ABSTRACT

With English as the lingua franca, numerous universities in non-English speaking countries offer programs with English medium of instruction (EMI) to receive international recognition in academia. These universities utilize their websites as primary sources for attracting prospective students and faculty from abroad. Drawing upon the distinction between de jure and de facto language policies and the notion of virtual linguistic landscapes, this study conducts a comparative content analysis of the Turkish and English homepages as subsections of the official website of Yildiz Technical University (YTU) in Turkey. It scrutinized the university’s language policies in its provision of content in both languages on its website which is conceived as virtual linguistic landscape (VLL) construction. Our comparative analysis revealed that YTU’s website content in English and Turkish is not aligned with its de jure policies, and found three main issues in YTU’s VLL: (a) unavailable and inaccessible content, (b) inconsistent content, and (c) incomprehensible and unclear English content on the EN-v homepages. Our findings lead us to contend that the de facto language practices observed on YTU’s official website appear to be inequitable because YTU’s international students and faculty in the 100% EMI programs cannot utilize substantial amount of online resources.

摘要

以英语作为通用语言，许多非英语国家的大学都提供英语教学语言（EMI）的课程，以在学术界获得国际认可。这些大学利用其网站作为吸引海外潜在学生和教师的主要来源。利用法律和实际语言政策之间的区别以及虚拟语言景观的概念，本研究对土耳其和英语主页进行了比较内容分析，作为土耳其耶尔迪兹技术大学（YTU）官方网站的子部分。它通过在其网站上以两种语言提供内容来审查大学的语言政策，这被认为是虚拟语言景观（VLL）的构建。我们的比较分析显示，YTU的英语和土耳其语网站内容与法律规定不符，并发现YTU的VLL存在三个主要问题：（a）无法访问和无法访问的内容，（b）内容不一致，（c）无法理解和EN-v主页上的英语内容不清楚。我们的发现使我们认为，在YTU官方网站上观察到的事实上的语言做法似乎是不公平的，因为YTU的100％EMI计划的国际学生和教职员工无法利用大量的在线资源。