EMI in Spain: Striving to maintain a multilingual balance

Abstract

Spanish universities have lately striven to boost English-medium in-struction (EMI) programmes, since EMI is viewed as a lynchpin of the internationalization process. Thus, Spanish universities encourage the use of English, which in monolingual regions entails bilingualism as the desired outcome, whereas in officially bilingual regions trilingual-ism is the aim. Spain is a multilingual country in which some minority languages coexist with Spanish and English in the curriculum and this multilingualism ineluctably generates friction. This chapter analyses how the interaction between Englishization and multilingualism is perceived by society in general and the different university bodies in particular, the reactions encountered as regards the impact of Englishization on the L1, and whether there are differences across disciplines.