Aguillar, M. & Rosa Rodríguez 2012 Lecturer and Student Perceptions On CLIL at A Spanish Uni.

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International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
Vol. 15, No. 2, March 2012, 183197
Lecturer and student perceptions on CLIL at a Spanish university

Marta Aguilar* and Rosa Rodrı́guez
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English Unit, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

(Received 19 April 2011; final version received 15 August 2011)
This study reports on a pilot implementation of Content and Language

Integrated Learning (CLIL) at a Spanish university. In order to find out how
both lecturers and students perceived their experience, several interviews and
meetings took place with lecturers, and an open-ended questionnaire was passed
to students. The meetings and interviews with lecturers yielded important
information about their satisfaction. It was found out that lecturers were mostly
interested in practising and improving their English spoken fluency, they did not
feel that the quality of their teaching had been sacrificed, they had not included
any question on language learning in their assessment and they showed great
reluctance to receiving any CLIL methodological training. As to students’
reactions, analysis of their questionnaires revealed that most of them found the
experience positive. Their self-reported perceived gains unanimously point to the
specialised vocabulary they have learnt and, in the second place, to an
improvement of their listening and speaking skills. The most outstanding negative
aspect they found is lecturers’ insufficient level of English. CLIL training specially
adapted to university teachers is necessary so that lecturers can overcome their
reluctance to a methodological training and thereby the potential of CLIL is
realised.
Keywords: tertiary level CLIL; perceptions to CLIL; CLIL training; internationalisation
Introduction
In the last few years, there has been a wide array of initiatives based on Content and
Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in Europe and in Spain. The acronym most
generally used is CLIL and is used as an umbrella term to describe foreign-medium
instruction which can offer different modalities. The Eurydice Report described the
state-of-the-art in 30 European CLIL experiences in 2006 but many more initiatives
have been taken since then, at least in Spain. Most of the studies done in Spain
revolve around CLIL in English and in primary and secondary education. Among
the few studies carried out on CLIL at tertiary level and in Spain, we find that most
research has been done in humanities and linguistics faculties, basically because
CLIL in Spain is still at an embryonic stage (Navés and Victori 2010). CLIL is the
acronym used in this article to describe the teaching experience but we will later refer
to the appropriacy of the term.
The main aim of CLIL in Europe can be summarised as full competence in the
mother tongue plus in two foreign languages in a multilingual Europe (Wolff 2002).
CLIL is also regarded as a crucial element to provide employability to graduates and
*Corresponding author. Email: marta.aguilar@upc.edu
ISSN 1367-0050 print/ISSN 1747-7522 online

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184 M. Aguilar and R. Rodrı́guez
postgraduates in the sense that students are trained to become qualified professionals
to work in a multicultural international environment. Therefore, a well-designed
CLIL university pedagogy should provide students with opportunities to express and
communicate about issues related to their professional expertise. CLIL also plays a
crucial role in acculturating university students into the language in which their
discipline knowledge is embedded, constructed or evaluated (Bhatia 2004; Wright
2004). Generally speaking, the most usually identified benefits are foreign language
learning (particularly improvement in receptive skills), multicultural competence and
a positive (emotional/affective) attitude toward foreign language learning and toward
the benefits of bi- or tri-lingualism as well. A general description of CLIL benefits

