Employing student and teacher focus group data obtained at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid as part of the SHIFT project – an international collaboration focused on exploring the notion of disciplinary literacies from a student perspective, this presentation hopes to contribute to an understanding of the interplay of linguistic hierarchies in EMEMUS (English Medium Education in Multilingual University Settings) classrooms.
Data obtained from transcripts of the focus groups conducted in the Spring of 2021 (19 informants overall) has been coded using MAXQDA. We started with five mother codes: Demographic data; Perceptions of Internationalisation; Using English; Using L1s/translanguaging and English outside the classroom, and created 24 sub-categories each further divided into 2-6 sub-codes. Once we had coded the focus group data, we had over 500 flagged extracts. This data is providing us with a nuanced understanding of the beliefs, opinions and attitudes in play.
In this presentation we will focus primarily on the question of classroom language use. This area is of obvious interest to researchers (for example see Komori-Glatz 2018; Sanchez-García 2019; Smit 2019) but this is perhaps the first study to compare stakeholder views. It initially appears that there are differences between the two cohorts' idealisations of praxis: the teachers leaning heavily towards English-only instruction while the students would prefer a more multilingual approach. We are currently engaged in exploring some of the potential reasons for this mismatch. These may be institutional – for example the university's policy for internationalisation equating teaching in English with 'bilingualism' (even though they are arguably advocating L2 monolingualism in the classroom) and situational – the pandemic having contributed to a scarcity of incoming Erasmus students in the student cohort and in turn to an atypical preponderance of L1 Spanish speakers.
This is a work in progress but one thing which has emerged when working with the data is that we found ourselves repeatedly wondering to what extent the two groups – teachers and students – were aware of each other's feelings on the matter. In line with AILA's concern this year with social cohesion, we cannot help but feel that while the focus group discussions provided us – researchers – with invaluable data it might be even more fruitful if the two cohorts were to engage in genuine dialogue with each other regarding the question of classroom language.
Bibliography
Komori-Glatz, M. (2018). Multilingual ELF interaction in multicultural student teamwork at Europe's largest business university. In: Tatsioka, H.Z.; Seidlhofer, B.; Sifakis, N. & Ferguson, G. (eds.) Using English as a lingua franca in education in Europe, pp. 150-174. De Gruyter.
Sánchez-García, D. (2019). 'I can't find the words now...': Teacher Discourse Strategies and their Communicative Potential in Spanish- and English-Medium Instruction in Higher Education, CLIL. Journal of Innovation and Research in Plurilingual and Pluricultural Education, 2(2): 43-55.
Smit, U. (2019) Classroom Discourse in EMI: on the dynamics of multilingual practices. In Murata, K. (ed.) English Medium Instruction from an English as Lingua Franca Perspective, 99-123. Routledge.
