Emma Dafouz

Surely They Can't Do as Well: A Comparison of Business Students' Academic Performance in English-Medium and Spanish-as-First-Language-Medium Programmes.

For years, universities worldwide have offered English-medium degrees as a way to attract international students and staff, enhance their institutional profile and promote multilingualism. In Europe and the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), English-medium instruction (EMI) is more recent, but the dimension and speed of its implementation has outpaced language policies, methodological considerations and empirical research. In view of this, this paper focuses on an empirical study examining the effect that the teaching of a Business Administration degree in English as a foreign language may have on Spanish students’ academic performance (as measured through coursework and final grades), when compared to their counterparts’ learning in Spanish. Students’ grades are analysed in three different disciplinary subjects and treated statistically. Findings show that both cohorts obtain similar results, suggesting that the language of instruction does not seem to compromise students’ learning of academic content. Differences, however, are found regarding learners’ performance in the three disciplinary subjects under scrutiny, with history yielding slightly higher results than accounting and finance. This finding runs counter to the general belief that the more verbal subjects, like history, would have a ‘limiting’ effect on EMI students’ final performance and, moreover, raises questions concerning disciplinary differences and assessment.

Analysing Stance in a CLIL University Context: Non-native Speaker Use of Personal Pronouns and Modal Verbs

In recent years, many European countries have witnessed a rapid implementation of the CLIL approach at tertiary level. In Spain, although English has been introduced as the language of instruction in some master and doctoral courses, the application of the CLIL approach is still isolated. Similarly, little research has been done into CLIL discursive features and teacher–student positioning in the Spanish university context. Focusing on university lectures by non-native speakers, the present paper explores the use of two relevant areas of stance: (i) pronominal forms, and their discursive functions; and (ii) modal verbs occurring within verbal clusters that accompany pronouns. The study is based on a quantitative analysis of these two linguistic devices in terms of number of occurrences and frequency. The results show that inclusive we is by far the most frequent pronominal form, functioning as a solidarity mechanism and helping to establish common ground. Furthermore, the functions assigned to the two most recurrent modal verbs, can and have to, are found to minimise also the speakers authority while inserted within a problem-solving framework and guiding the steps of scientific reasoning.

Contrasting learner corpora: the use of modal and reporting verbs in the expression of writer stance

This article presents part of the results from research carried out by the SPICLE team on argumentative texts written in English by student writers, both native and non-native speakers from several L1 backgrounds. The aim of the study was to compare how these writers construct stance by examining their use of devices of evidentiality, specifically, modal verbs (can, could, may, might and must) and nine reporting verbs (suggest, wonder, argue, explain, express, recognise, say, show, and state). The texts of American university writers were contrasted with those produced by five EFL groups (speakers of Spanish, Dutch, Italian, French and German). The results showed that the EFL writers either overuse or underuse modal verbs in comparison with the American writers. Regarding the use of reporting verbs, native writers use a wider range of verbs, many of which carry a higher pragmatic import for stance taking. This research is significant not only for the comparison of typological and pragmatic differences but also for the study of interlanguage features and the teaching and learning of writing conventions.

Formulating Writer Stance: A Contrastive Study of EFL Learner Corpora

The emergence of English as the predominant foreign language required for academic work in Spain has brought about a shift in the EFL teachers’ priorities regarding the teaching of writing skills. Since the early 1990s, the SPICLE1 writing research team at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid has studied argumentative texts produced by Spanish university writers, American university students and expert writers (signed newspaper editorials) in an attempt to tease apart the multiple factors influencing EFL text, including transfer of L1 features – linguistic (typological) as well as those involving the influence of L1 rhetorical conventions – novice writer aspects, EFL proficiency and educational background. We present two studies which show how these factors may subtly coalesce in order to produce certain discourse effects, especially concerning writer stance, as shown in the second study presented here. The results will be of interest to teachers of ESL and EFL writing and researchers in contrastive rhetoric.

A Contrastive Functional Analysis of Errors in Spanish EFL University Writers’ Argumentative Texts: Corpus-based Study

This article reports on the initial results of the Spanish data from the ICLE Error Tagging Project (Louvain). The corpus consists of 50,000 words of texts (argumentative essays and literature examinations) written by English Philology students at two Madrid universities. The tag categories were: Form (F), Grammar (G), Lexico-grammatical aspects (X), Lexis (L), Word (W), Punctuation (Q), Register (R) and Style (S). All tags were triple checked by various native-speaker raters. The results show that grammar (35%) and lexis (28%) account for two-thirds of the errors, while punctuation accounts for 11%, form 9%, word 7%, lexico-grammatical factors 6% and register and style for 2% and 1%, respectively. The study proposes various areas of investigation which may be useful to others who are working with English-Spanish contrastive data: discourse/pragmatics; semantics; (lexis)/lexico-grammar; syntax; phonetics/writing systems; and non-structural factors (writing conventions).

A sociolinguistic approach to the multifaceted Roles of English in English-medium education in multilingual university settings

Over the last twenty years, English-medium education in tertiary settings has turned into a global reality, with higher education institutions (HEIs) across the world aiming to become increasingly international. Yet this apparently uniform move towards English-medium instruction comes in such a variety of highly diverse local realisations that, when looked at in detail, the homogenising function of English turns out to be more complex and multifaceted than initially expected (Smit & Dafouz 2012). Within this context, the chapter draws on a recently developed conceptual framework for describing English-medium education in multilingual university settings (or EMEMUS), known by the acronym ROAD-MAPPING (Dafouz & Smit 2016) and focuses specifically on one of the six core dimensions, namely Roles of English (in relation to other languages). With the help of illustrative discursive examples from two different HEIs, we contend that well-established notions (such as EFL, EAP, ESP and ELF) while useful for initial categorizations of English language usage, are, firstly, complex in themselves and, secondly, adopt predominantly linguistic perspectives, potentially sidelining other relevant societal, institutional, pedagogical and communicational factors.

English-medium instruction and teacher education programmes in higher education: ideological forces and imagined identities at work

ABSTRACT With English-medium instruction (EMI) gaining momentum in higher education across the globe, teacher education programmes (TEPs) are being redesigned to equip lecturers with the skills necessary to deal with increasingly international classrooms. While most of these TEPs mainly pursue improving lecturers’ English language proficiency they rarely reflect on pedagogical changes and even less on the ideological forces and identity issues at play. This article addresses precisely such gaps by focusing on ideology and identity drawing on two complementary conceptual models: Investment theory and ROAD-MAPPING. These models are used in a qualitative content analysis of the online written responses of EMI lecturers at a Spanish public university. The findings reveal that lecturers unanimously agreed that EMI had enhanced their linguistic and social capital providing the younger teachers with a more international professional identity and a promising academic future. Concurrently, lecturers expressed their concerns about the necessary co-existence of languages (Spanish and English), particularly with respect to teachers’ responsibility to provide students with disciplinary literacy in both languages so that graduates become competent professionals at a local/ global level. The article closes with reflections and implications for designing TEPs in EMI settings.

Multilingual higher education. Beyond English medium orientations

for both school education and home language acquisition. Given the expansive contents covered in the book, it is well organized by including introductions and summary sections in each chapter to maintain the readers’ focus. It is also user-friendly by providing supplementary reading, online resources, study questions and activities as well as glossary lists. This book will be an invaluable reference for a variety of audiences such as researchers, teachers and parents who are interested in bilingualism. It is an excellent source for different introductory courses for undergraduate or graduate students such as second language acquisition, language policy and bilingual/multilingual education.