Background of the Study
Internationalization has been a critical issue that people worldwide are conscious of. (e.g., Hirst and Thompson, 2002; Currie and Newson, 1998). Not only the corporations but also the universities/colleges are engaging in internationalization because of international competition and cooperation. The number of local students is also decreasing on account of a low birth rate. Based on these situations, international recruitment becomes an indispensable action schools need to take, especially in higher education institutes. Taiwan government has been working on that and efforts made can be seen from the increasing number of foreign students (see Table 1.1).
Table 1.1
Number of Foreign Students Studying in Taiwan by Geographic Source
YEAR TOTAL ASIA AMERICA EUROPE AFRICA OCEANIA
1971-72 427 225 155 39 1 7
1981-82 2,982 1,656 832 437 9 48
1991-92 5,959 3,764 1,264 796 35 100
2001-02 6,380 4,490 1,140 546 79 125
2004-05 9,616 6,358 1,892 941 225 200
2005-06 11,035 7,039 2,305 1,116 262 313
2006-07 13,070 8,119 2,819 1,544 294 294
2007-08 15,436 9,532 3,409 1,766 369 360
2008-09 16,909 10,722 3,608 1,846 366 367
2009-10 19,376 11,853 4,393 2,346 381 403
2010-11 21,356 13,332 4,524 2,509 542 449
Note. Adapted from “Education in Taiwan 2011-2012”, by Ministry Of Education, 2011a, http://english.moe.gov.tw/public/Attachment/1113011175371.pdf, on January 15, 2012.
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Therefore, to attract the foreign students in Taiwan, the government has set up a few measures to support higher education institutes to achieve the goal of internationalization of higher education in Taiwan. In the following section, the evidences of governmental involvement are shown. In 2005, Foundation of International Cooperation in Higher Education of Taiwan (FICHET) was established and organized the first conference of international affairs development in higher education institutes of Taiwan in 2010, cooperating with Chengchi University. The conference involved all related international affairs members to discuss the situations and difficulties of internationalization development, which could be taken as one milestone. Furthermore, the Ministry of Education (MOE) has been working on many programs and projects. Here are some examples as follows. Taiwan drew up
“Study-in-Taiwan Enhancement Program (MOE, 2011b)” to further expand Taiwan’s higher education in 2011. This program is estimated to spend NT$57 million to achieve the goal of 90 thousand foreign students studying in Taiwan (MOE, 2011b).
“The Aim for the Top University Project (MOE, 2011c)” (邁向頂尖大學計畫) expected the university to develop into international school of excellence to achieve the goal of strengthening national competitiveness. The government will support NT$50 billion for each five year. In this project, one of the criteria is the degree of internationalization. It is evaluated by the number of foreign students, exchange students, and international conferences. “Internationalization Subsidy Plan of Universities (MOE, 2011d)” (大學校院推動國際化補助計畫) encourages school to plan a more concrete plan towards internationalization. Based on the internationalization plan and situation, the government will subsidy within one million to support the fulfillment of its plan. Lastly, there are increasing number of scholarship opportunities to local and foreign students provided by government and semi-government organizations, such as the MOE and the International Cooperation
and Development Fund (ICDF). For instance, the MOE and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs set up the “Taiwan Scholarships” in November 2003. Taiwan MOE also encourages all universities and colleges of Taiwan (MOE, 2011) to build good friendship with schools of other countries and has adopted the accomplishment of international development as one criterion to distribute educational subsidy.
The active action towards internationalization is expected to bring in more talents with multilingual and transcultural ability and promote more academic interactions and cooperation through international exchanges. In this process, many foreign students are recruited to study in Taiwan. When they arrive in Taiwan, the first barrier they face is language (Selvadurai, 1998). In Taiwan, the official language is Chinese Mandarin; however, most foreign students came to Taiwan without the ability to speak Chinese. Many negative consequences resulted from the inability to speak the Chinese language. For example, they may not be able to buy food, groceries and other life necessities on their own; they may not understand important announcements from schools, or the instructions to select courses, reserve books from library, and etc.
As a result, they may not know their right, and cannot easily survive in schools without arrangement of proper language interfaces.
To attract more foreign students, many higher education institutes in Taiwan strive to construct a better environment for foreign students to live and study. One of the major undertakings of schools is to minimize language barriers by different means, which is termed “language management practices” in this study.
Statement of the Problem
When the language barriers (difficulties) are taken care of through adequate language management practices, it can improve foreign students’ impression of
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Taiwan and also the willingness of studying in Taiwan. Consequently, the problem of language barriers forces higher education institutes to develop language management practices in order to fulfill the objectives of internationalization. Throughout the history of internationalization development by higher education institutes, many language management practices have been created and experimented. However, very few studies have focused on this aspect of school administration, nor was the effect of these language management practices on internationalization outcome studied. It is also unknown how schools develop their language management practices. Do they follow a systemic development process that is guided by the school’s strategic intention? What may be the school’s strategic type toward internationalization and how are these strategic types influence development and implementation of language management practices? There is a lack of extant knowledge in these issues.
Purpose of the Study
The purpose of the study reported here first was to explore the current situation of how Taiwan’s universities/colleges deal with language barriers and problems (i.e., language management practices). The other specific purpose is to analyze the relationship between school strategy towards internationalization and language management practices, as well as the effects of language management practice on internationalization outcome.
Research Questions
To fulfill the purpose of this study, answers were sought to the following questions: First, what are the school strategy and language management practices of universities and colleges respectively? Secondly, what is the relationship between school strategy towards internationalization and language management practices?
Third, how do school language management practices influence internationalization
outcome?
Significance of the Study
Internationalization will indeed benefit higher education of Taiwan. For local benefits, we can increase the student number to eliminate the negative effects of low birth rate, broaden the international horizon of local students, and enrich the friendship with other countries. Foreign students can bring in talent of professional, multilingual and transcultural ability. Besides, through the studying experience in Taiwan, they can promote the features of higher education in Taiwan to strengthen our international marketing.
Talents are considered as the most important asset of one country, and enterprise.
Schools provide education/training to cultivate one country’s talents. Therefore, to discuss the international development from the aspect of educational system is a way to see the management practice.
Internationalization forced schools to step out, and to recruit international students. However, the basic problem, language, has been a great challenge to many schools. Once the practices of language management can be collected through interviews and analyzed for their effectiveness, it will give those schools struggling in international development more direction.
As what mentioned above, language is the first problem international students encounter. Moreover, once universities/colleges could build an environment without language barriers to solve this basic problem for foreign students, the outcome of internationalization would be improved. Accordingly, this study expects to find an effective model of language management practices through exploratory investigation
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and further contribute to higher education institutes in confronting language barriers.
Definition of Terms
Before the discussion on language management practices, the concept of language management needs to be defined as follows:
Language Management: A set of actions determined by the internationalization strategy set by organizations to form explicit policies and practices about the use of language to influence internationalization outcome.
Language Barrier: Feely and Harzing (2003) addressed language barrier as a problem of ‘‘miscommunication’’, which will not only occur but also arouse a series of negative effects.
Language Policy: Corson (1999) said, “School language policies are viewed by many in education as an integral and necessary part of the administration and the curriculum practice of school which identified areas in the school’s scope of operations and program where language problems exist that need the commonly agreed approach offered by a policy.”
Language Management Practice: Options available to organizations to manage language and to alleviate the problems it creates (Feely and Harzing, 2003).
International Outcome: The number of international students is estimated as an indicator to evaluate the internationalization outcome in this study.