On 15th-17th June 2022, the 8th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd’22) took place in Valencia, Spain (hybrid format). The research team was represented by Oana Ivan, Loredana Bercuci, Madalina Chitez, Roxana Rogobete and Andreea Dinca, who presented the paper Making international mobility student-friendly: a linguistically embedded assessment of higher education internationalisation strategies.
Abstract:
Internationalisation is a desired goal for contemporary universities, which are increasingly using concepts like cultural diversity or globalism as selling points to attract students. However, these concepts are not always clearly defined in terms of underlying values and lived experience. We used a corpus linguistics approach to extract university descriptors of the term ‘internationalisation’. For that purpose, we compiled the INTER corpus (Corpus of Internationalisation Terminology in Higher Education Institutions in Europe), which includes texts extracted from the websites of 50 European Universities. We analyse the lexical profile of the tokens semantically connected to the concept of ‘internationalisation’. To verify whether the advertised concepts of internationalisation match the lived experience of the students, we use a second corpus, LIVIT (Corpus of Lived Internationalisation Experiences), which includes 300 testimonies of student mobility. All data and analyses capture the pre-COVID situation and are intended to inform the post-COVID university policymaking.
More about the conference here.
The full paper can be accessed here.
The Proceedings of the Conference can be accessed here.
