Practicum Supervisors'Insights Regarding Non-Native Teachers in Training

This paper presents the results of a series of oral interviews withpracticum supervisors in MA TESOL programs, regarding theirviews on the characteristics and the challenges experienced by nonnativeteachers in training while they were doing their practice teaching. Practicum supervisors constitute a group of professionals with a unique and privialged perspective onto the classroom performance of both native and non-native student teachers and through these interviews they can express their concerns and appreciations of non-native students teachers in North-American TESOL Programs Keywords: practicum supervisor; non-native teachers, TESOL Program

English in Spain: Education, attitudes and native-speakerism

Spain has traditionally featured rather low in the rankings measuring the knowledge of English by European citizens, and yet English has been constantly entering different areas of Spanish life and in all levels of education. This article delves into the efforts made at different levels of education to enable school graduates to communicate in English without difficulty. It focuses on how young people concep tualise English: their attitudes towards the language and to what extent they associate it with Inner Circle countries, or whether instead they see it as a tool for international communication. This discussion is complemented with an analysis of the pervasiveness of ‘native-speakerism’ in Spanish society, which we claim acts as another handicap to the normalisation of the use of English as a lingua franca by Spanish citizens in multicultural settings within and outside the country

Internationalization of Business English communication at university: A three-fold needs analysis

This paper provides an example of a thorough needs analysis previous to the syllabus planning of a Business English (BE) course at a Catalan university. Three types of sources for linguistic needs are considered. Firstly, the institutional foreign language (FL) policy of the university, which requires a CEFR level B1 for all graduates. Secondly, students’ needs, collected through an entry test and a self-report questionnaire, which provide statistical evidence of the effect of experience abroad and number of years studying English on results of the entry test and perceptions of their own reading skills. Lastly, the opinions of six local business people representing the main sectors with international activity in the area of influence of the university. These business representatives, gathered in a focus-group discussion session, emphasize the importance of comprehension skills and accuracy in BE lexical selection for international business. The triangulation of these data reveals the need to enhance communicative efficiency in business routine tasks in the BE syllabus, instead of promoting approaches oriented towards native-speaker models. Finally, inconsistencies are revealed between institutional and business representatives’ expectations regarding students’ FL target level