can be found in Marsh, Maljers, and Hatiala (2001) justification of CLIL’s five
dimensions*cultural, environmental, linguistic, content and learning dimensions.
See also Ruiz de Zarobe, Sierra, and Gallardo del Puerto (2011) for a summary of
areas with gains with CLIL and other areas that are not positively affected by CLIL.
Because this article documents a CLIL pilot experience at a Spanish university,
we focus on research in Spain whenever possible. Research with primary and
secondary students (Muñoz 2006) points to the fact that it is exposure intensity,
rather than exposure alone, that benefits most learners given that better results are
obtained when there are more hours of instruction in relatively short periods of time
than with fewer hours of formal instruction over longer periods (Dalton-Puffer 2007;
Lasagabaster 2008; Pérez-Vidal 2011). CLIL students seem to perform even better
than stay abroad students in certain aspects (Pérez-Vidal 2011). In bilingual
communities like Basque Country, Galicia and Catalonia at secondary level, we
find more gains in students who have been involved in CLIL for one or two years
than in those who are not participating in CLIL, particularly in listening skills, in
oral production and in organisation skills (Navés and Victori 2010; Ruiz de Zarobe
and Lasagabaster 2010). This is partly in line with the immersion outcomes described
by Swain (1985), who noted that immersion students progressed in content
knowledge and in interpretive skills more than in expressive (oral and written)
skills. Gains in the discipline-specific terminology and in those grammatical aspects
commonly used in the discipline genres and discourse have also been identified; in
particular one should highlight vocabulary acquisition (Feixas et al. 2009; Márquez
2007, 1001; Jiménez Catalán and Ruiz de Zarobe 2009 ) and word association
(Moreno 2009). Yet, in many of these studies, CLIL students were exposed to the
target language for longer periods than non-CLIL students, so it is not clear whether
gains can be attributed to increased exposure or to CLIL itself. The amount and
intensity of extra exposure required for CLIL benefits to become manifest in adults
are unclear, and evidence of long-term CLIL gains is still missing. Children in
immersion settings, for example, seem to reach the same level as pupils in their native
language after 47 years of bilingual teaching (Thomas and Collier 2002). Another
interesting aspect is the role played by participants’ proficiency. For example, it seems
that less proficient university students benefit more than more proficient students,
particularly in their listening skills (Aguilar and Muñoz, submitted) even though
intermediate high has been described as the minimum threshold for success in US
university immersion programmes (Klee and Tedick 1997).
As to losses of CLIL, Smith (2004), Yusof, Tayib, and Mansor (2004), Klassen
and de Graff (2001), and Sercu (2004) identified some of the most important losses
for university students, among which we highlight frequent use of avoidance
strategies (avoiding oral participation because of language problems), inability to
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 185
exhibit best performance, decrease in the quality of teaching, decrease in students’

