Bilingual resources in English-medium instruction lectures: the role lecturer’s L1 is playing in EMI courses

Mª Ángeles Velilla Sánchez

mavelilla@unizar.es

University of Zaragoza, Spain

ABSTRACT

English is increasingly used as a lingua franca (ELF) for academic activities in Spanish higher education institutions. The notion of ELF is now being redefined to include in its conceptualization a multilingual nature of communication (Jenkins, 2015). This conception is interesting for researchers in English-medium instruction (EMI). This paper reports on a study that focuses on the multilingual resources most frequently used by higher education lecturers to achieve comprehensibility in EMI courses at the University of Zaragoza, regarding them as part of the pragmatic and strategic behaviour of the participants. The corpus for the study consists of 14 hours of audio-recorded lectures in two different disciplines that have been analysed from a discourse-pragmatic approach, involving both qualitative and quantitative methods. Analysis of the data reveals that lecturers use multilingual resources, mainly their own first language, as a pragmatic strategy to enable them to achieve various conversational goals, such as clarifying meaning.

Keywords: English as a lingua franca (ELF); English as a medium of instruction (EMI); pragmatic strategies; multilingual resources; communicativeness.

II. INTRODUCTION

This paper draws attention to academia as an international domain which is currently promoting the use of English as the medium of instruction (henceforth EMI) in different academic subjects. The incorporation of English as the vehicular language for instruction in academia constitutes a challenge to conventional research and teaching traditions. It also represents a challenge for language intervention in many tertiary education institutions. This paper discusses the concept of English as a medium of instruction and its overlap with the English as a lingua franca (henceforth ELF) and explains how the “E” in both is understood in a particular case study, focussing not only on the use of the English language but also on the first language of the participants.

One of the many challenges posed by EMI is the EMI teacher’s command of the English language. This is a crucial matter as the vast majority of EMI lecturers in Europe are non-native speakers of English; they tend to be specialists in their field as opposed to language experts. Neglecting the linguistic aspect on EMI courses may eventually negatively affect students’ learning outcomes. Therefore, the concept of language proficiency and the role of L1 in the EMI classroom represent important aspects in this regard. The challenge for many observers of and researchers on this phenomenon is that in EMI contexts English is usually spoken by people who learnt English as a foreign language (e.g., in Spain or Portugal) and who not only communicate with native speakers. The richness of the language might be reduced when proficiency levels in English, on the part of both teachers and students, are not particularly high (Macaro et al., 2018, p. 37). Following Macaro (2018), we can think about different hypotheses regarding the language proficiency needed on the part of participants in EMI. One hypothesis could be that teaching in an EMI classroom needs a higher level than teaching in a ‘general English’ classroom because the nature of the content is likely to be more intellectually demanding and the academic language to communicate that content is likely to be more advanced in terms of vocabulary, genre and complexity of structures. Yet, some subjects may require more language to communicate the content than others. An alternative hypothesis might be that thematic knowledge in an EMI classroom is already shared among teacher and students, and therefore there is no need for a higher level of linguistic proficiency, given this shared prior knowledge. In any case, the question here is whether teaching using EMI is carried out using less language, meaning that by teaching in a vehicular language that is different from the L1, teachers may reduce the language to the bare essentials. In this regard, a report produced by the British Council/TEPAV (2015) on the general state of language learning and teaching in Turkey, based on teachers’ answers, found that teachers believed that they could make their teaching more interesting by teaching through Turkish and that EMI slows down the pace of learning content. Teachers considered that when teaching through EMI they used a more limited vocabulary, were less flexible and employed fewer types of pedagogical activity.

In line with this, another issue which has been the focus of research and interest in the EFL and the EMI spheres is that of ‘codeswitching’ or the use of the L1 in the EMI classroom as opposed to English-only. In Dearden’s (2016) study on English as a medium of instruction –a growing global phenomenon, 76% of respondents reported their country as having no written guidelines specifying whether or not English should be the only language used in the EMI classroom, which would seem to show that this question is left in the hands of individual teachers. The EFL field has now come to recognise that classroom codeswitching could be beneficial for L2 learning in a classroom situation where the teacher and students or students and students share an L1, recognising its pedagogical value in facilitating L2 learning more than exclusive L2 use (Hall & Cook, 2012). This perspective has been identified as the ‘optimal position’ related to the concept of ‘optimal use’, defined as “codeswitching in broadly communicative classrooms [which] can enhance second language acquisition and/or proficiency better than second language exclusivity” (Macaro, 2009, p. 38).

