Teaching in English: Online Edition

Course overview:

This course is aimed at teachers and future teachers who want to implement their courses in an interactive way through English and who want to provide their students with the support necessary to study their course content in another language. 

The main objective of the course is to familiarise participants with a variety of teaching strategies suitable for teaching through English in university classrooms, to provide opportunities for them to practise these strategies in online settings and to receive personalised feedback on their teaching and course materials. Participants will be required to read about, observe, discuss, and implement classroom strategies which will support them teaching their subjects through English.

Some of the main topics of the course include:

• What are the benefits and challenges of teaching through English?

• Introducing your course and your syllabus in English

• Writing an effective course syllabus in English  

• What is scaffolding? How to scaffold texts and lectures for your classes

• Making your classes more interactive – strategies and activities

• Working with students from different cultural backgrounds

• Overcoming common problems and challenges in the EMI classroom

• Preparing to teach an interactive session with your subject materials

Course structure - separated in two parts:

The course will be offered entirely online to adapt to participants’ schedules and will pay particular attention to providing personal feedback to participants on their course materials in English and their language for teaching through English.

1. The group sessions will take place online on the following dates/times:

2. Course tutorials:

Participants will have one individual and one small-group tutorial with the trainer in the 2 weeks following the course. In these sessions’ participants will receive feedback on their own materials and teaching practices.  The exact times of these meetings will be agreed with the tutor during the week of the online course.

Registration: from 18 August - 14 November 2025

Please also note our General Terms and Conditions for Teaching in English

Participants are asked to do the following before the course:

· Prepare some teaching materials related to your subject in English which you use (or would like to use) in your classes. These may be short texts or other types of documents which you ask your students to read and work on in your classes or a PowerPoint from a lecture in English.

· Bring the course syllabus and explanation of assessment for one of the subjects you teach through English.

· All participants will have an opportunity to teach a short microteaching lesson (10 minutes approx.) on their chosen subject area to the rest of the class in English during one of the sessions. They will receive feedback from their tutor on their session.

Course Tutor:

Robert O'Dowd is Full Professor for Applied Linguistics at the University of León, Spain. He has taught at universities in Ireland, Germany and Spain and has numerous publications on the application of online collaborative learning and Virtual Exchange in university education settings. One of his most recent books is the co-edited volume Online Intercultural Exchange: Policy, Pedagogy, Practice for Routledge. He recently coordinated European Commission’s Erasmus+ KA3 project Evaluating and Upscaling Telecollaborative Teacher Education (EVALUATE) (http://www.evaluateproject.eu/). This is a European Policy Experimentation which studied the impact of Virtual Exchange on over 1000 student teachers involved in Initial Teacher Education across Europe. He has worked as a trainer of English Medium Instruction and online education for the past ten years and has run courses in Spain, Austria, Italy and Lithuania. Robert’s publications are available here: http://unileon.academia.edu/RobertODowd and you can follow him on twitter @robodowd.