominant medium of tuition is German, with only a few courses taught in English. Academic writing is, thus, mainly in German, and the Master dissertations have to be written in German. The main aims of this small scale study are to explore the features of this multilingual environment, in terms of both challenges and opportunities involved, considering that most of the MBA-students enrolled in the programme have neither English nor German as their mother tongue. Text-based research will be complemented by the outcomes of focus group discussions with students and semi-structured interviews with teachers. The findings are meant to inform future curriculum developments, the 'research writing' module, and interdisciplinary cooperation with and among subject teachers, with a focus on enhancing the quality of student dissertation writing and their academic competences, in general.

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