Particular attention has been paid to code-switching in research on ELF. Research has looked at the strategic interaction in which ELF speakers make use of their multilingual resources in different ways and for various purposes. ELF theory has referred frequently over recent years to the notion of the ‘multilingual repertoire’, the ‘creativity’ of the multilingual ELF user or the ‘hybridity’ of ELF. In fact, the previous focus of most ELF discussion has been on the ‘E’ of ELF communication but interest is now moving towards the relationship between English and other languages in respect of the multilingualism of most ELF users and the “multi-competence of the community” (Jenkins, 2015, p. 59).

Cogo (2009) pointed out that ELF speakers draw on their multilingual resources by switching into their own first languages as well as into the languages of their interlocutors and even into the languages that are not the mother tongue of any participant in the interaction. Speakers exploit their non-nativeness drawing on convergent accommodation strategies which imply drawing on their shared repertoire (Cogo, 2009, 2010) such as overt code-switching moves, covert transfer phenomena or the use of cognates (Hülmbauer, 2009; Vettorel, 2014). These strategies may be interpreted in English as a Native Language terms as deviance from codified norms or ineffective communication. However, ELF research considers them to be the result of speakers bringing into the communicative act practices from their L1, or from other languages in their repertoires to improve communication effectiveness (Hülmbauer, 2007: 12). This is to say, although in SLA and ELT fields there is a negative attitude towards cross-lingual phenomena, this is not the case in ELF research. From the ELF point of view, cross-lingual phenomena are rather seen as communicative resources (Firth & Wagner, 1997). Consequently, multilingual resources are natural elements in ELF settings, since they are prompted (and supported) by the linguacultural backgrounds of the participants taking part in the interactions.

Current lines of ELF research concentrate on how the users’ L1 and other languages influence their use of English or even the mutual flow in two (or more) directions and the “trans-semiotic system” that has been found to characterise ‘translanguaging’ and ‘translingual practices’ (García, 2009; Canagarajah, 2011), ‘plurilingual English’ (Canagarajah, 2011) or ‘translingua franca English’ (Pennycook, 2010). What is more, some researchers argue that ‘Englishisation’ (Lanvers & Hultgren, 2018) of education could lead to undermining the status of the home language and particularly to ‘domain loss’, where a number of lexical items (e.g. technical vocabulary) will fall into disuse.

These strategies are a vital part of the discourse practices of ELF conversations in which interlocutors share their non-nativeness and they tend to exploit all their resources in communication and meaning construction. As such, these findings are interesting for researchers in EMI. However, Jenkins (2014, p. 40) argues that in Higher Education “the linguistic implications of ELF are poorly understood”, even though English-mediated instruction is a powerful driver of ELF interactions and contact among increasing numbers of international students and members of the academic community.

The present paper reports on a study that aims to raise awareness of the complexity and versatility of classroom discourse using English as the medium of instruction among lingua franca speakers in international contexts through the analysis of the pragmatic strategies used by Spanish lecturers and international students in two different disciplinary areas (Social Sciences and Engineering). The study is in line with previous ELF research which approaches code-switching from a sociolinguistic interactional perspective, regarding it as part of the pragmatic and strategic behaviour of the participants, looking at its social dynamics at the micro level of the language choices the speakers make during their EMI discourse, the functions it performs in communication and how meaning is generated and co-constructed (Klimpfinger, 2009; Cogo, 2009, 2011; Vettorel, 2014). In other words, this study focuses on how the users’ L1 influences and enriches their use of English, rather than on the mutual flow of both languages or the “trans-semiotic system” that has been found to characterise ‘translanguaging’ as defined by García and Li (2014, p. 42). Code-switching and literal translation are presented in this study as pragmatic strategies in a list of several strategies that characterise the ELF communication established in a particular set of EMI lectures, and they are presented as being used for a limited number of purposes. In this paper, I attempt to answer the following questions: (i) What functions do code-switching and literal translation fulfil during EMI lectures? (ii) What factors or motivations are involved in their use by EMI lecturers?

