Lecturers’ identities and practices in english-medium instruction at a catalan universityan ethnographic study

Resumen

One of the key drivers of the internationalisation processes of higher education institutions has been the introduction and rapid implementation of English-medium instruction (EMI) subjects. This Englishisation of university subjects responds to the belief that English is the language for academia and so it serves to broaden the academic opportunities for university stakeholders, especially lecturers and students. Nevertheless, EMI subjects are often taught by disciplinary content lecturers who are non-native English speakers in non-English speaking countries. For this reason, there is a need to explore and consider how lecturers experience EMI due to the challenged that they may confront when engaged in teaching subject matter in English, a foreign language. This ethnomethdological study investigates how three experienced STEM lecturers at the University of Lleida negotiate their professional identity through their self-inhabited positionings and how they accept or resist other-ascribed positionings that come with the language instruction shift from their L1 (either Spanish and/or Catalan) to English. It examines the negotiation, (re)interpretation, (re)construction and transformation of their EMI lecturer professional identities, focussing particularly on the extent to which they inhabit a language-related identity, that is to say a disciplinary-language facilitator (DLF) role, when engaged in EMI teaching. Alongside the exploration of professional identity, this study will also analyse EMI lecturers’ teaching practices, focusing on how these practices unfold in the classroom and to what extent EMI lecturer’ practices are multilingual. Accordingly, this thesis adopts a qualitative approach and comprises data from semi-structured interviews with the lecturers and classroom observation of their EMI classes. With a focus on their identity, this study specifically focusses on how lecturers grapple with the prospect of positioning themselves and their practices as CLILised EMI, understood as what happens when EMI is reframed as sharing key characteristic with Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) – language teaching. If English language learning becomes a goal, EMI may be CLILised, that is, it is adopted not only for content delivery, but also as a means through which students might improve their English. The results of the study reveal the lecturers accept and self-inhabit an EMI lecturer professional identity and resist the notion of CLILised EMI, which emerges from the researchers’ English-language teaching (ELT) discourses, and so they somehow diminish the DLF role. Although their professional identity still needs to undergo a profound negotiation and re-construction to actually become CLILised, they do position EMI as CLILised as they both report in the interviews, and actually perform in class language-teaching-like practices, a DLF role. Therefore, their professional identity fluctuates between the core EMI lecturer identity and the emerging, but somehow suppressed, CLILised EMI lecturer identity. These and other findings point to instructional and linguistic challenges as well as a disjuncture between policy and practice. For this reason, I argue that a clearer EMI policy – either CLILised or non-CLILised – needs to be developed by university administrators and EMI lecturers themselves, an EMI official policy that provides lecturers with a pedagogical and linguistic guide to perform confidently in EMI and further re-shape their professional identity.