‘Seidauk sai hanesan ami nia mehi’: a study of lecturers’ responses to multilingualism in higher education in Timor-Leste

© 2019 Dr. Trent Phillip NewmanThis research is aimed at understanding multilingualism in locally situated institutional contexts in higher education in Timor-Leste. Particular attention is paid to the language planning and workforce development roles played by tertiary educators in the context of postcolonial, social and economic development. This is done through a close study of the beliefs and practices of lecturers teaching in professional fields relevant to the national development of Timor-Leste: agriculture, petroleum, tourism and community development. Guiding research questions focus on these lecturers’ conceptualisations of the communication skills and resources needed by their students for study and work in their respective industries, as well as on their multilingual teaching practices and communication strategies with students. Findings are drawn from empirical data gathered ethnographically from focus groups, interviews and class observations conducted with lecturers from three institutions, one public and two private. A combination of fine-grained sociolinguistic and discourse analysis reveals spectacular diversity in the locally valued and enacted forms and arrangements of multilingualism in these higher education spaces in Timor-Leste. The results of this research detail the specificities of this variation at multiple sociolinguistic scales of analysis: the different industry areas case-studied, the different faculties, departments and institutions where data was collected, and the classrooms of different individual lecturers. Different ‘visions of industry’ are productive of different beliefs about the communicative worlds into which graduates will be entering. Different beliefs about the relative affordances and constraints of the four official and working languages of Timor-Leste (Tetun, Portuguese, English and Indonesian) are productive of different perspectives on the preparedness of students for tertiary study. Lecturers’ own unique plurilingual repertoires, borne of individual educational and biographical trajectories, combined with the material constraints of available teaching and learning resources, limit the multilingual communication possibilities in classrooms. There are, however, powerful examples of lecturers’ significant creative and agentive abilities towards the transfer of expert knowledge in and through a mixture of semiotic forms. This study thus highlights both the hugely challenging position in which lecturers in higher education in Timor-Leste are placed – at the meeting point of diverse and often conflicting pressures – and their role as change agents in the discursive construction of multilingual communication for different fields. Lecturers’ beliefs and practices with regard to multilingual communication are demonstrated to be influenced by a range of competing pragmatic considerations and discursive forces, as well as being themselves productive of particular norms of professional and vocational communication and particular constructions of expert knowledge. Implications of the findings of this study are considered for policy-makers working in language and higher education in Timor-Leste, for those working in workforce development, and for teachers in academic literacies and language support programs in tertiary settings in developing, multilingual contexts