III. EMI AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ZARAGOZA: A CASE STUDY

The results of the research described in this paper stem from the analysis of a corpus of 12 EMI lectures recorded in the context of two different programs at the University of Zaragoza, specifically, the bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Management in English (henceforth BAM degree), offered at the Economics faculty, and the master’s degree in Nanostructured Materials for Nanotechnology Applications, offered at the Science faculty, which are both completely English-mediated courses. They are complemented and supported by semi-structured interviews with the lecturers and a small-scale corpus of PowerPoint presentation slides that those lecturers used to support teaching. A discourse-pragmatic approach and an ethnographically oriented methodology have been used to analyse these three data sets. Data triangulation and methodological triangulation were applied in the current study, giving rise to both quantitative and qualitative results. The findings of the study show that 13 different pragmatic strategies were used by the lecturers in the different lectures recorded in order to fulfil communicative functions such as enhancing explicitness, clarifying and negotiating meaning and/or acceptable usage of the language.

Table 1 presents a data-driven taxonomy of the pragmatic strategies used by the participants in this specific research scenario. This classification was based on the communicative purposes of these strategies. Strategies were classified into five macro-categories: Explicitness strategies, Repairing strategies, Clarification strategies, Multilingual resources and Focus on form, respectively, as defined in the table. Table 1 also shows the pragmatic strategies within each of these five macro-categories, the definition of each macro-category, the total number of occurrences of each category and their percentage of occurrence in the whole corpus.

Table 1. Macro-categories of pragmatic strategies.

Macro-categories	Pragmatic strategies	Definition	Occurrences	%
Explicitness strategies	Reformulation	Clarifying a specific idea by using the same words or different structures from the original message when meaning making.	350	47.5%
	Defining
	Self-repetition
	Other-repetition
Repairing strategies	Self-repair	Using discourse to repair what has been previously said	230	31.25%
	Other-repair
Multilingual resources	Code switching	Switching the language used in the speech from English to the participants’ L1 and vice versa for communicative purposes	79	10.7%
	Literal translation
Clarification strategies	Comprehension check	Requesting the interlocutor’s feedback, clarification or help to keep communication flowing	56	7.6%
	Asking for repetition
	Indirect appeal for help
	Clarification request
Focus-on-form strategy	Focus on form	Commenting on specific terminology/structures to help students develop linguistic competence	21	2.9%

Table 1 shows that Explicitness, Repairing and Multilingual strategies have the highest number of occurrences and therefore weight in the lecturers’ usage of pragmatic strategies. ‘Multilingual resources’ has been given this name as, in addition to English, Spanish is also used by the participants, since the lecturers tend to code-switch or translate things literally from one code to the other to create and negotiate meaning in interaction. It is one of the most relevant categories of pragmatic strategies in the study reported here. As Table 2 shows, this category comprises two types of strategies: code-switching and literal translation.

Table 2. Multilingual Resources

Macro-category	Pragmatic strategies	Occurrences		%
Multilingual resources	Code switching	59	79	10.7%
	Literal translation	20

II.1. Code-switching

Code-switching is a particularly frequent communicative strategy observed in the corpus of the research reported in this article, with a total number of 59 occurrences (8%). This is a quantitatively significant result when compared with other EMI teaching-learning scenarios in different countries where oral speech has been analysed and no code-switching was present (Björkman, 2011b; Smit, 2010). Yet it does not constitute systematic code-switching between the participants’ L1 and L2, or as previous research has coined it, a ‘simultaneous parallel code use’ in which “the choice of the language depends on what is deemed most appropriate and efficient in a specific situation” (Centre for Internationalisation and Parallel Language Use, 2014), neither is it used by all the lecturers (it was used by 4 of the 6 lecturers). In other words, code-switching in this corpus is limited to isolated words or utterances and there are no long stretches of it. Code-switching in the data analysed for this study is used as a scaffolding device to negotiate meaning and to support the lecturer-student’s process of successful communication (and learning).

As the lecturers participating in the study stated during the interviews, they tend to use only the English language, the vehicular language for communication and instruction, during these EMI sessions. Nonetheless, the BAM degree lecturers in particular recognise that they are happy to code-switch to Spanish if they feel that this could be the way of ensuring understanding, and, therefore, learning. This positive attitude towards switching the language of instruction is reflected in the quantitative data, since code-switching is used in all the lectures recorded in the BAM degree. This can be accounted for by the high number of Spanish students who share their L1 with the teachers and the lecturers’ assumption that the international students, although not native Spanish speakers, do have a certain command of the language, since the faculty establishes this as a requirement to study subjects in English integrated in the BAM degree.

