Abstract:

During the past 30 years Spanish universities have developed several restructuration’s that have contributed to its modernization and current state. Universities have three main objectives: acquiring and transmitting knowledge, research at the top and most contemporaneous level, and internationalisation. The latter is the most ambitious objective to achieve for Spanish universities since among the 3,4 million students that study abroad worldwide, only 1,4% come to Spain. In order to improve this weakness, the Ministry of Education has reinforced the 2015 University Strategy (UE-15), which one of three principal objectives will be to attract international students to Spanish universities. To set the right direction, UE-15 upgrades offering inter-universities and international degrees, employment of foreign teachers according to international arrangements, encourage language courses or create international doctorate programs. The faculty of Sciences of the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) has enthusiastically embarked on this purpose by establishing an international agreement with Boston University (BU, USA) where exchanged American science students come to study to Madrid during the first semester, whereas Spanish students study abroad during the second. This first 2012/2013 semester exchanging program in UAM covers different science topics such as Maths, Chemistry, Statistics and Cell Biology, which were all taught in English following an efficient linguistic strategy. Specifically, Cell Biology was offered not only for the BU students, but also for a small number of Spanish science students. This has become an excellent pilot experience about integration of international students in our university programs/environment, as well as about learning effectiveness in a foreign language for UAM students. As one of the members of the Spanish teaching team it was a great challenge to teach in a foreign language, i.e., teaching in English to native Americans, but also to align the level of vocabulary and difficulty in order to properly communicate with American students but also wellbeing understandable for the Spanish ones. We have examined the teaching methods of this program and developed questionnaires to students. We aimed to get a deep understanding of how students can learn when they are taught in a foreign language since this experience gives us a good idea of how international students can progress when they come to Spanish universities, also how monitor the progress of Spanish students when they go to study abroad.

Keywords:

Internationalisation, exchange students.