overall learning results or increase in study load. Losses for lecturers can be an
increase in teaching load, poorer coverage of subject matter, a slower delivery rate
and more boring lectures (resulting from lecturers’ lack of proficiency to tell jokes,
anecdotes or interact with students). Vinke, Snippe, and Jochems (1998) found out
that the typical problems of lecturers were linguistic: they gave shorter, less elaborate
and less clear presentations because they failed to give examples, elaborate key
points, summarise, use signposting and appropriate pause/stress/intonation patterns.
Lecturers tend to rate their performance as more efficient than students and refuse to
follow any courses to improve their English (Yusof, Tayib, and Mansor 2004). An
insufficiently researched strand of research refers to how content in a foreign
language medium is conveyed. Some studies show that improvement in the
communicative competence of the vehicular language is not detrimental to the
learning of the content subject or of the mother tongue (Pérez-Vidal 2011; Seikkula-
Leino 2007), whereas others claim that the quality of the content is sacrificed as a
result of lecturers’ low proficiency (Airey 2004). Lecturers should regulate and
provide interaction and opportunities to regulate and explain, paying special focus
on form, so that communication becomes uptake and eventually intake (DeKeyser
2002). In Spain, lecturers’ insufficient English communicative competence and lack
of adapted teaching materials have been pointed to as unresolved problems (Dafouz
2007; Dalton-Puffer and Nikula 2006; Navés and Muñoz 1999; Pérez-Vidal 2007)
and that is why in Spain several initiatives are beginning to take place in CLIL
teacher training, both pre- and in-service (Lasagabaster and Ruiz de Zarobe 2010;
Ruiz de Zarobe, Sierra, and Gallardo del Puerto 2011), especially at the primary and
secondary level.
Moving on to attitudes in Spanish tertiary level, Muñoz (2001) conducted a survey
among English Philology students concerning the use of English as the medium of
instruction in content-matter subjects (e.g. literature and culture subjects). While the
use of the target language as the medium of instruction is a characteristic feature of
such a learning context, the situation most closely resembles CLIL. The answers to a
written questionnaire revealed that students perceived higher gains in receptive skills
than in productive skills, and that gains in self-confidence were also high. Only a
handful of studies have explored how Spanish university students from non-language-
related degrees respond to CLIL. Feixas and others (2009) found out that for 67% of
the students surveyed, foreign language did not represent more difficulty; reactions
were also positive both in motivation and in overall gains because students felt they
had improved their language competence in general, as well as their oral skills and their
written production, namely their vocabulary. Nevertheless, some problems were also
identified: students’ insufficient language competence and their inability to express
their content knowledge in a foreign language. As regards expectations and
motivations, Dafouz and others (2007) surveyed students and teachers about a future
CLIL implementation at two Spanish universities. Lecturers’ expectations pointed to
several important requisites in order to, in their opinion, teach properly: (1) teachers’
good English fluency and pronunciation, (2) CLIL adapted materials, (3) slower
delivery rate (with a slight reduction of content) and (4) better organisation in order to
transmit content. Yet, they did not think their assessment method should be changed.
When students were asked, after having followed a course of English for specific
purposes combined with a content subject, they sensed they had improved their
specific vocabulary, their pronunciation and their listening comprehension, but not
their grammatical knowledge.
Method
We will first provide some information about the background against which the
first stages of the project took place. In order to gather information about
engineering students’ average level of English, a questionnaire was prepared and
randomly administered to students from different academic years. Seven hundred
and forty-six students answered and it turned out that 42.7% of students could
certify their English competence was at or above level B.2.2 (upper-intermediate
level). At this initial pilot stage, seven postgraduate courses were chosen because
they fulfilled the following requisites: (1) the course was given by lecturers willing
to teach in English, (2) there were different groups running at the same time so
that students could choose the language, (3) an interactive course (e.g. lab sessions,
practicals or lectures with a lot of teamwork/problem-solution work), (4)
postgraduate course (preferably) and (5) a course with a significant percentage
of Erasmus students. It was also possible to know the average English level of the
lecturers participating at this first stage and others who joined the process in the
following year because they took the Oxford Placement Test (OPT). Their average
score was 144.8 which, according to the OPT band, corresponds to B.2.2 (upper
intermediate).
Another important action consisted in helping teachers adapt their didactic
materials, in particular power-point slides displayed in class. This adaptation,
however, merely amounted to translating materials from CatalanSpanish into
English. During the shift, code switching was quite usual in the teaching practices:
English was the medium of verbal instruction and visual material (power-point
slides), but the rest of written materials were either in Catalan or in Spanish. The
commission was well aware that this assistance did not suffice because ‘teaching
through a foreign language involves much more than a mere change in the language
of instruction’ (Dafouz and Nuñez 2009, 103). In fact, only 11% of the teachers
involved had previously attended seminars on CLIL organised by the university
education institute. The rest of the teachers, however, did not know about CLIL
methodology.
The study
This study takes place in a school of engineering at a Spanish university and
analyses students and lecturers’ perceptions after a CLIL experience. On the whole,
lecturers were reluctant to teach in English, but eventually eight lecturers agreed to
participate in the first semester. In total, 17 lecturers agreed to participate between
the first and the second semester. In the setting we describe, engineering content
courses are given in neither the participants’ mother tongue nor the language of the
environment. In fact, English is the third language, Catalan and Spanish being
official languages.
The study aims to depict a pilot CLIL teaching experience at a Spanish university.
More specifically, the aims of the study are twofold: (1) gather information about
lecturers’ perception after a 15-week semester in English-medium instruction (Were
they satisfied? What was their opinion about CLIL training and other methodological
issues? and (2) gather information about students’ perception after a 15-week
semester in English-medium instruction.
Participants
The overall number of students who participated in the first stage was 193 (seven
courses), with an average age of 21.9 years. Since only a few lecturers agreed to
participate in the first semester, 87 students answered a questionnaire (45% of
students enrolled) on the last lecturing day. Erasmus students represented 26.4% of
the students, coming from Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and to a lesser extent
from The Netherlands, Denmark, Portugal and Slovenia. All Spanish students were
bilingual (CatalanSpanish) and had never before followed any content course in
English. Past experience of Erasmus/mobility students was unknown to the
researchers. Students were randomly distributed in several 15-week, 4-hour/week
courses.
Eventually, 17 lecturers attended meetings and interviews. All lecturers were
Spanish/Catalan native teachers with more than 10 years of teaching experience in
their mother tongue. No lecturer had lectured in English before, except for the odd
seminar with PhD students and of course their experience in conference participa-
tion; five of them had some post-doc stay experience at an English-speaking
university, but not in lecturing.
Instruments
This study used a series of oral interviews in order to gather students’ and teachers’
perceptions. Information about lecturers’ degree of satisfaction and beliefs about
methodology and assessment were obtained through a series of informal interviews
and meetings where teachers could voice their uncertainties and opinions. Two
interviews were held with eight lecturers, most of whom were responsible for the
initial seven courses, whilst more informal interviews and meetings with the rest of
the lecturers took place later. In these meetings teachers were informed about the
implementation process and the material adaptation procedures. The authors took
note of all relevant information elicited in these meetings. The notes were later
compared and contrasted item by item by the two researchers in order to achieve a
final and more complete version.
Information about the degree of students’ satisfaction was collected by means of
a five-item survey administered to five groups during the last week of a 15-week
semester. The questionnaire was in English so students answered in this language:
(1) What is your opinion about the course in English? What is your overall
assessment?
(2) What English aspects did you learn or practise in this English group? Rate
them from most important (5) to least important (1).
(3) Did you find any negative aspect? Rate them from most negative (5) to least
negative (1).
(4) Was there anything missing, in your opinion?
(5) Do you plan to enrol in another English group in the future?
Results
Most lecturers from the first stage were interviewed at the end of the semester for two
purposes. The first referred to the post-assessment of the experience; the second
aimed at eliciting their opinions about methodological issues like teacher training
and student evaluation. Seven (out of the eight) lecturers said they were on the whole
satisfied and wanted to continue in the future. Exceptionally, one teacher expressed
disappointment because his students did not have the option to choose the modality
(language) they wished, which negatively affected their attitude. Nevertheless, the
most important answer that determined the degree of success was that 100% of
teachers wanted to repeat the experience. The positive feedback from students that
was given to them (satisfaction questionnaire) reinforced this feeling.
Lecturers were inquired about: (1) their motivations, (2) their perceived quality of
their teaching, (3) their attitude towards teacher training, (4) their student
assessment method and (5) their problems/complaints. As to motivation, all lecturers
admitted that they had agreed to participate because they wanted to learn/practise
their English. Hence, for them it had been positive because they had improved their
English fluency and increased their confidence. With hindsight, they said that having
succeeded in lecturing in English had been satisfactory.
Lecturers were asked about their students’ performance and fulfilment of
academic goals: (1) Did the students’ performance and final marks in your English
group differ from the performance and results of students in the CatalanSpanish
streams? and (2) Did you cover the same amount of content in the English group as
in your CatalanSpanish groups? Answers were unanimously affirmative. It is,
however, interesting to note that even if all lecturers stated they had covered the same
material, two of them manifested that they felt limited when it came to commu-
nicating in English: ‘For me the problem arises when a student says he doesn’t
understand and asks me to explain again. Then I don’t have enough vocabulary and
synonyms to explain the concept without repeating the same words that appear on
the screen. This is a limitation for me’. Interestingly enough, six of them felt that they
were in fact faster when lecturing in English. A faster, not slower, delivery rate
resulted from their lack of resources to rephrase in English, as elicited from their
post-reflections: ‘I usually cover the same material in less time because I don’t repeat
or paraphrase so often as when I teach in Catalan or Spanish, and this is because I
lack vocabulary, synonyms, etc. so I finish before’. When other lecturers were
informally asked in a second round of meetings, the same perceptions were identified.
They stated that neither students’ performance (average final marks) nor their
coverage of the content had been sacrificed because of English, at least to their
perception.
As to lecturer’s attitude toward receiving methodological training, it turned out
they were not interested at all. Most (78%) agreed to follow the courses the university
was offering, but they showed interest in improving general-purpose and academic
English (i.e. traditional English lessons). The vast majority showed clear reluctance
to methodological training and explicitly refused to be trained in CLIL methodology.
When asked about their assessment method, lecturers manifested they had not
assessed English language learning in their exams. Here we find the usual divide
between language and content because content matter is their priority and because
lecturers do not feel prepared to assess language learning (Dafouz 2011, 201).
Lecturers also voiced their complaints at the meetings. Complaints basically revolved
around lack of incentives from the university (‘we don’t have any reward’) and lack of
resources in general. Their demands were of a linguistic nature. They noted the
difference in English competence between local and Erasmus students, highlighted
the need to revise/translate material, acknowledged they had had to invest more time
in the preparation of their lessons and exams, and finally they realised that they
needed to improve their level of English. All teachers would have liked more support
from the university in this sense the university should offer ‘English lessons in-situ,
and for free’.
Next, the results of students’ questionnaire are going to be set forth. In the first
question, students were asked to assess their experience. As can be seen (Figure 1),
most students (74.71%) said that it had been positive, only 8.04% thought it had been
negative and for 13.79% it was not sufficient, either because they would have liked
more courses in English, or because they not only wanted lab sessions in English but
also the rest of theoretical lectures. Finally, very few students (3.44%) did not answer.
The second item in fact consisted of two questions. First, the students had to
identify positive aspects (which skills they sensed they had improved) and then rate
them from most positive (5) to least positive (1). Since students provided more than
one answer and every answer could be rated differently according to the student,
replies were coded and grouped according to skills, which acted as cover terms (e.g. ‘I
understand better’ fell under the listening category). Different groups were obtained:
technical vocabulary acquired, speaking, listening, reading and writing. When
students wrote two skills together, these formed one same category. Reading and
writing were by and large mentioned together (‘reading-writing’) so they were also
labelled together. The analysis done, results were grouped according to the score, as
summarised in Table 1.
As can be seen, the overwhelmingly most positive aspect was technical specialised
vocabulary. It was the only aspect that was rated 5. Aspects they also felt they had
improved and whose gains students valued positively (score 4) were listening (59%)
and speaking (40.9%). Following this, we find reading and writing (44.4%), technical
vocabulary they had learnt (33.3%) and speaking (22.2%). Aspects that were also
regarded positive but which had a lower score (2) are readingwriting (71.9%),
followed by listening (23.8%). No item was rated 1. Apart from this, 59% of the 87
students that replied the second question claimed they had not learnt any English
and 8.04% did not reply. By and large, the most highly valued aspects are, in this
Figure 1. Assess the experience.

