3 rd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LIFELONG EDUCATION AND LEADERSHIP FOR ALL ICLEL 2017 / September 12-14, 2017 / Polytechnic Institute of Porto, Porto – PORTUGAL PAPER ID 248 Tapping into the intellectual capital at the university Mary GRIFFITH 1 1 Associate professor, University of Málaga, Faculty Modern Languages Email: griffith@uma.es Abstract Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is as full of challenges as it is of possibilities. We will explore the challenges while seeking realistic solutions as eight Computer Science professors teach their subjects through English for the first time. We hope to gain insights into the bilingual classroom at the university level where teacher training can aid in professional development. Kevin Haines (2017) has posed the question about policies, principles and practice in bilingual settings, suggesting that we still need to address the challenging question: “who will support the teachers?”. In this paper we will observe problems and solutions to bilingual teaching from the ethnographic point of view of action research. (...) We hold that research in education must make the move toward a more qualitative assessment. As researchers, perhaps we need to describe less and do more by putting our research into action. Key words: CLIL/EMI, Computer Science, Teacher Training, Professional development, Research in action Introduction Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) or English Medium Instruction (EMI) are the new catch phrases of internationalization in universities across Europe. However, one of the inherent problems for multilingual implementation is how to combine content specialization with foreign language teaching specialization, we must explore content professors’ more practical concerns when facing bilingual instruction. In fact, if we truly plan to create a plurilingual university we must actively seek out content professors who are largely uncomfortable with teaching through a foreign language. They need both orientation as well as assessment and collaborative training programmes may indeed highlight the multiple differences between teaching language and teaching content. The term CLIL was adopted in 1994 (Marsh, Maljers & Hartiala, 2001) and rapidly considered successful and enriching to learning. CLIL became an educational approach of convergence; in fact, converging language learning with content learning is “where CLIL breaks new ground” (Coyle, Hood & Marsh, 2010, p. 4). But now this term is subdividing into more specific areas, making it necessary to clarify terminology. Smit and Dafouz (2012) have distinguished between the following terms: “English Medium teaching (Coleman, 2006), EMI (English Medium Instruction) (Hellekjaer, 2012), CLIL (Marsh, 2006: Dalton Puffer, Smit & Nikula, 2010b) and ICLHE (Integrating Content and Language in Higher education (Wilkinson & Zegers, 2007).” p. 2) What we have observed is that the debate now seems to be surging around the terms CLIL and EMI, in particular with regard to higher education (see Airey, 2012; Morgado & Coehlo, 2012) where English seems to be pushing ahead of other languages and where form issues oftentimes go unbridled. We have observed that the perfectly balanced CLIL model seems to work better with children because their language and cognitive needs are developing simultaneously, making it more natural to combine language with content, while the content approach or EMI seems to be the preference for higher education. In this study, we will use the umbrella term CLIL while focusing on the more specific needs of higher education taught through English. In higher education, CLIL research can be divided into three main perspectives: First, classroom discourse, next, teacher cognition and lastly plurilingual policies. Smit and Dafouz (2012) report: To date as most of the published research confirms, the driving force to integrate language and content in higher education is clearly one sided and comes mainly from linguists, language teachers and teacher educators. In contrast politicians, university authorities, administrators as well as part of the lecturing staff (ie content specialists) have initially engaged in this new scenario by embracing top-down internationalization plan alongside a chance for professional and academic development; a scenario wherein pedagogical concerns and more specifically language learning matters are usually of secondary importance. (p. 8) In contrast, this CLIL professor support network aims to put pedagogical concerns and language learning matters at the forefront. One can never fully separate learning from teaching, but we feel the instructional side to CLIL in practice at the higher educational level might be of great interest to professors willing to engage in this new academic scenario. In fact, this paper addresses Kevin Haines’ (2017) question: “Who will support the teachers?”