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.