WHEN SPANISH BECOMES A MEDIUM OF INSTRUCTION IN SPAIN

Spain is a top destination within the Erasmus Program, which offers European university students the chance to spend a year of their degree course within another EU centre of Higher Education. In the past years, the ratio of foreign-native students was always lesser to one. However, every year the number of Erasmus students with different Spanish language proficiency increases.

What to do in this situation? As lecturers, we are trained to use content and language integrated language (CLIL) when teaching in English. However, when the number of Erasmus students with a really low proficiency of the Spanish language is the same as native students, Spanish becomes a Medium of Instruction.

This work describes all the actions carried out in the subject “Engineering of auxiliary operations in the food industry” to help Erasmus students to improve their language skills in Spanish at the same time that acquiring all the competences of the subject, since the number of Erasmus student was the same as the number of local students.

Proposed actions included the 4 C’s of CLIL methodology: content, communication, cognition and culture. After the teaching period, a survey was done on both collectives to evaluate how the proposed methodology had contributed to Erasmus Students to improve their language skills and to native students to study the contents of the subject in a globalised world.

Results showed that most of the strategies, overall those tasks carried out by a national and an Erasmus student couples, have improved the communicative skills of both students due to the synergy in content learning.