Collaboration between content and language teachers in English Medium Instruction

by Natalie Green

My interest in collaboration grew out of an MA TEAP (Teaching English for Academic Purposes) assignment at the University of Nottingham. I had been based in Barcelona for many years, and I was interested in studying whether English was perceived to be a linguistic and cultural threat to lecturers using English as the Medium of Instruction (EMI) in a context that is already bilingual, with a minority regional language (Catalan) and a majority state language (Spanish). It turned out that English was viewed very positively: it was perceived as giving opportunities. My attention turned to the role of language in the EMI classroom because of the following questions that I asked the lecturers (via an online survey):

  • Do you teach language in your lessons?
  • Should you teach language in your lessons?
  • In your assessments of student work, what weighting (or importance) do you give to language use? (Score 0 to 10; 0 = only content counts in the assessment, 10 = only language counts in the assessment)

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