English-Medium Instruction at Universities by Doiz Aintzane;Lasagabaster David;Sierra Juan Manuel;

Author:Doiz, Aintzane;Lasagabaster, David;Sierra, Juan Manuel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1047944
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

As we can see, the level of English of a great majority of first-year students is B1 or lower. According to the CEFR (Council of Europe, 2002: 34), level B1 is characterised by the learner’s ability to deal with ‘personal views or opinion in an informal discussion with friends (…) but may sometimes be difficult to follow when trying to say exactly what he/she would like to’. If we add to this that the learner at this level is able to cope with problems in everyday life, it seems that it is clearly insufficient to cope with the level of formality, abstraction and precision that is expected in a university subject both in terms of receptive and productive skills.

As for the instructors, although we do not have data about their level, the low number of English-medium subjects offered by universities may reflect the difficulties universities encounter to introduce this type of instruction. Following Coleman (2006), who cites a study by Ammon and McConnell (2002), we see that in the academic year 1999-2000 Spain was one of four European countries in a total of 23 where universities did not offer English-medium programmes. Although the situation has probably changed slightly since then, the figures we have for Catalan universities for the academic year 2007-08 related to the presence of EMI can be considered as rather low, with 3.4% for the University of Lleida (Universitat de Lleida, 2011a) and 5.6% for the University Pompeu Fabra (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2011).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.