Quality Factors in Bilingual Education at the University Level

Abstract

© 2017, Universidad de Granada. All rights reserved. This article seeks to investigate which factors exercise the greatest influence on the quality of university bilingual/CLIL programs and their positive results. With this aim, a questionnaire was designed with 62 variables (Appendix 1) and it was applied to a sample of 164 students and 57 TEFL/CLIL professors. The results demonstrate a considerable agreement among the participants of this study, who coincided in assigning salient ratings to the professors’ linguistic competence and commitment to the program, in addition to student motivation and interest. Significant statistical differences were also found between the professors and students, who had diverging views in reference to the tested quality factors. Students were found to assign more importance to the motivating effect of their professors, the need for language exchanges with native speakers, the necessity of speaking clearly in class, and the presence of native teachers. However, the professors more highly valued their personal motivation and commitment to the program, their didactic training in CLIL, the incorporation of measures of improvement in class, and the integrated planning of linguistic and non-linguistic contents.