Conceptualizations of English and ELF-awareness among EMI and ESP instructors at university

Resumen

Conceptualizations of English and ELF-awareness among EMI and ESPinstructors at universityEnric Llurda Giménez, Júlia Calvet Terré and Vasilica MocanuUniversitat de Lleida – Universitat de Lleida – Universidad de SalamancaEuropean universities provide numerous courses in English for Specific Purposes (ESP)and/or English-medium-instruction (EMI) in order to compete in the global highereducation area. Often EMI and ESP courses are offered in a complementary way in thesame degree as part of the effort to help students develop higher competence in English.In the last 25 years, there has been a growing awareness of the need to reconceptualizeEnglish for international purposes (Seidlhofer 2003). Such a reconceptualization impliesdeveloping an awareness of the role of English as a global lingua franca and of the needto free English language teaching and use in the classroom from the limitations of formalstandard English and monolingual English usage.Teacher ELF-awareness (Llurda, Bayyurt & Sifakis 2018) calls for some kind ofdetachment from traditional constraints with regard to error correction, openness todifferent varieties of use and to different languages being incorporated in the use oflanguage, namely translanguaging (Garcia & Li Wei 2014), and a deployment of anideological vision of English that departs from a narrow vision of English as native-dependent.This paper presents the fundamental lines underlying a project (LIDISELF) that aims toexamine the guidance exerted by EMI, ESP and L1 instructors towards students’development of disciplinary literacies at two Catalan universities, with an emphasis onthe use of corrective feedback provided on student submissions. In this comprehensivestudy, multiple forms of data collection will be used (students’ written and oralproduction, feedback offered by instructors to students’ productions, classroomobservation, interviews and questionnaires with students and teachers). The results ofLIDISELF are expected to shed light on the process of development of disciplinaryliteracies within university-based instruction, considering teachers’ views and practiceswith students’ reception of them. In short, an ELF-aware vision implies an appreciationof diversity and translanguaging, plus an acceptance of errors that do not interfere withintelligibility.In this paper, we present a qualitative analysis of 3 EMI and 3 ESP university instructorswith regard to ELF-awareness, as displayed through interviews, classroom observationand analysis of corrective feedback given to students’ assessed tasks. Through ouranalysis we will demonstrate how different teachers have different profiles that may beconnected to their own trajectories as English learners, but we will also illustrate howEMI and ESP teachers have some differentiated characteristics that separate one groupfrom the other. Thus, we will see that ESP teachers are strongly connected to a traditionallanguage teaching identity that requires them to correct all formal aspects that deviatefrom formal standard English, whereas EMI instructors apply a more practical-oriented(and therefore more communicative) approach to the use of English.