As can be observed in the examples below and in line with the findings in previous research (Hülmbauer, 2007; Klimpfinguer, 2009; Rogerson-Revel, 2008; Cogo, 2009, 2012), code-switching is a tool that these multilingual speakers have at their disposal, enabling them to achieve various conversational goals in communication, including asking for assistance, introducing another idea, filling gaps in ELF speakers’ linguistic knowledge, negotiating meaning, signalling cultural identity and often serving more than one function at the same time. Besides, what distinguishes this strategy from the others studied in this case study is that it provides nuances of expression that would be unavailable using only the English language, thereby enriching the message conveyed. In addition, it serves to construct solidarity and group cohesion (Cogo, 2009) signalling membership of the same multilingual ELF community, projecting participants’ social and cultural identities and providing nuances of acceptance.

There are several factors that lead the lecturers to code-switch during their explanations. Firstly, the fact that the BAM degree is taught simultaneously by the same lecturers in a Spanish-medium group has an impact on the language they use in the English-medium group, particularly, but not exclusively, when it comes to discipline-specific vocabulary. In other words, some of the words that lecturers use in the Spanish-medium group are also used in the English-medium group. For instance, in Excerpt 1 the lecturer is explaining how to ask questions in a Marketing research questionnaire. He/she mentioned the words used to refer to ‘gender’ in Spanish to illustrate his/her point and he/she lists these words.

1. ) L2: Questions? This is just a reminder of Unit 6. Be careful when asking about, for example, gender. You have to use very concrete words, very un-ambiguous words. In Spanish, we have all these kinds of questions to ask about gender, you can say <L1sp> hombre, mujer, varón, hembra, femenina, masculino, varón, mujer </L1sp>. Sometimes people confuse these kinds of terms so why not just put <L1sp> hombre, mujer </L1sp> or male, female for gender.

This type of code-switching is a win-win pragmatic strategy; firstly, because lecturers feel comfortable with the Spanish terminology they are used to working with, and secondly, because in general terms their audience shares that vocabulary, since most of them are Spanish speakers. Therefore, he uses both languages so that the students are aware of the correct terminology both in English and in Spanish. Nonetheless, he/she subsequently also uses the English terms, as this lecturer made it clear during the interview that he/she is aware that not all students present in the class master the Spanish language (13% of the students present in the class were international students rather than Spanish) and so he/she is aware that only using Spanish is not enough to scaffold meaning.

This simultaneous use of both languages is also reflected in Excerpt 2 in which the lecturer uses a Spanish term and he/she translates it into English, establishing his own version of the translation. He/she even acknowledges the fact that lecturers in the BAM degree have to replicate the Spanish contents in English. This lecturer most probably uses the Spanish term to help the students understand and remember the concept and because he thinks that, in this context, it is also important for students to learn such specific terminology in Spanish.

2. ) L2: You have already seen projecting tech (2) projecting techniques ok? in order to know the subconscious of consumers (.) the hidden attitudes ok? (.) the intrinsic motivations of certain behavior and then we have this kind of objective task performance technique or <L1sp>Técnica del desempeño de la tarea objetiva</L1sp> (.) Why I put the translation? because I didn’t find it e:h in English ok? But as we have to exactly replicate the Spanish contents into English I had to put this ok? But (.) well (.) this kind of technique is when for example (.) we ask some consumers to recall an event.

Participants also switch code when they are talking about something they feel close to in an affective way, or something that is common in their daily lives, as in Excerpt 3 (‘faculty’). They similarly change their code unconsciously when they are talking about something related exclusively with the Spanish and local culture, as in Excerpt 4 (‘fiestas del Pilar’), thereby signalling their own cultural and multilingual identity (Klimpfinger, 2009). As Mauranen (2006a, p. 143) pointed out in a previous study, “it is virtually impossible to separate academic culture from local culture”.

3. ) L1: So, it’s much easier to read this graph, it’s much more easier, because the more to the left is my library the better, the more to the rig- to the right the worse, ok? So, my aim, the aim of my library is to go (.) to stay as close to the left as possible and for example the library of ehh <L1sp> facultad </L1sp> is the less comfortable.

4. ) L1: But for example (.) sh- should we offer this wine <LNfr> Château </LNfr> glamorous in this cup, glass shiny and this in a typical plastic glass of <L1sp> fiestas del Pilar </L1sp>? what should we do? Different glasses or the same glasses?

