In view of the growing amount of English used outside language courses, this study seeks to gain insights into how language teachers at university level understand and navigate their changing roles. It examines the place of ESP teaching in a university setting in Spain where almost all language lecturers play a double role: they teach obligatory ESP courses and also support content lecturers in the integration of English into their subjects as CLIL tutors. The results of two openended questionnaires and interviews with ESP lecturers/CLIL tutors show that interdisciplinary teacher cooperation concentrates on raising content teachers' awareness of teaching methodology and language issues in their disciplines, but also benefits the design of ESP courses. Language specialists view their multiple and fluid roles as an opportunity to expand their horizons and welcome the chance to mediate between disciplines and participate in students' academic and disciplinary development not only in ESP courses but also throughout the degree programme. Despite the increasingly blurred dividing line between ESP and CLIL at university level, the two approaches, rather than compete, can complement each other, so to this end, language specialists' effort to find the right balance between language and content knowledge should also be addressed.
This paper documents collaborative work between content and language lecturers for CLIL at a Spanish university. It focuses on the perspectives and concerns of ten Pharmacy lecturers who integrate credits in English within their content subjects, as reflected during a group discussion and in individual questionnaires. The study reveals that the lecturers are motivated and have positive opinions about both the project and the collaboration. In spite of some years of CLIL experience, they still need support and their main difficulties are related to the linguistic side of CLIL and its assessment. Given the differences in objectives in each subject, further collaboration with the language lecturer should focus on addressing the specific needs and concerns of particular lecturers. More collaboration between content lecturers is also needed to define the aims and outcomes of particular activities and to sequence them properly so as to offer a well-balanced CLIL degree programme.
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