CLIL Journal of Innovation and Research in Plurilingual and Pluricultural Education

Editorial CJ 5(2)

Monica Clua — 2022-07-29

CLIL for medical universities

Jennifer Valcke — 2022-07-29

This article offers insights into the knowledge, skills and attitudes medical educators need to teach effectively to culturally diverse cohorts of medical students. “CLIL in Medical Education: Reaching for Tools to Teach Effectively in English in a Multicultural and Multilingual Learning Space” (CLILMED), an Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership, designed a profile to assist medical educators in the process of intentional goal-setting and self-reflection around their pedagogy, language and culture. It is the pluricultural outcomes of education that will be addressed here, since favouring the development of knowledge, attitudes and skills related to otherness, plurality and diversity have a direct impact on the quality of healthcare provision (Bradshaw, 2019; Corbett, 2011; Tiwary et al., 2019). Understanding what competences medical educators need in an intercultural classroom greatly influences their ability to intentionally design, implement and develop their teaching. The CLILMED Glocal Competence Profile for Medical Educators, centred around the intended pluricultural outcomes of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), is intended to clarify and support lifelong learning for helping medical professionals interact effectively and appropriately with students from other linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

The Role of the L1 in EMI classroom practices

Balbina Moncada-Comas — 2022-07-29

English-medium instruction (EMI) affects lecturers’ classroom practices as they face a new teaching scenario where language(s) can be used to construct lecturers’ identities. Therefore, lecturers can take up different identities because their language-choice acts depend on their communicative and identification purposes. Employing Membership-Categorisation Analysis (MCA) to examine classroom interaction, this paper examines the classroom practices of one EMI lecturer to explore how the orientation towards one language over the others implies a specific function associated with a particular identity. The alternation between languages reveals to what extent EMI lecturers accept or challenge the English-only policy and how lecturers position themselves as English-only or as translanguaging lecturers. This study documents lecturer’s teaching behaviour, particularly how L1-choice acts can be more effective for certain purposes. Studying how lecturers draw from both their EMI-lecturer identity and their L1-lecturer identity, this paper shows how multilingual practices unfold in EMI and highlights the pedagogical value of the L1, hence advocating that the use of languages other than English has, after all, a particular purpose.

The role of English for specific purposes (ESP) in supporting the linguistic dimension in English-medium instruction (EMI)

Francesca Costa — 2022-07-29

Partly because of the Bologna Declaration, the so-called English-Medium Instruction (EMI) courses in universities have undergone a strong surge in the last 15 years. This initial phase of growth in EMI has had an impact on LSP (Language for Specific Purposes) courses, which have in some cases suffered a consequent decline. This article seeks to highlight the potential of LSP to prepare students in EMI communication, support academic disciplinary skills, develop transversal skills, and foster intercultural communication. The study analyses an LSP-focused curricular design that aims to help students develop English-language communicative effectiveness for a domain-specific context: social and human services. The various integrative practices inherent in LSP instruction call attention to its potential as a harmonizing and empowering force for content- and language-integrated learning when used alongside EMI.

Keywords: English-Medium Instruction (EMI); Language for Specific Purposes (LSP); English for Specific Purposes (ESP); Content-and-language integrated learning (CLIL); Integrating content and language in higher education (ICLHE).

Becoming “Language-Aware“ in ICLHE

Petra Kletzenbauer — 2022-07-29

In this paper, we present a cross-disciplinary collaboration model inspired by collaborative action research (CAR) developed at a computer science department at a University of Applied Sciences in Austria. We outline the roles which language teachers at the institution and external collaborators (teacher educators and language specialists) play in creating a space of trust for the professional development of content specialists.

Recent research (e.g. Zappa-Hollman, 2018) has called for such collaborative partnerships between language and content specialists to raise awareness among English Medium Instruction (EMI) practitioners and stakeholders that language is “the crucial semiotic resource to [...] facilitate conceptualization and problem solving in specific disciplines” (Yuan, 2021, p. 2). This demand for an integrative approach which takes the interplay of language and content into consideration has not yet received sufficient attention, neither at the institutional level nor at the level of individual teachers (Zappa-Hollman, 2018). Innovative approaches are clearly needed to improve the quality of ICLHE teaching (Kim et al., 2018).

The generally positive reactions of the content teachers to the Trust Model of Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration suggest that it can contribute to improving their understanding of the epistemic function of language and their Integrating Content and language in Higher Education (ICLHE) teaching practice.

The A-B-C of content teaching in an EMI classroom

Monica Clua — 2022-07-29