CLIL in Pharmacy: A case of collaboration between content and language lecturers

Abstract

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.

A Typology of English-Medium Instruction

“…15 Adjunct courses often serve as a type of bridging course to prepare students for EMI instruction, and may contain a focus on text types, language, and vocabulary of academic subjects, as well as academic study skills. For example, in pharmacy lecturers in a CLIL approach at a Spanish university, English is usually used for assignments where previously learnt knowledge needs to be applied yet English is rarely taken into consideration to introduce new content (Woźniak, 2013). 16 The main focus is on promoting students' general English skills such as listening, reading, speaking, and writing (Coskun, 2013).…”

Go hand in hand: Showcasing lecturers’ online collaborative teaching practices

“…In light of its well-found impacts on K-12 schools, university professionals may take coteaching strategy into account. They may admit it as a new way of working at the university (Kluth & Straut, 2003;Woźniak, 2013). Since collaborative teaching approach is also crucial at the university (Woźniak, 2013), lecturers will have a chance to merge their expertise to assist the learning process (Gillespie & Israetel, 2008) and elevate teaching performance as well as upgrade teaching quality (González & Skultety, 2018).…”

“…They may admit it as a new way of working at the university (Kluth & Straut, 2003;Woźniak, 2013). Since collaborative teaching approach is also crucial at the university (Woźniak, 2013), lecturers will have a chance to merge their expertise to assist the learning process (Gillespie & Israetel, 2008) and elevate teaching performance as well as upgrade teaching quality (González & Skultety, 2018). A common syllabus is developed by collaborating instructors, whose integrated perspectives and teaching contents as well as activities are jointly selected (Letterman & Dugan, 2004).…”

Mulilingual education: A contrastive analysis in Humanities, Social Sciences and Health Sciences

“…At this point, some sort of collaboration between content and language experts is highly desirable for an effective teaching procedure (Bellés-Fortuño, 2021, Bellés-Fortuño & Belenguer Balaguer, 2006Carrió-Pastor, 2008Doiz et al, 2019;Wozniak, 2013;Maljers et al, 2007), especially if content teachers feel that their proficiency level is not good enough to plan their lessons. Unfortunately, team-teaching practices where content and language instructors share their knowledge seem to be extraordinarily exceptional at university levels (Räisänen, 2009).…”