Teacher attitudes to language in university bilingual education

Abstract

The main goal of this article is to explore the attitudes (opinions, beliefs, etc.) regarding ‘language’ of university teachers engaged in bilingual education. The context for this research is an on-going teacher development programme at the School of Engineering (Escuela Superior de Ingeniería) at the University of Cadiz. At this stage in our research, we are looking at teacher attitudes to language from three perspectives: to better understand what they think about language in their ‘normal’ i.e. Spanish/monolingual teaching; how they conceive of language per se in learning and how they feel about bilingual classrooms. Prior to their involvement in bilingual education, these teachers were likely encouraged to think of themselves as specialists in Áreas No Lingüísticas, but it would appear that they are in the process of reconceptualising both the roles of language in learning and the contributions that teachers can make. In the bilingual classrooms, most of their students are locals with limited language skills and the teachers favour an approach geared to developing both content and languages (L1 and L2) concurrently and perceive of themselves as both models and facilitators in the process. We interpret this as a good example of Internationalization at Home (IaH).