EMI and the Teaching of Cultural Studies in Higher Education: A Study Case.

This paper examines students’ perspectives on the challenges raised by their first encounter with EMI pedagogy in higher education. The research was conducted with a group of beginner students with no previous experience in monolingual instruction in English. The case studied is based on two English Cultural Studies subject courses of the English Studies Program at a Spanish university and taught in a learning environment of total linguistic immersion. By activating their metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness, students were encouraged to take ownership of the stages of their learning process and assess it critically. Set at the intersection of EFL, ESP, and EAP, the specificities of these courses comprising linguistic and non-linguistic contents shed light on the teaching procedures employed in English Departments training programs, whose goals are to turn undergraduates into expert linguists and philologists and maximise their communicative proficiency in academic English.

Tertiary education learning outcomes, a case study: “You want us to think!”

Present perceptions about the poor production of university students in the last decades might be the same other professors had in previous centuries. Nonetheless, more corseting forms of assessment and the irruption of new technologies can establish a difference. These factors serve the controversy when blamed for preventing intellectual development, or when also considering that ICTs are the personal mark of new generations of youths who face their outdated dinosaur teachers. The purpose of this paper is to provide a tentative case analysis of the situation to validate what seems a generalized perception of the decay of tertiary education. Our data will be obtained from answers that students of the third year of a Humanities English degree could not provide. In our approach we will consider the difficulties students have in reaching the highest levels of taxonomies like Bloom’s (1956) or Dreyfus & Dreyfus (1980) with their further modifications. Collaterally we will tackle key competences and forms of assessment. Results will present the dichotomy of maintaining the present progression or, alternatively, think again and take some action.

EMI and Intercultural Competence at University of Alcalá: The case of the Master's Degree in Teacher Training

The use of English as a Medium of Instruction to teach subjects other than English is widely spread across European higher education institutions. The University of Alcalá has been working on the implementation of English-Medium Instruction (EMI) for decades now. The internationalisation process accounts for the increasing number of studies both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels taught in English. The response of international students has been positive considering the University of Alcalá one of their favourite Spanish destinations. The interaction of local and foreign students evidences the need to raise awareness towards the intercultural competence as part of the Master’s Degree in Teacher Training, so that learners will feel comfortable in a different language and culture and contribute significantly not only to the labour market but also to dialogue and living together. In this article, the authors report on how this is done in one of the compulsory courses of this specific Master’s Degree: Complementary Training in English Studies.

Possible implementation of subjects taught using English as a Medium of Instruction methodology in tourism studies

The present study analyses which conditions would be necessary to implement subjects taught using English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) methodology in the undergraduate degree in tourism studies at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC). In the literature review, some of the concepts related to this methodological approach are examined to clarify diverse methodological approaches that are frequently confused, namely Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), EMI, and English for Specific Purposes. With the objective of finding out the specific conditions necessary for implementing EMI subjects in the Degree in Tourism at the ULPGC, a revision of EMI subjects that have been already implemented at this institution would be made. Then a proposal indicating the conditions that are regarded as vital for implementing EMI subjects in this degree would be presented.

Carrió-Pastor, M. L. - Bellés-Fortuño, Begoña (2021) (Eds.). Teaching Language and Content in Multicultural and Multilingual Classrooms CLIL and EMI Approaches. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, ISBN 978-3-030-56614-2, pp. 377

It is not surprising that there is a clear interest in specialised English language teaching at a time when academia needs to evidence its strong connection to social practices and internationalization (Carrió-Pastor 2019, 2020). This is a timely book, both in scope and usefulness. The contents are organised in such a way as to allow an understanding of methodological practices, firstly by establishing the difference between CLIL, i.e. Content and Language Integrated Learning, and EMI, i.e. English as a Medium of Instruction. In principle, these two terms refer to clear concepts, but in practice the distinction does not always seem to be so apparent. In fact, this book succeeds in providing a theoretical stance and examples to illustrate and clarify these approaches. The usefulness of this Palgrave volume for language professionals, namely teachers, researchers and newcomers, is easy to foresee.

Bilingual resources in English-medium instruction lectures

English is increasingly used as a lingua franca (ELF) for academic activities in Spanish higher education institutions. The notion of ELF is now being redefined including in its conceptualization a multilingual nature of communication (Jenkins, 2015). This conception is interesting for researchers in English-medium instruction (EMI). Therefore, this paper reports on a study which focuses on the multilingual resources most frequently used by higher education lecturers to achieve comprehensibility in EMI courses at the University of Zaragoza. It regards them as part of the pragmatic and strategic behaviour of the participants. The corpus for the study consists of 14 hours of audio-recorded lectures in two different disciplines that have been analysed from a discourse-pragmatic approach, involving both qualitative and quantitative methods. The analysis of the data reveals that lecturers use their multilingual resources, mainly their own first language, as a pragmatic strategy that enables them to achieve various conversational goals such as clarifying meaning.

Whole issue 14.2

Whole issue

English as a Medium of Instruction in Learning Professional Skills for Engineers

In this article, we reflect on the variables to be considered when teaching in English a subject of the bachelor’s degree of Computer Engineering: “Learning Professional Skills for Engineers”. In order to make this study, we start from an analysis of the recent history of teaching in English at university level and the institutional context in which it happens. Three research questions are posed, with the intent to check what minimum conditions must be met to be able to teach this subject in English. The results lead us to conclude that the option of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) is not the appropriate one, taking into account both the linguistic and didactic training of the teaching staff and the language accreditation of the students. However, it is feasible to opt for the Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education (ICLHE) option.

Book review: Llegir la Imatge. Il·lustrar la Paraula. Reflexions al voltant del llibre il·lustrat i el còmic.

Llegir la imatge. Il·lustrar la paraula. Reflexions al voltant del llibre il·lustrat i el còmic (Reading the image. Drawing the word. Reflections on comic books and illustrated literature, in English), edited by Julia Haba-Osca and Robert Martínez-Carrasco (2020), is a compendium of short articles written in Catalan. The book is the resulting outcome of a series of conferences, International Symposium of Innovation about Illustrated Literature, celebrated at the Universitat de València. Each of these articles acts as an individual chapter within the book, which compiles a total of fourteen of these. Speakers from different professional backgrounds and fields of knowledge related to the role of the printed image as a means of communication were invited to participate in the symposia and the subsequent compendium. This variety is reflected in the different thoughts, ideas, and views on the role of image in literature that encourage the reader to analyse and consider other perspectives. The book champions the view of illustrated literature as a graphic and visual literary genre in its own right. The book aims to open the reader’s critical eye towards the use of illustrated literature to convey meaning and stimulate the reader’s interpretive skills.

Insights into the subtitling of films from Arabic into Spanish

Audiovisual translation studies (AVT) have experienced an exponential growth in the last twenty years, have consolidated proven analysis methodologies, and attracted the interest mainly of Western scholars. It is interesting to investigate whether these methodologies are also applicable to the study of subtitling of films from linguistically and culturally distant cultures such as Egyptian and Spanish. Therefore, the main objective of this work is to verify whether the translation norms proposed in the translation methods for dubbing and subtitling, traditionally based on language combinations with English, are applicable for the specific case of the Arabic-Spanish language combination, based on the analysis of the treatment of the cultural elements present in the audiovisual texts selected for this research. Among the findings, the distinctive features and colloquial character and spontaneity of the original versions are frequently lost.