“Yes, I wouldn’t have done that in Spanish”. Unlocking lecturers’ multimodal competence in LREs in EMI contexts

Abstract

Within an EMI context, students find themselves immersed in a teaching environment where the working language is an additional language, which can lead to difficulties in their understanding and participation (Rose, 2021). On top of that, EMI lecturers do not always seem to be aware of the potential linguistic limitations of students (Aguilar, 2017; Aintzane & Lasagabaster, 2020) or may even be reluctant to focus on language (Airey, 2012). While the additional language component can be challenging, multimodality can be an effective pedagogical strategy that lecturers can employ to ease the path to understanding a lecture taught in an additional language. This webinar illustrates how multimodality helps ICLHE or EMI teachers in their task to transmit knowledge and facilitate learning of content through an additional language (Ruiz-Madrid & Fortanet-Gómez, 2019; 2023). We present and discuss actual EMI teaching practices in a Mechanical Engineering course in Spain in which the teacher resorts to multimodal strategies to support Language-Related Episodes (LREs). Additionally, we delve into the lecturer’s reaction and comments on our analysis and results, providing additional insights that complement and enrich our study.

Presenters

Mª Noelia Ruiz Madrid is Head of the Departament and Senior lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Universitat Jaume I (Castellón, Spain), where she teaches both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the areas of EAP, ESP and EFL methodology. She coordinates together with Inmaculada Fortanet the GRAPE research group.

Her research interests are related to Multimodal Discourse Analysis, EMI and CLIL/ICLHE, and ICT applied to language learning. Her most recent publications can be checked at https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9800-5624

Enzo Boggio López (award for Excellence in Academic Performance 2018) is a PhD student in Applied Linguistics, with a predoctoral contract (UJI program). For his doctoral thesis, he is conducting a multimodal analysis of EMI (English Medium of Instruction) lecturers’ discourse, co-directed by Noelia Ruiz Madrid and Vicent Beltrán Palanques. He has participated as speaker in ICLHE and AESLA conferences and collaborated in national and European research projects.