The Psychological Experience of Integrating Content and Language by Talbot Kyle Read; Gruber Marie-Theres; Nishida Rieko

Author:Talbot, Kyle Read; Gruber, Marie-Theres; Nishida, Rieko
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N/A
Publisher: Channel View Publications
Published: 2021-01-18T16:00:00+00:00

The first year at university is crucial in students’ acculturation process, as together with the aforementioned difficulties in understanding and using technical vocabulary and comprehending dense lectures, learners also need to meet institutional and disciplinary requirements, which are often not explicitly stated (see Evans & Morrison, 2011). Interestingly, our lecturers also admitted that language concerns were arguably not so evident when teaching their subjects in Spanish as the L1. Lecturer V, for instance, commented that she ‘hadn’t noticed this problem so much when teaching the Spanish group’ and lecturer F, added that ‘this was probably happening in all the classes but the fact that English was used simply made it more patent’.

Similarly, research by Cammarata and Tedick (2012: 257) in immersion contexts describes these views as a process of awakening that takes teachers from initially identifying themselves as content experts to ultimately envisioning themselves as partly responsible for teaching the language of their discipline. In this respect, when directly asked during the focus group if they viewed themselves as teachers of English, lecturers unanimously answered ‘no’ but, concurrently, provided many examples of their multifaceted psychological views of the roles of English in their teaching practices, as Extract 2 below unfolds:

Extract 2: Lecturer C

I’ve learned a lot of English from my field by having to prepare for class. Because when you speak English, either you are speaking English with a foreigner in a trivial, everyday conversation or you are speaking scientific English in a congress, which is a very closed world. Here [in an EME lesson] you are between the two worlds and that has forced me to make a great effort.

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