Bilingual signs at an ‘English only’ Korean university: place-making and ‘global’ space in higher education

Abstract

Higher education in Korea has recently undergone drastic changes introduced by internationalisation policies aimed at global competitiveness in the educational markets. While the widespread student mobility has been studied by numerous scholars, little attention has been paid to both international and local students’ interpretations of the global culture created by the policy. In this paper, we explore the ways in which Korean and international students actively engage in interpreting the meanings of ‘global’ brand created by the institution. It draws upon ethnographic data collected at a Korean university where English has been adopted as an official language. Extending the discussions in recent semiotic studies of linguistic landscapes and place-making, we analysed the ways in which public signs on campus are represented and interpreted. While the institutional language policy is designed to utilise English as an emblem of ‘global’ brand, the stakeholders such as Korean and international students have contested ideologies about the role of English in creating the campus space as a place to which they belong. The findings of this paper suggest that linguistic landscape is an intertextual product, rather than a materiality that reflects fixed values of Korean and English.