English-medium instruction and teacher education programmes in higher education: ideological forces and imagined identities at work

ABSTRACT

With English-medium instruction (EMI) gaining momentum in higher education across the globe, teacher education programmes (TEPs) are being redesigned to equip lecturers with the skills necessary to deal with increasingly international classrooms. While most of these TEPs mainly pursue improving lecturers’ English language proficiency they rarely reflect on pedagogical changes and even less on the ideological forces and identity issues at play. This article addresses precisely such gaps by focusing on ideology and identity drawing on two complementary conceptual models: Investment theory and ROAD-MAPPING. These models are used in a qualitative content analysis of the online written responses of EMI lecturers at a Spanish public university. The findings reveal that lecturers unanimously agreed that EMI had enhanced their linguistic and social capital providing the younger teachers with a more international professional identity and a promising academic future. Concurrently, lecturers expressed their concerns about the necessary co-existence of languages (Spanish and English), particularly with respect to teachers’ responsibility to provide students with disciplinary literacy in both languages so that graduates become competent professionals at a local/ global level. The article closes with reflections and implications for designing TEPs in EMI settings.

KEYWORDS:

• English-medium instruction
• higher education
• ROAD-MAPPING
• investment theory
• lectures

Acknowledgements

My heartfelt thanks go to the lecturers who participated in the survey. I thank too Joanne Pagéze from the University of Bordeaux as well as the editors for their insightful comments, and finally the anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Emma Dafouz is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at Complutense University of Madrid. Since 2000 she has researched on English-Medium Instruction in higher education. Her work has been published in international journals (e.g. Modern Language Journal, AILA Review, System, English for Specific Purposes, Language and Education and Applied Linguistics, amongst others). She was part of the international research team ConCLIL (University of Jyväskylä, Finland), IntlUNI (Aarhus University, Denmark) and has also coordinated INTER-LICA, a Spanish project on the internationalization of higher education through the use of English. Since 2014, she is advisor for Language Planning and Internationalization at her instituion.

ORCID

Emma Dafouz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2396-7391

Notes

1 Other theories dealing with motivational aspects in language learning are, for instance, expectancy-value or goal-oriented theories. This study uses the term ‘investment’ precisely because of its economic resonance (and in spite of it too), with the aim of making policy-makers and HEIs in general aware of the effort and financial support that educational changes of this importance require in order to be seriously and effectively implemented.

2 Exceptions to this rule are lecturers who already have EMI teaching experience abroad or have been part of the programme for more than two years.

3 The university uses the term ‘bilingual degrees’ to refer to courses in EMI to distinguish them from courses using Spanish-medium instruction.

4 Due to space limitations, only some demographic features are included here to describe the sample.

5 All responses have been transcribed as provided by lecturers themselves without any editing.

6 For more information on the EQUIIP Project visit https://equiip.eu.

Additional information

Funding

This study was conducted with the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness ( [FFI2013-41235-R] and is part of a broader national project known as INTE-R-LICA (www.ucm.es/interlica).