Literacy is a key element of higher education: learning and teaching in universities and colleges is supported and evidenced via a range of texts and genres from reference works to lecture handouts, essays, portfolios and research articles. As higher education becomes more widely available and more internationalized, it is increasingly common for this literacy to involve more than one language in some way. This book deals with biliteracy in academic contexts: that is (adapting a definition from Hornberger (1990)) the use in a higher education context of two or more languages in or around written text for the purpose of broadening or deepening knowledge. Our aim in this book is to bring together studies of academic biliteracy in diverse parts of the world and to consider how it may be an integral element of learning at the tertiary level. The chapters in this book range from cases of informal student use of different written languages, to pedagogical, institutional and disciplinary strategies leveraging multilingual resources to develop literacy.

Globalised Higher Education, Multilingual Campuses and Implications for Teaching and Learning

Much has been written in the past 20 years on the way in which globalising forces influence higher education both positively and negatively. Terms such as student mobility and internationalisation are used to describe challenges and opportunities at organisational, political and financial levels, with sporadic attention to the internationalisation of the curriculum and the desirability of educating for international citizenship (Palfreyman & McBride, 2010). In truth, academics and students have always moved across national borders; for example, from the 13th and 14th centuries, student mobility became a key feature of universities in Europe (Perraton, 2014). Of course the situation today is very different because of the large numbers of students and academics who travel to follow or present courses at higher education institutions elsewhere.