Fostering team teaching: Mapping out a research agenda for English-medium instruction at university level

Abstract

Although English-medium instruction (EMI) courses are burgeoning at university level on a global scale, there is a scarcity of pedagogical guidelines about how to implement effective courses, while most higher education institutions rarely offer courses aimed at helping EMI teachers tackle this new teaching context. An additional concern has to do with the fact that content EMI lecturers tend to avoid language aspects, a weakness that could be overcome by boosting team teaching, that is, the collaboration between language and content teachers. Previous research reveals that team teaching improves undergraduates’ learning and can also be a gratifying experience for the teaching staff involved, who usually highlight the motivational boost it gives them because it stimulates reflection on their pedagogical knowledge and practices. In this paper I put forward research tasks with a view to enticing researchers to embark on projects focused on this uncharted territory, as team teaching is a research field in which much remains to be done.

Teachers’ and Students’ Second Language Motivational Self System in English‐Medium Instruction: A Qualitative Approach

“…For our teachers and students, participation in the EMI experience can contribute to their identity formation. The EMI experience provides them with a practice that shapes their multilingual identity (Henry, ), while at the same time their international identity is evidently promoted (Lasagabaster, ).…”

“…However, and despite the “unprecedented” growth of studies on motivation in the last decade (Boo, Dörnyei, & Ryan, , p. 145), it is noteworthy that the number of publications on the interaction between EMI and motivation is scarce (Lasagabaster & Doiz, ). At a time when EMI is gaining global popularity and research on its impact is needed, some important aspects are being neglected by researchers (Lasagabaster, ; Lasagabaster, ), its impact on L2MSS being one of them. Since EMI teachers and students find that their teaching/learning processes are increasingly demanding of them, L2MSS arises as a worthwhile field of research.…”

The Impact of Online Technologies and English Medium Instruction on University Lectures in International Learning Contexts: A Systematic Review

“…In this respect, Yang (2016: 60) highlighted the implementation of ESP courses in Taiwan that "are delivered using a CLIL-oriented approach". On this point, collaboration between content and ESP lecturers has been claimed by scholars to successfully develop EMI programmes (Lasagabaster, 2018), addressing the language needs of both students and lecturers. However, Dimova and Kling's (2018) findings, also based on perceptions, suggested that instructors' problems lie in the general vocabulary needed to explain new and/or complex disciplinary content rather than in the domain-specific vocabulary associated with different varieties of ESP.…”

Language Errors in an English-Medium Instruction University Setting: How do Language versus Content Teachers Tackle them?

“…What is more, the analysis of the interaction between language competence and content learning is even more conspicuous by its absence. Collaboration between language and content teachers is necessary to make content teachers more aware of the importance of language in content learning (Lasagabaster, 2018). As Symon and Weinberg (2015) point out, merely implementing EMI is unlikely to increase language learning if there is no appropriate linguistic support framework.…”