Policy and Practicality in Timorese Higher Education

Abstract

This chapter emphasizes on an empirical study of the policy discourses and other forces impacting East Timorese tertiary educators' conceptualizations of the academic and professional communication skills needed by their plurilingual students. Particular attention is paid to the ways that a variety of competing institutional, national, and global policy discourses enter into the accounts of higher education lecturers in development-related disciplines in Timor-Leste. Timorese lecturers are thus caught up in a whirlwind of forces pushing and pulling them in different directions with regard to classroom communication and "practiced language policies". Regarding students' skills conceptualized as communicative competence for understanding classroom instruction, students' plurilingual repertoires are perceived simultaneously and rather paradoxically as both a resource and a problem. Given that the language programs are also institutionally separated from one another as well as from the other faculties—once again arranging multilingualism as parallel but separated monolingualisms—they also fail to correspond to the mixed, multilingual realities in classrooms.

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