English-mediated Instruction in Italian universities: A cuckoo nest scenario?

This paper addresses the controversial link between English-mediated Instruction (EMI) and Internationalization in European Higher Educa-tion with a specific focus on the Italian context, a setting which only recently has drawn scholarly attention. The assumption behind this controversial link regards the so-called European Paradox (Phillipson 2006: 72), a concept which underpins the contradictory educational policies enacted in Europe aimed at implementing university courses entirely held in English as a result of the post-Bologna process (now a consolidated global trend), set within an environment, the EU, strong-ly marked by a long-standing multilingual tradition. This intrinsic dualism is clearly explained through the cuckoo nest metaphor, also developed by Phillipson (2008) who defines lin-guistic dominance in terms of naturalistic behaviour. In his view Eng-lish is the lingua cucula in the European Higher Education scenario, in that it behaves in a similar way to cuckoos which: “substitute their own eggs for those in place, and induce other species to take on the feeding and teaching processes” (Phillipson 2008: 252). By drawing on previous studies on EMI in Italian Universities (Costa/Coleman 2013; Campagna/Pulcini 2014; Molino/Campagna 2014; Pulcini/Campagna 2015; Campagna 2016) this paper aims first at providing an overview of the state-of-the-art of EMI in Italy. It then moves on to explore the European scenario with a special focus on the Nordic countries which have recently opted for a diglossic educational policy in academia embodied in the concept of Parallel Language Use after experiencing English-medium instruction for a long time. The aim is to investigate how Parallel Language Use effectively operates in practice and whether it could be used as a European model to miti-gate the risk of linguistic dominance.