On Friday 1 April, UIC Barcelona hosted the 7th edition of the Spring Research Seminar, an annual event organised by the Institute for Multilingualism.

This year’s edition, entitled “Rising up to new challenges in multilingual education”, was held both on-site and online and welcomed 98 registered participants from Catalonia, Spain and other countries around the world (including Italy, Iran, Turkey, China and Holland), who had the opportunity to attend two plenary sessions led by Dr Emma Dafouz, from the Complutense University of Madrid, and Dr Imma Miralpeix, from the University of Barcelona. This was also the first edition to feature a poster session, which was also presented in dual format (on-site and online) and proved highly successful.

The guest speakers shared their research in the field of multilingualism and second-language acquisition, delving, more specifically, into the development of disciplinary literacies in English-medium higher education, within the approach known as Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), and the role of audiovisual input in vocabulary acquisition within the English-language classroom.

The session, which lasted from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., also featured a string of experts from Catalan, Spanish and international universities, who, through oral presentations and posters, discussed current topics such as teacher and student beliefs and perceptions about English as an international language in CLIL settings, the internationalisation of the curriculum and lecturers’ training needs in CLIL contexts.

Other themes of discussion included the development of English communication skills in these contexts, task complexity and student gains in written production in English, the advantages and disadvantages of bilingualism, cross-linguistic effects on bilingual speakers and linguistic attitudes and motivation among teachers from the Basque County and the Italian region of Friuli, with regards to multilingual educational practices.