Teaching Students, Creating Teachers: Focusing on Future Language Teachers and their Education for Bilingual Classrooms

Abstract

How to better prepare future bilingual teachers for foreign language learning classrooms and their challenges is a key consideration in education, a concern echoed across the world as such programmes, where curricular content is taught in a foreign language, grow in popularity. This article presents student profiles and satisfaction for the first year of an EMI (English as a Medium of Instruction) teacher training model at the University of Extremadura in Spain. The goal of this programme is to offer instruction for education majors in a four-year, bilingual Bachelor’s in Primary Education (BA) programme where 50% of curricular subjects are taught in students’ native Spanish, and 50% in English. The data collected in this study revealed that first-year students in the bilingual programme have higher university admission scores than average, as well as high expectations for their linguistic progress in the programme. They are also quite motivated and indicate that the cooperative model of the programme positively impacted the experience of their first year and was a hallmark of their satisfaction overall. The positive results of the study offer insight not only onto analogous contexts in Spain but also to other countries where EMI or bilingual education is of interest.