Moreover, one lecturer said that Spanish is also used when he/she is explaining or discussing something that was not prepared for the purpose of that particular lesson, namely terminology or exemplification that was not prepared in advance (i.e., a gap in the language), in order to maintain flow or to ask for assistance. In fact, in the corpus analysed, code-switching and literal translation were mainly used during lecturers’ digressions when dealing with side-topics, given the need for explicitness or linguistic economy. This is the case in Excerpt 5, which shows how a lecturer verbalised a lexical gap in the course of his speech. The lecturer was explaining the concept of ‘pressure groups’, an important factor in competitive marketing and he/she provided different examples, some of which appear to have been improvised in the course of the discussion. This digression leads the lecturer to seek the help of the students in order to recall the translation of the word ‘tarifa’ into English (‘fare’), which he/she immediately integrates into his/her discourse. The speaker relies on his/her interlocutors’ linguistic repertories as well as on the certainty that a paraphrasing strategy (“a price, a package, you see a product for people that don’t have much money”) for it will ensure shared meaning. Therefore, the lecturer is appealing for help in the shape of code-switching since he/she is trying to retrieve the correct translation from Spanish to English and, in so doing, he defines the term to make himself understood and to prompt listeners to co-create shared meaning. Ultimately code-switching is used in this case to ensure conversational fluency (Prodromou, 2008).

5. ) L2: But people argue against these companies, and they got that the price was not so highly increased. So, a medium. Okay? And they also launch a a <L1sp> tarifa </L1sp>, how do you say <L1sp> tarifa? </L1sp> a price, a package, you see a product for people that don’t have much money. Right? So, how is <L1de> tarifa </L1sp> by the way? <L1sp> tarifa </L1sp> in English? 
   
   S3: The fare, meaning something...
   
   L2: Ah the fare. Of course, the fare, the price anyway. Okay, the price of the electricity. The fare, very good.

This excerpt clearly exemplifies how ELF interactants co-construct meaning when one of them so requires, even when the boundaries between lecturers’ and students’ roles are clearly delimited. The interesting aspect of these results is the fact that when lecturers need to fill in a linguistic gap, they do not tend to use their creativity by means of coining words as previous research on lingua franca interactions has shown (e.g., Pitzl, 2005, 2010). They use code-switching to make sure that meaning is correctly conveyed.

Code-switching is also triggered in this corpus by the classroom materials that lecturers use in order to scaffold students’ knowledge. As stated above, more occurrences of code-switching have been found in the BAM degree as a result of the use of some teaching materials used by the same lecturers to teach the same subject to a Spanish-medium taught group. Therefore, the use of code-switching is also determined by the language used in the different types of materials. This includes some of the slides of the PowerPoint presentations that the lecturers projected to help make the lectures easier to follow or some printed materials that the lecturers shared with the students.

As can be observed in Excerpt 6, the use of the Spanish language on a PowerPoint presentation slide may lead the lectures to verbalise those contents in Spanish even if English is the vehicular language for instruction. That is, the language of the materials that support the lecturing practice has an impact on the language used by the lecturers. This mainly happens when the lecturer reads something written in Spanish when providing examples or presenting exercises. Surprisingly, the lecturer does not translate the written content into English after reading it in Spanish, but just reads the content in the language in which it is written and then moves back to English.

6. ) L2: we ask at the point of sale (2) eeh identification data, there is identification data, you can see here at the top of the page there is <L1sp> cuestionario número, día, hora </L1sp> Ok? so this is the code that the interviewers have to use, need to use in order to identify eh which questionnaire they are dealing with ok?

Therefore, code-switching here seems to be an efficient and time-saving strategy that is useful in a predominantly monolingual context. By means of code-switching lecturers overcome their linguistic/content difficulties by resorting to relevant items of vocabulary in their L1, in order to ensure their interlocutors’ understanding. In the contexts analysed code-switching is seen as a contextualisation cue for the participants’ social identity to emerge and at the same time as an organisational we-code aimed at creating in-group solidarity (Cogo, 2011, p. 119). As Hyland (2002a, p. 1091) states, “academic writing is not just about conveying an ideational ‘content’, it is also about the representation of self”. In this case, the academic practice of the lecturers code-switching between their L1 and their vehicular language for instruction in different genres (oral and written), i.e., the inclusion of other languages in their presentations, reveals their view of languages as vehicles to achieve communicative purposes, and therefore the intrinsic ELF character of these lectures. It has been shown that in these particular academic settings small-scale bi/multilingualism has become a resource rather than a problem, as Jenkins (2015) puts it. Code-switching is therefore used to achieve successful communication and local accommodation, providing an alignment component among lecturers and students.

