English Language Role in Higher Education Student Exchange Programs

This reflection article aims to analyze scientific articles related to the role of English language in higher-education student exchange programs. For this purpose, data was collected, by using scientific documentation from the Scopus database based on a bibliometric analysis of results. The key-word “student mobility, higher education, and role of English” resulted in 38 documents related to the topic of study. For the bibliometric analysis of results, this piece of research focused on the number of documents per year, documents per country or territory, documents by subject, documents per funding sponsor, and documents by type as outlined in the Scopus search-ing tool. The results showed that the country with the highest number of scientific studies in this area was the United Kingdom (nine publications), followed by Spain (five publications), and the United States (four publica-tions) between 2005 and 2024, which highlighted the role of the English language as a medium of instruction in student exchange programs at high-er education institutions. Furthermore, a higher rate of article production was evident between 2019 and 2021. This suggests that English language knowledge, educational policies, college prestige, and scholarship sponsor-ship favorably impact higher-education student exchange programs.