Table 1. What are the most positive aspects? Rate them from most positive (5) to least
positive (1).
Rate 5 (very Rate 4 Rate 2 (less Rate 1 (the least
positive) (positive) Rate 3 (neutral) positive) positive)
Vocabulary Listening: Reading & writing: Reading & writing:
(100%) 59.09% 44.4% 71.19%
Speaking: Vocabulary: 33.3% Listening: 23.8%
40.9%
Speaking: 22.2%
order, vocabulary acquisition and listening and speaking practice. Fifty-nine per cent
of students replied they had not learnt any English, although it was later found out
that (only) low proficient students in the study had significantly improved their
listening and grammar skills at the end of the course (Aguilar and Muñoz,
submitted). The questionnaire was anonymous so it was not possible to correlate
proficiency level with self-assessment. It would have been interesting to know if adult
L2 learners prove to be poor self-evaluators of their oral skills (Lynch, Klee and
Tedick 2001).
The third question was written in the same way as the second, only that this time
about negative aspects. Students, however, were not as accurate and only five
students rated negative aspects from most to least negative. The rest of them simply
wrote down negative aspects, without any scores. Presence of the lecturer,
unwillingness or inability to articulate their perceptions could account for this
fact. In fact, this could also be interpreted as two flaws in the questionnaire; that is,
lecturers had better not be there while students answer and the questions may have
been too demanding and time-consuming, considering students’ willingness. As
shown in Figure 2, a considerable number of students (31.04%) did not answer while
27.58% found no negative aspect. Among the negative aspects, the lecturer’s bad or
insufficient English (25.28%) stands out. Much less significant (8.04%) is increased
difficulty in following an already difficult course and the slower delivery rate
(lecturers make more pauses to strike the word they need). Surprisingly, this
contradicts teachers’ feelings about delivery rate: teachers perceive that they cover
material faster in English than they would in their mother tongue and that content is
not sacrificed. For 4.59% of students, only having practical lessons of the course in
English is negative (i.e. they would like theoretical lectures in English). Likewise,
Figure 2. Was there anything missing?