II.2. Literal translation

Literal translation is the second most frequently-used multilingual resource observed in the recordings of the study. It involves the literal translation of a lexical item, an idiom or a structure from the vehicular language to the L1 and vice versa. In this case, Spanish and English are the main codes. This strategy occurs only 20 times in the whole corpus, representing only 2.7% of the total number of occurrences found. Nevertheless, these occurrences are worth exploring and illustrating. As Cogo has observed in previous studies (2009, 2010), ELF speakers engage in sophisticated strategic behaviour to enhance understanding, create supportive and cooperative communication and display community membership in discourse, and these are precisely the functions of this strategy in this study.

In the corpus, the participants’ awareness of their use of culturally sensitive expressions motivates the pre-empting strategy of translation, which is usually combined with other strategies such as the use of definitions, intended to ensure understanding. Effective interactional work is supported by the combinations of these strategies, so that meaning is explored, clarified and eventually understanding is promoted. The translated elements are normally relevant items of vocabulary, often disciplinary-related terms or vocabulary that arises when the lecturers are providing examples. There are also humorous expressions that lecturers translate as they are aware of the potential for misunderstandings and that, as such, particular attention has to be paid to them. The examples here are mainly single words (content words) or short idiomatic phrases that are easily employed in the lecturers’ speech without apparently causing problems of intelligibility, but in order to prevent any of such problems, as previous studies have observed (Klimpfinger, 2007), lecturers use more than one language to establish successful interactions.

In Excerpts 7 and 8 lecturers translate specific terminology from the different subjects such as ‘outlayer/valor extremo o extraño’ and ‘optical tweezers/pinzas ópticas’. In all the excerpts lecturers mention the concept in English and then give the Spanish translation. Excerpt 8 is particularly interesting since the English term seem to be used both when speaking in Spanish and in English. Hence, the lecturer does not translate it for them to learn the term in English, but rather to explain its meaning.

7. ) L2: I’m losing information but most of the people moves from here to here you are the only outlayers ok? Do you understand ‘outlayer’? Have you ever used (.)? Ah well sorry you always speak English @@ in econometrics we also use the word outlayer, ok? For an extreme value, in a series an extreme value, it is an outlayer, in English and in Spanish ok? In Spanish, we can also say <L1sp> un valor extremo, un valor extraño </L1sp> but we usually say <L1sp> un outlayer <L1sp> ok?

8. ) L5: There are two main techniques that can be used for single molecule study in biology, one is the is the AFM, Atomic force Microscopy that you probably are familiar with, because eeh this is a technique that is used in the institute of nanoscience here in Zaragoza. There are several instruments able to measure this, and the second is called optical tweezers <L1sp> pinzas ópticas </L1sp > tweezers in case you don’t know the translation of that <L1sp> pinzas ópticas </ L1sp> These are, this is a technique that it is not ee:h available here in Zaragoza.

These excerpts shed light on the linguistic difficulties that EMI may pose both to the lecturers and the students involved. From an EMI perspective these excerpts reveal that lecturers are aware of possible breakdowns in communication due to a lack of shared terminology in English. When faced with this, they make use of their shared terminology in Spanish to ensure their interlocutors’ understanding. Using the L1 of most of the participants can be useful in these cases, especially when tackling a new topic for the first time in the subject. L1 could have a supportive function for meaning making, together with an explanation, but it could also have a learning function, as it can help to build up the lexicon both in English and in the L1 and to foster students’ metalinguistic awareness (Ball et. al., 2015); or, in Gibbons’ words, the lecturers can use L1 to provide students with opportunities to build on the resources of their mother tongue, using L1 strategically (Gibbons, 2015, p. 24). This is again a way of saving time since lectures are time constrained. From an ELF perspective, it is a way of accommodating linguistic differences and difficulties. Lecturers believe that learning through understanding is the most important objective in any lecture and therefore they do not hesitate to ensure understanding by means of shared multilingual resources if that may help their students in accomplishing the specific learning task.

However, it is not only subject-related terminology that is translated by the lecturers. Different English terms emerging from the lecture materials are also translated when an idea is explored. The lecturers interviewed argued that although they are not language teachers, they shared their knowledge with their students and they use all their resources to try to clarify concepts and ideas. To illustrate this pragmatic behaviour Excerpt 9 shows how a lecturer teaching Marketing in the Business Administration Degree, translates the English term “AIDS” literally as the Spanish term “SIDA” while explaining different aspects concerning questionnaires. The translation occurs pre-emptively before any student asked for any kind of clarification. In this example, literal translation is used as a pragmatic strategy in order to ensure interlocutors’ understanding and, in this context, it seems to be a successful strategy by which the lecturer efficiently conveys meaning and saves time, maintaining his flow while students easily process the information.

