Designing and Implementing a Professional Programme for ICLHE Teachers: Beyond Linguistic and Communicative Competence

Abstract

English Medium Instruction (EMI) is being fostered by universities across the world to promote their internationalization with an increasing number of courses taught through English both at graduate and postgraduate level. This requires university lecturers to be offered opportunities for professional development. It is the aim of this paper to present an extended training programme -CLIC@unizar (Content and Language Integrated Competences at the Universidad de Zaragoza)- developed at our institution which seeks to foster not only the communicative skills but also the pedagogical skills of those lecturers teaching through the medium of English or who are planning to do so. The training itinerary is grounded on previous research on EMI professional development programmes, English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP), and methodological principles promoting the students’ active role and their development of communication and digital competences. The use of digital tools and technologies which promote online collaboration, especially HyperDocs and Google Apps for Education (mostly Google Docs, Google Slides, and Google Forms), has been integrated in the itinerary following the SAMR Model (Puentedura, 2013). The use of these digital tools has allowed us to include multimodal ways to provide participants with input, make them interact with the material, with us and among themselves, and produce output as demonstrations of their learning. It is essential to make ICLHE (Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education) teachers aware of their need to adapt their methodology or adopt new ones to be effective in their teaching in an L2.