Figure 3. What are the most negative aspects?
2.29% state that lack of interaction in class is also negative and finally a few (1.14%)
state they do not understand Erasmus students. On the whole, many of these losses
are also identified in the literature.
The replies to question four turned out to be quite consistent with the responses
in the previous question. About half the students (47.12%) did not reply whereas
some students (27.58%) stated they did not miss anything. Fewer students (6.89%)
expected lecturers to be more fluent in English, 5.74% of students wanted a glossary
with the translation of common specialised terms, 4.59% insisted on the little
interaction studentstudent and studentteacher in class and 4.59% of them
mentioned unfulfilled expectations of a different nature: I would have preferred a
native English teacher, it would have been better if the teacher had translated some
technical term in Spanish while uttering the word on the spot. To finish, a minority of
students (3.44%) would like to have more study material in English (Figure 3).
As for the fifth and last question (Do you plan to enrol in another English group in
the future?), many responses were positive: 47.12% of students would repeat the
experience. Yet, 16.09% responded negatively while 16.09% of them did not reply.
Nevertheless, 11.49% of students replied that they would not repeat because they
were about to graduate or to participate in an Erasmus exchange otherwise they
would. A few students (9.19%) answered ‘maybe I would repeat’ but it is impossible
to determine if it was because of indecision or discontent. Therefore, if 47.12% of full
affirmative responses is added to 11.49% of students that would repeat if they were
not finishing their studies, we obtain that 58.6% of students are satisfied. This result
partly corroborates the 74.71% of positive replies in the first question (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Do you plan to enrol in another English group?