9. ) L3: Then we have the loss of status error or biases, which is very related to the threatening questions, threatening topics, socially desirable topics and undesirable topics. “Do you care about AIDS?” AIDS is the English term for <L1sp> SIDA </L1sp>.

The results also show that lecturers rely on semi-preconstructed phrases in their L1 coined as idioms, during these EMI sessions. Seidlhofer argues that “[t]he idiom principle can be seen as a means whereby users of a language accommodate to each other by conforming to shared conventions of established phraseology” (Seidlhofer, 2009a, p. 197), as they are part of the interlocutors’ commonly shared knowledge. Among members of the same lingua-culture, idiomatic expressions function as “territorial markers” of social identity and group membership” (Seidlhofer, 2009a, p. 198). In ELF settings, however, the use of idioms is radically different since usually not all the participants will normally belong to the same lingua-culture, as is the case here, and they may not share the culturally-dependent knowledge implied in this phraseological expression. Yet idiomatic expressions have been observed as used by ELF speakers and even constituting an integral part of the linguistic resources speakers can draw upon to achieve effective communication (Cogo, 2012a, p. 103). This is precisely the case in Excerpt 10.

10. ) L1: mm I don’t know an expression similar in English to the Spanish one that (.) what’s the relation between the speed and the pork (.) <L1sp> ¿cuál es la relación entre el tocino y la velocidad? </L1Sp> ok? So we must try to avoid that our relations are like this, because ou:r we say this expression is because we find that there is no a relationship between the two elements, the two variables, so we must try to avoid that we establish a relationship between two variables that have no relation at all.

Excerpt 10 presents an example of the problematic issue of phraseological competence and social/contextual integration in ELF contexts (Cogo, 2010). The use of idioms requires the ability to create and draw on ‘deep commonality’ which characterises first language users (Prodromou, 2008), but at the same time the capacity to try not to exclude the international students that might not have the necessary command of Spanish to understand the idiomatic expression. In this case the lecturer firstly uses the literal translation of a Spanish idiom in English (“what’s the relation between the speed and the pork?”), because this is an English-medium lecture and the idiom may also make sense when translated into English; then he uses the Spanish idiom (“¿Cuál es la relación entre el tocino y la velocidad?”) and then, he reformulates the meaning of this figurative expression to ensure understanding. The relevant aspect here is the lecturer’s translation of the idiomatic expression into English and the explanation that follows to help the international students interpret the idiom and place it into context.

According to Seidlhofer (2009, 2015), idiomatic expressions can be used as means for users of a language to accommodate to each other adjusting language in compliance with the cooperative and the territorial imperatives. The “territorial imperative” is used by ELF speakers “to secure and protect [their] own space and sustain and reinforce [their] separate social identity, either as an individual or as a group” (Seidlhofer, 2009b, p. 196). On the other hand, the cooperative imperative is implicit, since this requires the speakers to engage in “procedures for making their communicative intention accessible” (p. 196). In other words, both imperatives are needed in this case to make what is said acceptable to others. In this case they are fine-tuned, since the use of an idiomatic expression in Spanish serves to establish rapport among the Spanish audience and to identify them as “members of the here-and-now group, as insiders in the conversation and […] makers of a shared territory expressive of common understanding and attitude”, as well as creating a “shared affective space” (Seidlhofer, 2009a, p. 206). On the other hand, the reformulation strategy fosters the cooperative function of communication, contributing to a commonly constructed (pragmatic) meaning among all the participants in the lecture (not only the Spanish speakers). Besides, the use of this idiom in both languages may provide an alignment component among the participants, since they either share the lingua-cultural knowledge or the explanation enables the interlocutors to understand the idiomatic construct in that context. Translating it into English and explaining its meaning the lecturer ensures that it does not lead to any potential non- or misunderstanding among the non-native Spanish speakers, but rather it reinforces a successful negotiation of meaning.

These extracts help to demonstrate the multilingual nature of ELF, especially in an EMI context where the lecturer and most of the students share a common language, and secondly, the way speakers can draw on partially or completely shared languages (as is the case of Spanish in this context) when they need to negotiate meaning in interaction. As Jenkins (2015, p. 61) points out, at this point in ELF research, more emphasis should be placed on the multilingual nature of ELF as “English is only one language among others present or latent in any interaction”.

