1 177 Webster St., # 220, Monterey, CA 93940 USA Web: www.tirfonline.org / Email: info@tirfonline.org Title of Project: ‘Seidauk sai hanesan ami nia mehi’ – A Study of Lecturers’ Responses to Multilingualism in Higher Education in Timor-Leste Researcher: Trent Newman University of Melbourne newmant@student.unimelb.edu.au Research Supervisor: Professor Joe Lo Bianco University of Melbourne TIRF Research Topic Investigated: Language Planning and Policy Trent Newman Final Report Motivation for the Research Lecturers in higher education institutions in Timor-Leste (aka East Timor) are faced with a daunting challenge: how to work within a mixture of linguistic and communicative resources for the academic and professional transformation of their plurilingual students amid an intensely complex and conflicted language policy environment. These lecturers are under competing pressures to adopt different monolingual teaching practices, despite the multilingual reality in classrooms. They must routinely select from among the two “co-official” (Tetum and Portuguese) and two “working” (Indonesian and English) languages for the diverse range of academic and vocational communication work that they need to do. Pressure from the government and many nationalist voices in Timor-Leste is to abandon the use of Indonesian in all tertiary classrooms, though it is the language that many lecturers have themselves studied in and the language of many teaching and learning resources, and to comply with an educational decree dictating that Portuguese should be the sole medium of instruction for all post-primary education (RDTL, 2008; Taylor-Leech, 2013). At the same time, some private higher education institutions in Timor-Leste are in the process of implementing English medium of instruction policies for specific faculties oriented to strategic industries, notably Petroleum Studies and Tourism (Williams-van Klinken, 2014). This is in response to growing demand for English-speaking graduates in these and other industries in the young developing nation, mirroring micro- and macro-level discourses that point to English as the language of regional and global job markets (Williams, 2010; Duchêne & Heller, 2012), in addition to its status as the international language of scientific and academic research (Lillis & Curry, 2010). Meanwhile, recent research suggests that Tetum is likely to be the strongest language for those students who are entering tertiary education now (Godinho, et. al., 2012), though most will have experienced primary and secondary schooling in a mixture of all four languages, with some use of local indigenous languages in academic domains also possible (Quinn, 2013).