10TH SPRING RESEARCH CONFERENCE: PILAR MUR-DUEÑAS DELIVERS A PLENARY TALK ON SUSTAINED PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES
Dr Pilar Mur-Dueñas was a plenary speaker in the conference organised by the GRAM Research Group at the UIC Barcelona’s Institute for Multilingualism. The conference was centred on “Advances in Multilingual Learning and Teaching”, and took place on the 14th of March 2025.
Her plenary talk, entitled “Sustained professional development programs for ICLHE: Developing lecturers’ competences”, highlighted the need for professional development training programmes aimed at Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education (ICLHE). She presented the CLIC@unizar itinerary offered at our institution, described the courses comprising the training programme, and offered examples of activities and strategies, amongst other things, used for fostering participants’ interdisciplinary, global skills.
You can read the abstract of her plenary talk below:
Sustained professional development programs for ICLHE: developing lecturers’ competences
As part of their strategy for internationalization higher education institutions are increasingly offering courses taught through the medium of English, both as a way of attracting foreign students and of offering home students the opportunity to develop competence in the foreign language and in global skills. In this context, supporting lecturers by means of sustained professional development programmes has been pointed out as a crucial aspect for ICLHE (Integrating Content and Language in Higher
Education) success. This training should embrace the development of not only language and communication skills in the general academic and the disciplinary-specific lecturers’ context but also of pedagogical competences (e.g. Manchó-Barés and Arnón-Macià 2017; Pérez-Cañado 2020; Sánchez-Pérez 2020; Breeze and Sancho Guinda 2021; Morell and Volchenkova 2021; Ruiz-Madrid and Fortanet-Gómez 2022). It is the aim of my talk to describe and evaluate how this need for a sustained ICLHE professional development programme was met in our institution through the CLIC@unizar itinerary. I will briefly present the different courses the itinerary consists of and share examples of activities, tasks, strategies and techniques employed throughout the training in order to develop participants’ linguistic, disciplinary, academic, digital, pedagogical and multimodal competences in turn. Finally, the main strengths and opportunities for trainers, trainees and ultimately students will be pointed out together with some of the challenges that designing, implementing and evaluating this professional development programme has entailed.
References
Breeze, R., & Sancho Guinda, C. (Eds.). (2017). Essential competencies for English-medium university teaching. Springer.
Manchó-Barés, G. & Arnón-Macià, E. (2017). EMI lecturer training programmes and academic literacies: A critical insight from ESP. ESP Today, 5(2), 266–290.
Morell, T., & Volchenkova, K. (2021). Introduction. English Medium Instruction (EMI) Teacher training in Higher Education. Special Issue of Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 34, 7-14.
Pérez-Cañado, M.L. (2020). Addressing the research gap in teacher training for EMI: An evidence-based teacher education proposal in monolingual contexts. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 48.
Ruiz-Madrid, M.N. & Fortanet-Gómez, I. (2022). Teacher professional development for the integration of content and language in higher education. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 16 (4-5), 277-280. https://doi.org/10.1080/17501229.2022.2123678