Valuing National Disciplinary Language in Internationalised Higher Education: Student Perspectives across Disciplinary Ecologies

Övrigt konferensbidrag, 2026

This paper explores how students in internationalised higher education systems value the relevance and legitimacy of national disciplinary language, using Sweden as a high-internationalisation European case. Across Europe, the expansion of English-medium instruction (EMI) has become a central strategy for internationalisation, while universities are simultaneously expected to maintain national languages for academic and professional purposes. Although these tensions are well documented at policy and institutional levels, less is known about how they are experienced and interpreted by students across different disciplinary and degree contexts.

Drawing on research on internationalisation, disciplinary literacy, and higher education language policy, the paper conceptualises students’ language valuations as a latent orientation reflecting how national disciplinary language is positioned across four functional domains: learning and academic success, programme-level relevance, teaching practices, and future professional work. Theoretically, language is treated as a resource whose value is produced within institutional and disciplinary regimes rather than through individual preference alone. From this perspective, students’ valuations are understood as shaped by broader constellations of disciplinary traditions, programme structures, language-of-instruction arrangements, assessment practices, and professional expectations.

Empirically, the paper draws on survey data from university students in Sweden. Rather than presenting definitive results, the analysis focuses on identifying indicative patterns for how students’ valuations cohere and how they appear to vary across educational contexts, including study level, language of instruction, and disciplinary field.

The European relevance of the study is twofold. First, Sweden’s partial EMI landscape mirrors developments across the Nordic region and wider Europe, where commitments to national languages coexist with expanding English-medium provision. Second, disciplinary variation in language use – particularly between STEM, education and health, and humanities and social sciences – raises questions of broader relevance for European debates on parallel language use, governance, and how discipline- and profession-specific ecologies of practice produce language value.

By foregrounding student perspectives, the paper aims to contribute to discussions on how the conditions for learning, knowing, and acting in higher education are structured through disciplinary and institutional arrangements, and how language value is negotiated within these contexts, thus highlighting the role of power relations through which certain languages acquire legitimacy and are rendered consequential as academic and professional resources.

The initial sample comprised approximately 1,000 student respondents, with effective sample sizes varying across analyses due to item non-response (N ≈ 940–987). Students were drawn from a wide range of disciplinary fields and study levels, enabling comparisons across educational contexts.
Students’ valuation of national disciplinary language was operationalised as a latent construct measured by four ordered items capturing the perceived importance of Swedish disciplinary or professional language for: (1) learning and understanding course content, (2) programme-level relevance, (3) teachers’ instructional practices, and (4) future professional work. All items were measured on five-point response scales and treated as ordinal.
Individual background variables included gender, age, and first-language background (Swedish vs. non-Swedish L1). Educational context variables comprised study level (first- vs. second-cycle), language of instruction (Swedish- vs. English-medium), and disciplinary field. Programmes were grouped into three theoretically motivated categories: (i) STEM; (ii) social sciences, humanities, and arts; and (iii) education and health/care.

Data analysis proceeded in two stages. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to examine the coherence of the four items as a single latent construct. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was then employed to explore how this latent valuation was patterned by individual background characteristics and educational context variables. All analyses were conducted using Mplus.

The analysis suggests that students who value national disciplinary language as important in one educational domain (e.g., for learning) also tend to value it as important in other domains (e.g., teaching practices and future professional work). Together, these patterns point to a broader underlying orientation towards the relevance and legitimacy of national disciplinary language in higher education.

Preliminary results indicate that students enrolled in English-medium programmes tend to attribute lower relevance to the national disciplinary language. However, this pattern does not appear to be uniform across programme disciplines. Instead, disciplinary field appears to shape both the likelihood of EMI and how consequential language choice becomes for students. From this perspective, language of instruction functions less as an independent driver of students’ language valuations and more as part of wider discipline- and profession-specific ecologies of practice. Interpreted in this way, differences in students’ valuations can be understood as adaptive responses to organisational, curricular, and professional contexts rather than as individual attitudes for or against language policies. In a broader European context, the findings open up discussion of how internationalisation, parallel language use, and disciplinary traditions interact in shaping language value in higher education, including questions of power, legitimacy, and responsibility in language choice.