Academics’ beliefs about language use and proficiency in Spanish multilingual higher education

Abstract

Today, more and more universities in Spain are starting to design language policies, usually including Spanish and English. At the same time, Spain has a special socio-political context since part of its territory is already bilingual. This paper examines the opinions and attitudes of academics at a bilingual Valencian-Spanish university which is about to implement a multilingual policy adding English as a third language of instruction. Therefore, in order to start planning the implementation of the teacher development programme and complementary communication campaigns that are part of the recently approved policy, it was considered important to determine the beliefs of academics regarding their proficiency in the three languages involved and the ways to teach in them (Borg 2003). A questionnaire was distributed to a stratified sample of the lecturers at Universitat Jaume I in order to find out what lecturers believed to be their competence in the three priority languages and to identify what they regarded as the main pedagogical styles used in their discipline. Additionally, lecturers were asked, by means of a semi-structured discussion, about their attitudes towards multilingual teaching. The results of this study shed some light on teacher training needs regarding language and pedagogy and allow for suggestions as to possible measures in support of implementing multilingual language policies.