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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ English-Medium Instruction in French Higher Education Competing Ideologies, Policies and Practices Blattes, Marianne Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 03. Oct. 2021 English-Medium Instruction in French Higher Education Competing Ideologies, Policies and Practices Marianne Blattès Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Education, Communication and Society Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy King’s College London January 2018 To my parents. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, I would like to express my immense gratitude to Professor Constant Leung and Dr Simon Coffey for guiding me throughout the years and for their invaluable comments. It has been a privilege to work with them. I would also like to thank Professor Meg Maguire for her continuous support and words of encouragement. A special thank you to all my research participants and to Minister Geneviève Fioraso for her precious time. Many thanks to my dear friend Samar for supporting me along the way and to all my PhD friends from G-10 who made the PhD journey much more enjoyable. To Anne-Mette, Reema, Munirah, Cedric, Kelvin and Raymund for all the great memories. To Patricia, for your endless moral support. I cannot thank my parents enough for their patience, unconditional love and support. Thank you for always being there, believing in me and pushing me to persevere in times of difficulty. Finally, I am grateful for the grant that I received from the International Research Foundation (TIRF). 3 ABSTRACT Over the past decade there has been an exponential rise in the number of courses being delivered in English across Europe making English-medium instruction (EMI) a particularly significant area of research in European higher education (Brenn-White and Faethe 2013). Few studies, however, have examined EMI in France because it is a comparatively recent phenomenon. This thesis aims to provide insight into the ongoing exploration of EMI by investigating it within the French context. In July 2013, Article 2 of the Fioraso Law was introduced making it easier for French universities to deliver courses in English (which was, in theory, illegal under the 1994 Toubon Law). The decision to depart from the traditional French-only model was highly controversial and sparked widespread protests and debates. Using Article 2 as the starting point for the research, the overall aim of the thesis is to examine the policy trajectory of Article 2 and how it has been recontextualised within a specific institutional setting. Following the “ethnography of language policy” (Johnson 2013), this study explores how policy texts and related discourses move through national, institutional and local levels. Ultimately, the goal is to understand how Article 2 (and by extension EMI) is interpreted and enacted “on the ground”. This study focuses on a public French university which primarily specialises in sciences. The thesis comprises three main data sets: official language policy documents (parliamentary debates and four versions of Article 2), interviews (with 8 EMI teachers and 2 university administrators) and EMI classroom observation (14 hours). It emerges that EMI is an extremely sensitive topic at the national level whereas it is more readily accepted within the university context. Taking a discourse-oriented ethnographic approach, this research examines the way in which policy actors understand and engage with EMI at different levels. The findings reveal that EMI is naturalised in the university context, while in Parliament it is instrumentalised for political purposes. By investigating how EMI takes on significantly different meanings across various settings, this study contributes to the field of language policy and planning as well as the research on EMI. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................................................................... 3 ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................ 4 Chapter 1 Introduction ........................................................................................... 12 1.1 Overview of the study .......................................................................................... 12 1.2 Research aim and research questions ................................................................... 13 1.3 Background to the research .................................................................................. 13 1.3.1 What is EMI? ................................................................................................ 13 1.3.2 A picture of EMI in numbers ....................................................................... 16 1.4 “Englishisation” or “internationalisation”? .......................................................... 17 1.4.1 Drivers of EMI in Europe ............................................................................. 17 1.4.1.1 Erasmus .............................................................................................. 19 1.4.1.2 The Bologna Process .......................................................................... 19 1.4.1.3 Attracting international students: a money-making business ............. 20 1.5 Research on EMI in Europe ................................................................................. 21 1.6 Research on EMI in France .................................................................................. 24 1.7 Outline of chapters ............................................................................................... 26 Chapter 2 Language policy in the French context ............................................... 27 2.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 27 2.2 From the Enlightenment to the Revolution .......................................................... 27 2.2.1 The “Académie Française” ........................................................................... 27 2.2.2 The building of the nation state: towards linguistic homogeneity ............... 29 2.3 The 19th century: securing the position of French inside and outside of France 30 2.3.1 The Jules Ferry laws ..................................................................................... 30 2.3.2 Prestige and image planning ......................................................................... 31 2.4 After the Second World War................................................................................ 32 2.4.1 Restoring France’s “rayonnement” .............................................................. 32 2.4.2 Monolingualism on the inside, multilingualism on the outside ................... 33 2.5 The Toubon Law (1994) ...................................................................................... 35 2.6 The 21st century historical language policy shift ................................................. 36 2.7 Towards a definition of language policy .............................................................. 38 2.7.1 A brief history of language policy definitions .............................................. 38 2.7.2 Towards a definition of language policy for my research ............................ 42 2.8 Summary .............................................................................................................. 45 5 Chapter 3 Theoretical framework and research methodology ........................... 46 3.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 46 3.2 Applying a language policy framework to the study of EMI............................... 46 3.2.1 Moving beyond linguistic imperialism ......................................................... 46 3.2.2 Policy as a multi-layered process ................................................................. 50 3.2.3 Policy creation, interpretation and appropriation ......................................... 52 3.3 An “ethnography of language policy” ................................................................. 54 3.3.1 Ethnography or ethnographic perspective? .................................................