Biodata

Davinia Sánchez-García completed her PhD (with Honours) on teacher discourse strategies in English-medium instruction (EMI) in higher education at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). She combines her work as adjunct lecturer at the Open University of Madrid (UDIMA) and as assistant professor in the English Studies department at UCM with her role as educational developer (UCM). Her research interests include EMI, CLIL, classroom discourse and second language acquisition. Currently she is a research member of the European Erasmus+ project ‘Educational Quality at Universities for Inclusive International Programmes’ (EQUiiP) and the UCM research group: ‘The Role of English in the Internationalization of Spanish Higher Education’ – https://clue-project.weebly.com/.

Questions at the service of pedagogy in English-medium instruction in higher education

This study examines the relationship between teacher questioning practices and pedagogical objectives in Spanish- and English-medium lectures. It draws on the SETT framework (Walsh, 2011) and a taxonomy of questions (Sánchez-García, 2016) as main analytical tools. The results obtained from the analysis of 16 lectures delivered by the same two university teachers both in Spanish and English reveal that the use of questions could be exploited more effectively for pedagogical purposes. Consequently, this paper tries to raise teachers’ awareness of the role of questions upon their teaching and their students’ learning process.

Walsh, S. (2011). Exploring classroom discourse: Language in action. Abingdon: Routledge.

Sánchez-García, D. (2016). A contrastive analysis of Spanish- and English-medium instruction in tertiary education: Teacher discourse strategies in a spoken corpus. Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Doctoral dissertation).