Discussion
By and large, lecturers’ and students’ self-reported perceptions after their first CLIL
experience appear to be satisfactory: on the one hand, students feel they have learned
technical terminology and practised their listening skills and on the other lecturers
feel they have practised their English without sacrificing content. Yet, when
stakeholders were asked if they would repeat the experience, 100% of lecturers
would but only 58.6% of students replied positively. Hence, lecturers seem to be more
deeply satisfied than students, perhaps because they find more gains (improved
spoken fluency) than losses. Lecturers demand more support to prepare their
materials and improve their level of English. In particular, they feel they should
improve their spoken fluency and vocabulary richness because these skills would
empower them to better paraphrase by means of synonyms and parallel linguistic
structures. As to their refusal to be trained in CLIL methodology, their reaction
somewhat resembles Spanish lecturers’ little willingness to follow teacher training
courses in several Spanish universities, as reported by Dafouz (2011, 211) but it
contrasts with the results obtained by Dafouz and others (2007) about lecturers’
expectations before a CLIL experience. One possible explanation may be that the
engineering lecturers under study are I-centred (rather than ‘audience-friendly’) and
that when they speak in a foreign language this approach emerges as the most
inefficient. In fact, it was methodology in general as well as CLIL methodology they
were reluctant to.
Lecturers also believe that their content coverage has not been negatively affected
and justify their belief by drawing upon figures: final grades did not vary
significantly with regard to the grades in the Spanish/Catalan groups. Yet, the
researchers do not have information about the kind of exams. One may argue that in
exams that are essentially numerical or have a multiple choice format, students do
not need to show the same deep understanding of the content as, for example, in
exams where they have to explain the rich complexity of content.
Correlating students’ and lecturers’ answers, we find that both parties acknowl-
edge that lecturers should improve their English, echoing other studies done at
Spanish universities (Dafouz et al. 2007; Feixas et al. 2009).This belief may be due to
the fact that lecturers’ average level of English is very close to that of students’
(upper-intermediate) and that this falls short of students’ expectations of being
exposed to a rich input. In fact, the recommended pre-requisite for university
teaching assistants in many US universities is advanced plus or superior (Magnan
1986). Along the same lines, no student mentions that the students’ insufficient
English is a problem while lecturers stress that local students are not enough
proficient. Lecturers and students’ self-reported perceptions diverge in other aspects,
as summarised in Table 2.
As already said, students’ satisfaction is not so high as lecturers’ and they highly
value their acquisition of technical content-specific vocabulary. Our results among
adult language learners of English with a technical profile coincide with other
research into university (Feixas et al. 2009, 146) and secondary students’ reactions,
hinting that vocabulary acquisition may be a generalisable benefit in CLIL and that
it is a sensitive component in adult self-assessment of CLIL. Having been exposed to
a certain number of hours in English, students also feel they have improved their
listening skills, which increases self-confidence. Students’ beliefs that lecturers’ poor
proficiency resulted in increased difficulty to understand an already difficult content
Table 2. Summary of perceptions.

