Abstract:
Prior to COVID-19, globalisation prompted increasing diversities amongst higher education (HE) systems in the Anglo West. Yet within the globalised, ‘multicultural’ university, English persists as the academic lingua franca. Despite scholarly critique of English hegemony, the normalisation of English monolingualism is sustained through curricula, ideology, and practice in many Anglo universities. Such taken-for-granted, (mis)recognised linguistic legitimacy is what Bourdieu would call doxa. In Australian HE, a doxic English monolingualism poses challenges for many non-English speaking research students. In response, academic language support has been put in place to help them adapt linguistically. Although linguistic adaptation can demonstrate forms of resilience, it also camouflages and falls prey to ‘symbolic violence’ through the ontological complicity with English domination. To grapple with this paradox, we draw on Bourdieu to probe Chinese international research students’ academic language practice in response to supervisory practice during their research journey in Australia.Data were generated through semi-structured interviews with 18 Chinese research students having studied or completed their degree in four Australian universities. Using thematic analysis, we found that participants resiliently negotiated their linguistic capital deficiency (limited vocabularies and inappropriate use of English); habitus-field mismatch (Chinese thinking in completing a thesis in English); and symbolic violence (imbalanced symbolic power in knowledge production between English and Chinese). Despite such structural constraints, participants accumulated linguistic capital and reconstructed linguistic habitus during their experience of research supervision to survive and thrive in the Australian HE field. These strategies demonstrate ‘adaptive resilience’ yet leave the symbolic power of English intact, paradoxically reproducing the symbolic violence in the doxic field. To recast the linguistic landscape of the globalised HE field, we draw insights from Bourdieu-informed sociology of resilience (Mu, 2021) which reveals both the value and the violence of linguistic adaptation prevailing in English-dominant HE systems. We are also informed by postmonolingual theorising (Singh, 2019) that acknowledges the linguistic repertoire of research students from diverse cultural backgrounds when completing their thesis in English. We conclude with recommendations for Chinese international research students, their supervisors, and universities, to reconfigure their language ideologies and capacities for the sake of maximising academic success and multilingualising the HE field.