Exploring university students’ goals for the development of multilingual and intercultural communication competence

While internationalisation in higher education has often been used in a narrow sense to mean instruction in English to attract foreign students, this understanding has been questioned in recent years. Instead, universities are increasingly looking for strategies to support students’ internationalisation in a more individualised fashion. The present study explores the goals set by 64 Finnish students of early childhood education at the beginning of their bachelor’s studies regarding their individual internationalisation process. When these goal descriptions are viewed through the lens of the ideal self, a conception of the kind of person a learner would like to become, they can be seen as representations of students’ ideal international selves. The goal descriptions were analysed using qualitative content analysis. Drawing on the framework of Multilingual and Intercultural Communication Competence (MICC) developed at the Centre for Multilingual Academic Communication at the University of Jyväskylä, I investigate what elements of the framework students most commonly ascribe to their ideal international selves, and what role different languages and multilingual competence play in their goal descriptions. In the study, the most central attributes of the ideal international self were openness to diversity and communicative confidence. Students generally showed a high level of interest in intercultural communication and “other” cultures although descriptions of the “other” were often somewhat essentialist. At the level of language learning, instead of language-specific goals, students often had goals related to multilingual competence. Where specific languages were mentioned, the most common goals were related to English, Swedish, and Arabic. The study concludes by discussing implications for language and communication studies, particularly the need to put more emphasis on raising confidence and fostering a non-essentialist understanding of culture.