Weaknesses Strengths
Students’ perceptions Lecturers’ low level of English Learnt specialised
vocabulary
Lecturers’ slow delivery rate Practised listening skill
hindering a smooth lecturing:
difficult/tedious
Lecturers not using a glossary
and code switching
Lack of interaction
Lecturers’ perceptions Want English lessons (no Practised their spoken
methodology) fluency
Want more support with their Have achieved their goal of
materials lecturing in English
Acknowledge that they tend to Covered the same material
be faster & more concise in their
explanations due to lack of
fluency & vocabulary
Local (Spanish) students are not Final grades, unaffected
so proficient in English as
Erasmus students are
and that the classroom pace slows down, making lessons more tedious, resemble only
in part the results obtained by Dafouz (2007, 71), where students seemed to be
conscious that CLIL implies having more visual-graphical information, more
exemplification and hence more elaborate lectures.
We also found contradictory perceptions regarding delivery rate. Lecturers feel
they are faster in English than in their L1 but students feel that teachers’ slower pace
is a negative outcome, far from understanding that this is probably a (desired?) side
effect of CLIL. At the same time, students’ reactions to their lecturers’ slower speech
do not seem to support lecturers’ claims of content coverage and quality.
Many students report having missed ‘on the spot translation’ of a given technical
term on the part of the lecturer (code-switching) and a glossary of common
specialised terms in EnglishSpanishCatalan. This is just an example of the focus
on form that students are missing, precisely the kind of methodological training
lecturers do not want.
An important student reported weakness is lack of interaction. In their replies,
students do not explain their complaint in detail so we do not know if it has
something to do with their difficulty in interacting in English (Feixas et al. 2009, 145)
or if it is a consequence of lecturers not applying the necessary methodological
strategies that promote interaction. The authors could informally speak to over 20
students who, when asked about the issue, said they were well aware that they had
not exploited the potential of a CLIL classroom with Erasmus students practice of
linguistic and intercultural competence. A lecturer trained in CLIL methodology
might not have fallen short of expectations in the sense that (s)he would realise how
important it is to create work-teams mixing students from different nationalities; in
this way the practice of communicative competences and multicultural abilities as
well as the cultural and linguistic dimensions (Marsh et al. 2001) can be promoted. It
is difficult and quite artificial to make a group of local students speak in English if
they are in a Spanish university setting but if only the team contains a small
percentage of foreign students, then communication in English is not perceived as

