LSP Teacher Training Summer School: The TRAILs project

This book is the result of research carried out in partnership with seven
European universities as part of an Erasmus+ project on training teachers
of Language for Specifi c Purpose (LSP) in higher education. All university
partners, i.e. Bordeaux (France), Zagreb (Croatia), Jade (Germany), C?diz
(Spain), Adam Mickiewicz (Poland), Ljubljana (Slovenia), Arcola Research
(UK), and Bergamo (Italy) carried out surveys and developed a detailed
report showing that in Europe there is very little training for this type of
teaching, and that teachers generally need to be trained in the specifi cities
of the language fi eld they are going to teach. Medical or maritime English,
legal Spanish, French for tourism, etc. require both an expert domain
knowledge and a grounding in language teaching. Several testimonies
highlight this situation and show the lack of career development prospects
for LSP teachers at European universities.

The members of the Erasmus+ TRAILs project have therefore been
interested in the specifi c needs of LSP teachers and have been able to
update the information through several types of surveys. The competences
of LSP teachers were thus identifi ed. Based on this precise inventory, they
are proposing to draw up a complete training programme.

A pedagogical approach has been developed: resources, lesson preparation,
course design, innovative pedagogical approaches are presented. The
research presented in this book goes well beyond the TRAILs project and
questions the training of specialised language teachers. More generally,
it highlights the need to provide effective training and professional
development for LSP teachers and offers a contribution to overcoming the
shortcomings of LSP teacher education.