National languages in academic research and higher education

Annette de Groot studied Dutch Language and Literature and General Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and subsequently obtained a doctorate in Psycholinguistics, also at Radboud University Nijmegen. In 1987 she was appointed by the University of Amsterdam, first as associate professor of Cognitive Psychology and next as professor of Experimental Psycholinguistics. She conducted research on reading and spelling, word recognition and the mental lexicon, and bilingualism and multilingualism. Within the latter research theme, the emphasis was on word processing by bilinguals, word learning in a second language, and simultaneous interpreting. In addition to dozens of journal articles and book chapters, she has published a number of books, including the monograph Language and cognition in bilinguals and multilinguals: An introduction, published by Psychology Press. Her farewell lecture Nederlands moet: over meertaligheid en de verengelsing van het universitaire onderwijs (Dutch is a must: about multilingualism and the anglicisation of university education), marks the beginning of her current efforts to inform various audiences about the risks and adverse effects of large-scale anglicisation of higher education. These efforts are particularly urgent in The Netherlands, where English has rapidly become the sole language of instruction in the majority of university programs.

Rainer Enrique Hamel gained his PhD in Romance linguistics at Frankfurt University, Germany. He is professor of linguistics in the Department of Anthropology at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) in Mexico City, and a member of the Mexican Academy of Science. He is the Director of the inter-institutional Research Programme “Indigenous Communities and Intercultural Bilingual Education” hosted at UAM, and the Director of the Project Networks “Language Policy in Latin America” of ALFAL, the Association of Linguists and Philologists of Latin America: he is the representative of the UNESCO Chair on Politics of Multilingualism in Mexico. His areas of research include sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, bilingualism and bilingual education, language politics and planning, and discourse analysis, especially interaction research. He has published several books and over 70 articles and book chapters in five different languages. Over the past 25 years he has worked as a visiting researcher and professor in the Universities of Campinas, Belem and Bahia, Brazil, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara and UC San Diego, USA, and Frankfurt, Mannheim and Freiburg, Germany, as well as in other countries.
www.hamel.com.mx

Vera Schwach earned a doctoral degree (dr.philos.) in history from the University of Oslo (2012) and helds a position as Research Professor at NIFU, Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Higher Education, situated in Oslo, Norway. Schwach’s specialities includes evaluation, studies on research policy, higher education and history of science. Since 2003 she has examined the use of English and the national language, Norwegian, in research and higher education. Her investigations of academic curriculums includes language distribution in bachelor- and master programmes respectively, in textbooks and other learning resources, furthermore, teaching and learning environment in general. Her ambition is to reach facts and insight in contemporary use of English and Norwegian in an academic setting, and to establish reliable methods and statistics for investigations. The majority of the studies has been Commissioned by the Norwegian Language Council (Språkrådet). The results have contributed to a knowledge basis for the Language Council’s work and policy, furthermore to official papers and Government’s white papers to the Parliament.

Kerttu Rozenvalde currently works at the Department of Language Development of the Latvian Language Agency where she does sociolinguistic research. Right now, she is part of the working group that carries out a large-scale macro-sociolinguistic study on language situation in Latvia from 2016 to 2020. The research is a continuation of previous work done in a similar vein (The Language Situation in Latvia. 2010–2015. Latvian Language Agency, 2017). From 2011 to 2017 she worked as lecturer of the Estonian language and culture at the University of Latvia. Among her fields of research are language and higher education policies. She recently defended her PhD dissertation that investigated the interplay of languages in higher education comparatively in Estonia and Latvia.