Work Packages 2 & 3 in the first year of the project were intended to provide an overview of the internationalisation of higher education and the challenges that it entails. The aim of WP3 was to identify the linguistic, cultural and educational (pedagogical/didactic) challenges in the internationalisation of higher education.

As the pedagogical and didactic challenges will typically reflect different aspects of an academic or disciplinary culture, IntlUni decided to work with, in the first instance, a distinction between linguistic and cultural challenges, and subdivide the cultural challenges into ethnic, local, disciplinary and academic cultures. This distinction between four different kinds of culture is seen in this model:

Based on Räsänen, A. (2011) International classrooms, disciplinary cultures and communication conventions: a report on a workshop for content and language teachers. Quality Assurance Review for Higher Education, Bucharest: ARACIS, Vol.3, Nr.2, September 2011, p. 155-161.

Flowerdew, J. & L. Miller (1995) On the notion of culture in L2 lectures. TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 29/ 2, 345-373