Developing Research-based Teacher Education Programmes and Student Support Structures for English-medium Higher Education: A European Perspective

Organisers: Emma Dafouz (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain) & Davinia Sánchez-García (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)

Invited Speakers: Guzman Mancho-Barés (LIDISELF PROJECT - Universidad de Lleida, Spain), Slobodanka Dimova (University of Copenhagen, Denmark), Lesley Graham (Département Langues et Cultures, University of Bordeaux, France), Barbara Schmidt-Unterberger (WU - Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria)

With the internationalisation of higher education (HE) growing at a fast pace, a large number of HE institutions world-wide offer localised forms of English-medium education (EME) for parts of their study programmes. Despite such growth, pedagogical considerations, together with lecturer education programmes and support structures for student development of disciplinary language have often not been sufficiently provided (Kuteeva & Airey, 2014; Breeze & Dafouz, 2017; Bradford & Brown, 2018). Against this backdrop, the purpose of this three-hour colloquium is two-fold: 1) to describe some of the English-medium professional development initiatives developed within five European higher education institutions set in four different geopolitical areas (i.e. Spain, France, Austria and Denmark) and their respective research projects, and 2) to discuss the main linguistic and pedagogical differences and similarities identified in lecturer and student English-medium practices across these European universities and provide examples of good practice.