ABSTRACT
In the past decades, and as a result of the internationalisation processes experienced by higher education across the world, English-medium education (EME) has gained momentum in universities where well-established national and/or local languages had traditionally been the means of instruction. While this phenomenon is growing at a fast pace, professional support for the lecturers engaged is very often scarce and unsystematic. Against this backdrop, the EU project known as EQUiiP (Educational Quality at Universities for Inclusive International Programmes) takes as point of departure the support of a specific set of agents – educational developers (EDs) – who, although essential in the design and implementation of internationalised programmes, has attracted scarce research attention. Drawing conceptually on the ROAD-MAPPING framework (Dafouz, E., and U. Smit. [2016]. “Towards a Dynamic Conceptual Framework for English-Medium Education in Multilingual University Settings.” Applied Linguistics 37 (3): 397–415) and with the help of data from a baseline survey gathered by EQUiiP, this paper explores the roles, beliefs and practices of EDs in these concrete internationalised programmes. Our findings reveal great differences in these agents’ backgrounds and areas of expertise as well as different perspectives on the roles of language(s), and more particularly English, in the process of internationalising higher education.
Acknowledgements
Our gratitude goes to the participants in the survey who took the time to answer our questions. We would also like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. A special thanks to all the EQUiiPers for making this possible.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Emma Dafouz is Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies at Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. Since 2000 she has researched on English-medium education in multilingual university settings and published extensively in journals such as Applied Linguistics, English for Specific Purposes, AILA Review, and Language and Education. Together with Ute Smit she has written the book ‘ROADMAPPING English-medium education in the Internationalised University’ published by Palgrave Macmillan. She has also been Policy Advisor for curricular internationalisation at her university.
Dr Kevin Haines is Senior Curriculum Developer for the International Classroom Project at University of Groningen, the Netherlands and academic coordinator of the EQUiiP Erasmus+ project (www.equiip.eu). Kevin has worked in international Higher Education programs in the Netherlands since 1992, and he specializes in guiding university lecturers and ‘students as partners’ in international classrooms and English Medium Instruction (EMI) programs. He has published several articles on the impact of the international classroom and English Medium Instruction on learning processes in both the formal and the informal curriculum, and he is also co-author of the IntlUni Principles (www.intluni.eu).
Joanne Pagèze is Vice President for Internationalization at the University of Bordeaux. She works also as a university teacher at the Department of Languages and Cultures. She has been project leader of Défi International, a university-wide teacher development program for EMI and international classroom since 2014. Vice-chair of the EAIE expert community on Language and Culture, Ms PagPagèzeze is also assistant-editor for the European Journal of Language Policy and board member of the French national association for language centers (RANACLES) affiliated to CERCLES.
ORCID
Emma Dafouz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2396-7391
Notes
1 See www.intluni.eu
2 From EQUiiP Erasmus+ Project Proposal 2016, 3.
3 For more information see https://equiip.eu/
4 From the explanation of baseline survey for partners, Internal project document, January 2017.
5 Email communication from project coordinator to all partners, February 2017.
6 The authors hereby acknowledge the work of Dianne Hermink in the preparation of the survey and these reports.