The Future of Education

In today’s linguistically diverse higher education contexts, teaching bi/multilingual disciplinary literacies (BMDL) becomes more challenging when both teachers and students are non-native speakers of the language of instruction. This leads to university teachers’ increased expectations for students’ secondary education in disciplinary literacy (DL) development. Considerable BMDL studies (e.g. Airey, 2012; Dafouz & Smit, 2020) have focused on secondary education, yet challenges and demands in higher education settings remain significantly under-researched. This study explored university teachers’ perspectives on the challenges they and their students face regarding BMDL practices. It also investigated teachers’ expectations of both their students and their secondary education regarding BMDL development. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews conducted across countries, disciplines, and languages of instruction, and were analysed both inductively and deductively. The participants were 41 university teachers from Turkey (n=10), Albania (n=13), the Czech Republic (n=10) and Kuwait (n=8), who taught natural (12) and social sciences (29) in a language other than their first language. The languages of instruction were English (n=40), German (n=1) and Arabic (n=2). While most participants encountered challenges concerning the adaptation of pedagogical strategies to suit their students’ needs related to BMDL development, others reported difficulties stemming from teaching in a foreign language. Perceived student difficulties involved aspects of DL comprehension, learning and application, and differed according to the disciplines. Findings demonstrated that expectations from secondary education reflected the challenges the participants experienced; however, they varied across disciplines, mostly centering on basic discipline-specific knowledge and skills, familiarity with concepts and analytical skills, and students’ equipment with the necessary language skills. By identifying challenges university teachers face in bi/multilingual classrooms and shedding light on their expectations, this study contributes to a better understanding of current issues in BMDL instruction and offers valuable insights for future pedagogical practices and policy development in both secondary and higher education.