Parallel ESAP courses: What are they? Why do we need them?

Educational institutions are today constantly under pressure to react to changes which are being brought about by various aspects of globalisation and technological advances. English has achieved a global language status in many social, educational and economic areas and this phenomenon has made it imperative that many non-English speaking countries develop English language proficiency in their own citizens. More and more students are travelling abroad to study, either through organised programmes such as Erasmus, or individually motivated. Canada and the US have seen large influxes and so too here in Europe, largely due to the Bologna Declaration of June 1999. The Bologna Process launched the European Higher Education Area and set in motion a series of reforms to make European higher education more competitive and attractive for European students and students from other continents. Well over 3 million individual participants have benefited from this scheme since its inception. Institutions publish their course descriptions which contain learning outcomes (i.e. what students are expected to know, understand and be able to do in the target language) and the workload (i.e. the time students typically need to achieve these outcomes). Each learning outcome is expressed in terms of university credits. The Bologna Process does not aim to harmonise national higher education systems but to provide tools to connect them: therefore higher education providers remain autonomous institutions. Universities based outside English-speaking countries began to offer courses taught in English in order to attract this flux of newly mobile students. This has led many universities all over the world to teach courses in English in order to attract as many of these fee-paying foreign students as possible. These student migrations are changing the nature of the student body in many ways and affecting institutions, impinging upon methodologies, course design and classroom activities.