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

Resumen

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.