English medium education at university level is widely used in different contexts and it poses a challenge for students who are not used to studying through the medium of English. This study was carried out in a university in the Basque Country in Spain and it focuses on a course where students who are mostly Basque-Spanish bilinguals are taught…

Massive Open Online Language Courses, also commonly known as Language MOOCs or LMOOCs, are online courses offered for a limited period of time by higher education institutions worldwide for anybody wishing to learn a foreign language. The average duration of these courses is between four and six weeks, and approximately three to five weekly study…

Education in Spain and Latin America has been experiencing an ever-increasing use of English as a medium of instruction at all levels and across curricula. Bringing the vast research-literature into a reflective dialogue is paramount to advancing the discipline and to refining English teaching practices. As such, this literature review…

Higher Education is demanding the need of a greater connection between its academic offer and the necessary civic engagement of the graduates. This has given Spain the opportunity, for just over a decade, to develop the methodology of service-learning, which combines both the theoretical and practical aspect of university learning with the…

The drive to embed employability in Higher Education (HE) offers a growth opportunity for languages provision. The employability potential of language learning for the global graduate has been analysed by the "Born Global" project on languages and employability (British Academy, 2016). Employers have consistently identified communication…

This study aimed to analyze the student's behaviour in relation to their degree of commitment, participation, and contribution in a MOOC based on a social learning approach. Interaction data was collected on the learning platform and in social networks, both of which were used in the third edition of a social MOOC course. This data was then…

The topic of the internationalisation of academia has recently attracted attention from sociolinguists and language-policy scholars. In this paper, we compare two different universities from two contrasting contexts in Europe in order to find out more about their projected stance [Jaffe, A. (2009). Stance in a Corsican School: Institutional and…

In striving for internationalisation, government and university policies in Catalonia promote the use of English in classrooms in two ways that often overlap: (1) as a lingua franca aiding the participation of international students and (2) through immersion approaches targeting local students. However, as the findings presented in this article…

This article analyses aspects of the impact of internationalisation in higher education in multilingual contexts where both a state language and a minority language are present and where English is gradually being introduced. The analysis focuses primarily on the consequences for the professional identities of academics who work in a minority…

During the last years there has been an increasing interest in examining the brain responses to word order variations. In one ERP study conducted in Spanish, Casado, Martin-Loeches, Munoz, and Fernandez-Frias (2005) had participants read Spanish transitive sentences with either an SVO (subject-verb-object) or an OVS order. The word order of a…

The learning of prestigious international languages becomes a process fraught with tensions in multilingual settings. The process of internationalisation in many universities has led to the spread of English-medium instruction (EMI), which tends to raise linguistic debates particularly in the case of bilingual institutions. However, and despite a…

The concept of competence is a recent introduction into the curricula of the Spanish education system, and applies to vocational training and university, but also to basic education. In both cases, the meaning and use of the term have differed, sometimes giving rise to confusion. There can be no doubt, however, that this incorporation has been of…

Since the introduction of gender themes into university teaching in geography in Spain in 1989, significant gains have been made but challenges remain in relation to placing gender into undergraduate curricula and developing teaching resources in local languages. Geographers in Spain have to meet those challenges in the near future in order to…

Including speaking tasks in the foreign language paper of the Spanish University Entrance Examination (PAU) has been inexistent in the last 15 years. However, the implications can be seen in shape of pressure on teachers to get students ready for such tasks in just three years (2009-2012). Because of the high stakes consequences attached to this…

The key role of administrative staff in the implementation of specific institutional policies at university has often been ignored when analysing policies or attitudes related to higher education. Consequently, little is known about the administrative staff's attitudes and involvement relating to the processes of internationalisation and…