III. CONCLUSIONS

Lecturers in this Spanish context make use of multilingual resources to convey their messages more effectively during lectures. They are aware of their condition as ELF speakers and make use of their own L1 as an effective interactional mechanism. In this sense, this study understands code-switching as an additional tool that multilingual speakers have at their disposal, enabling them to achieve various conversational goals such as to signal culture and multilingual identity, to maintain one’s flow or to ask for assistance.

Code-switching has been frequently found in formal and informal ELF conversations (Cogo, 2009), business meetings (Pitzl, 2005) or as part of the virtual speech community in informal blogs (Vettorel, 2014; Luzón, 2016). However, the frequency of occurrences of multilingual resources in the lectures analysed is more than expected if we take into account previous studies in different university contexts where no code-switching or literal translation was found (Björkman, 2011a; Smit, 2010), or where the incidence reported was lower (Gotti, 2014). Therefore, the use of Spanish in these lectures is a distinctive feature, resulting from the situational context of the ELF interactions analysed for this study. Yet, the number of occurrences found in each of the sub-corpus is not equal. More occurrences of these two strategies are found in the bachelor’s degree than in the master’s degree.

There are several reasons for this difference in the frequency of occurrences of these strategies in the two sub-corpora. First, the bachelor’s degree may require more negotiation of meaning to overcome the diverse first-language backgrounds of the participants and their varying levels of English proficiency, as acknowledged by the lecturers during the interviews. Secondly, the lecturers’ attitudes towards the change in the vehicular language were different. The data from the interviews show that the master’s degree lecturers were more reluctant to use Spanish during EMI lectures than the lecturers in the bachelor’s degree. Thirdly, the frequent alternation of English and Spanish in the bachelor’s degree lectures is also due to the fact that most of the materials in this degree were adapted by the same lecturers from the materials they use in their Spanish-medium classes. This characteristic feature of the bachelor’s degree makes it relevant to analyse how the languages in the lectures and the written materials interacted and to what extent language alternation in those materials was used as a pragmatic strategy to facilitate comprehension.

The participants’ use of their multilingual resources reveals that, although English is unequivocally the vehicular language or the lingua franca in both degrees, Spanish, that is, the L1 of the majority of the participants, is also present and used as a pragmatic resource in the context under analysis. The use of different languages, mainly by means of code-switching and translating from English to Spanish and vice versa, reveals how lecturers make use of all the resources available to convey meaning and most often to ensure conversational fluency. Communication has proved to rely sometimes on partially or completely shared Spanish-cultural and linguistic awareness to succeed in understanding certain notions and/or referents. In the settings where the EMI lecturers were recorded, where the majority of speakers have the same lingua-cultural background (i.e., all the lecturers and a high number of students were Spanish, especially in the bachelor’s degree) and the interaction was carried out in their home territory, it was expected that the shared linguistic and cultural background affected the speakers’ use of the English language. As Blommaert et al. (2005, p. 198) suggest, the environment can affect the participants’ capacity to make use of their linguistic resources and skills. This strategic use of the languages and the background shared among the participants signals the participants’ membership to the same lingua-cultural community of speakers and a local-contextual in-group solidarity (Cogo, 2011, p. 119). This cultural impact is more noticeable in this study than in similar studies in other universities in which English is a dominant official language (See Smit, 2010; Björkman, 2011a).

The results obtained in this research show that using the multilingual resources of the lecturers and, most importantly, the shared languages among the participants in an EMI lecture, may contribute to gaining more lexical richness and discourse flexibility when explaining concepts and to creating a good rapport among lecturers and the students. In turn, it promotes intercultural engagement and effective intercultural relations. Yet, lecturers need to be cautious about when and how to use other languages different form the vehicular one. They should take into account the academic and linguistic backgrounds of the students, since it may be important to comprehend students’ reactions, misunderstandings and lack of knowledge about certain culturally dependent allusions and terminology. To avoid this kind of issues more than one pragmatic strategy can be used, such as code-switching, reformulation or defining, in order to ensure the understanding of every participant in the lecture regardless of their linguistic backgrounds. Nevertheless, further research could assess the effectiveness of these pragmatic strategies used by the lecturers by eliciting the students’ feedback and perceptions using ethnographically designed methods.

IV. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (project code: FFI2015-68638-r MInECO/FEDEr, EU) and by the regional Government of Aragón (project code: H16_17r).

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Received: 6 September 2021

Accepted: 9 November 2021