Multilinguismo, CLIL e innovazione didattica - Libera Università di ...

Cristina Mariotti
ity of direct interaction, shared time and place, and an inclination on the part of the
speaker to reveal their own personal stance. These characteristics are shared, to
greater or lesser extents, across all spoken university registers. (Biber 2006: 189)
Speaking in public in a higher education setting represents a big challenge for
both native-speaking and non-native-speaking students; nevertheless, it
should be considered that internationalisation programmes entail great
challenges also for non-native-speaking academics.
Despite this fact, the ability to use a foreign language to convey highereducation-level
specialised contents is often taken for granted by institutions
on the grounds that if an academic can publish in English and can speak at
conferences, they can also hold a lecture or conduct a seminar in English
without further training (cf. for instance lecturers in the Netherlands in
Klaassen, Räsänen 2006: 245).
In addition to questions connected with the ability to transfer their teaching
skills from their L1 to English, non-native academics engaged in internationalisation
programmes are likely to have to deal with other issues, for instance
face-threats. In formal education settings, the need to appear in control of the
ongoing situation, the added challenge represented by the fear of producing
speech that does not conform to what is considered standard in the L2 (‘proficiency
face’, cf. Ahvenainen 2005, 2008), and the fear of not being able to
respond to students’ questions or to explain or reformulate a concept in an
efficient way may end up in communicative hindrances and can affect the
perception of the speakers’ identities as efficient users of English (Brown,
Levinson 1987; Cook 2002; Jenkins 2007; Spencer-Oatey 2007). Moreover,
internationalisation programmes may include students who are monolingual
(native) or bilingual speakers of English, and this may further threaten the
academic identity and the self-confidence of non-native lecturers who use
English as a medium of instruction (cf. Richards 2009 about the concept of
stable and unstable academic identities).
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