Internationalization strategies in Spanish universities: a corpus-driven analysis of institutional documents

THIS PRESENTATION is part of an on-going PhD dissertation aiming to examine the internationalization strategies of Spanish universities since the process of becoming an international university may vary due to factors such as the local context, motivation, goals, or even research fields (Childress 2006, 2010; Knight 2004; Maringe and Foskett, 2010). In this case, I adopt a top-down approach to deal with internationalization in order to study how universities understand it. Furthermore, the results are compared to the national framework for internationalization “Strategy for the Internationalization of Spanish Universities” (MECD, 2014) to find the most frequently-used lines of action and to comment on their degree of implementation. Following McEnery and Hardie’s (2012) principles, I compiled a corpus of 110 institutional documents formed by strategic plans and internationalization documents from 71 universities. Corpus linguistics was the chosen methodology and the Antconc software (Anthony, 2011) was used to retrieve frequency lists, keyword lists, and collocation patterns in order to analyze the meanings of ‘internationalization’ in context. Corpus findings show key indicators of internationalization are mainly related to mobility, the presence of international students, international collaborations and agreements, teaching in English, dissemination of knowledge, and language accreditation. Moving beyond these broader semantic correlations, of particular interest are the references to languages and language use in relation to internationalization. This seems to match the National framework’s internationalization strategic objectives, which in addition to encourage an international university system, international visibility and recognition, and international and interregional partnerships, focus on national —Spanish— and foreign —English— languages as one of the main assets to export and import internationalization in the Spanish Higher Education.