contrived. Applying group management skills that integrate less proficient learners
and promote cohesion (Lynch, Klee and Tedick 2001), using code switching where
necessary, helping students process language syntactically (Kowal and Swain 1997)
or incorporating some linguistic assignment in the overall assessment of the course
are but some of the methodological aspects that should be catered for in the future if
we want to transform some of these losses into gains.
Conclusions
Several reflections can be made. First, both students’ and lecturers’ post-perceptions
of a CLIL experience are satisfactory but they differ except for their appraisal of
lecturers’ poor proficiency. The perceived gains substantiate some of the results in
other studies but we must remember the students’ experience was short (15 weeks, 60
hours). If one considers that ‘improvement in language skills over a short time is
likely to be limited’ (Wilkinson 2004, 463) and that perceptions are also likely to be
marginal, then results are satisfactory but preliminary as well.
Second, there still exists lack of knowledge about students’ and teachers’ needs
and about the best training adapted to technical university lecturers. The data we
have gathered in this study help us better know the participants’ needs and provide us
with some hints as to the kind of CLIL training for lecturers with an engineering
profile. Third, the requisite of applying CLIL in courses with Erasmus students
appears to be good, as long as interaction is promoted by lecturers. Fourth,
apparently it was a good decision to first back materials translation because this is
the first step to having good study material and helping participants gain self-
confidence. The less proficient students/lecturers are, the more dependent they are on
class material, so the quality of translated (and adapted) material is crucial.
An important finding is that the average lecturer profile seems quite skeptical
about the usefulness of methodology and pins down his/her needs as linguistic.
Engineering lecturers in this study seem to associate CLIL with the vehicular
language used in the CLIL experience. Their priority is content, not language
teaching, yet they use CLIL to their advantage. These lecturers have to be shown that
CLIL training can enrich the learning and the teaching experience, and that they can
incorporate strategies that are not excessively demanding (in terms of time or effort).
They could be provided with some general guidelines: using material already written
in English, providing/asking students to do summaries or mind maps with
highlighted keywords and conceptual relationships, preparing a glossary of basic
terminology, relying on the meaning-constructing role of code-switching and
broadening opportunities of interaction. These guidelines could be transmitted as
though a wedge, integrating both academic English and academic genres. Much
research has been done on how to adapt lessons to international audiences (mainly at
North-American universities) in a total immersion setting, but we point to the virtual
inexistence of materials addressed at lecturers in an environment where English is
only the medium of instruction. CLIL teacher training at a tertiary level should be
informed by English for Specific Purposes (ESP) practitioners as well as teachers’
and students’ perceived needs. The reflection is that the techniques for good
engineering epistemology communication and good teaching and learning practice
must be tailored to every discipline and anchored to genre knowledge and situated
cognition (Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995). It would be interesting to draw on a
programme integrating Marsh, Maljers, and Hatiala’s (2001) five CLIL dimensions
with Bhatia’s competences (Dafouz and Núñez 2009), together with the commu-
nication and specific language use strand, the didactic and pedagogic strand, and the
multiculturalismmultilingualism one (Fortanet 2010).
This study has some limitations. One is the considerable high percentage of
students who did not answer. The questionnaire was handed out and collected by one
of the authors of this paper but the content course teacher was also there, so we do
not know if this fact affected students’ behaviour. Other possible explanations are
that students were not willing to answer somewhat excessively time-consuming

questions. Second, it remains to be seen to what extent the perceived quality of
teaching would have differed if instead of laboratory and problem-solving lessons,
CLIL had been implemented in more theoretical, argument-loaded lectures. More
research is necessary to exactly pin down gains and losses objectively. Finally, and
most importantly, the pilot experience described here is not CLIL proper because
CLIL entails more than teaching in a foreign vehicular language. Content and
language learning should be integrated in CLIL because the symbiotic relationship
between language and subject understanding demands a focus on how subjects are
taught whilst working with and through another language rather than in another
language (Coyle 2005). Administrative policies at universities should ensure that the
line between teaching in English and CLIL is not blurred. In this sense, this study has
managed to document the limited conditions under which the so-called CLIL
process was undertaken in Spain under the European effervescence of CLIL.
In conclusion, if CLIL is believed to be a crucial resource to achieve a
multilingual world, action should be taken to encourage the move towards CLIL,
particularly in countries like Spain, where the standard level of English is still
insufficient and where the policies from the universities themselves either do not
suffice or are sometimes sceptical of the role and expertise of English for Academic
Purposes (EAP)/English for Specific Purposes (ESP) teachers. The move to CLIL
should not be a hindrance but a challenge, and lecturers’ reluctance to the new
methodology could surely be overcome. It would be interesting to find out if these
lecturers’ reluctance to receive methodological training is also present among
lecturers with a similar technical profile from other universities in the world.
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Lecturer and student perceptions on CLIL at a Spanish university

English Unit, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

This study reports on a pilot implementation of Content and Language

*Corresponding author. Email: marta.aguilar@upc.edu

ISSN 1367-0050 print/ISSN 1747-7522 online

the benefits of bi- or tri-lingualism as well. A general description of CLIL benefits

exhibit best performance, decrease in the quality of teaching, decrease in students’

Figure 1. Assess the experience.

Figure 2. Was there anything missing?

Figure 3. What are the most negative aspects?

Figure 4. Do you plan to enrol in another English group?

Table 2. Summary of perceptions.

percentage of foreign students, then communication in English is not perceived as

that students were not willing to answer somewhat excessively time-consuming

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