Focus on Form in ICLHE Lectures in Italy

This paper seeks to provide an insight of the local context of ICLHE (Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education) in Italy. Its principal aim is descriptive although it discusses theoretical models since it pursues to establish the extent to which FoF (focus on form) is present in ICLHE lectures. This could indicate the extent to which lecturers have understood the intrinsic nature of integrating content and language objectives. By means of observations, recordings and transcriptions, data were obtained from the spoken English of Italian university lecturers in scientific fields teaching in English as the medium of instruction. ICLHE is carried out in Italy by subject teachers and not by language specialists. Thus one might expect university lecturers not to be attentive to the teaching of language. However, in this corpus sporadic examples of pre-emptive focus on form, through lexical and grammatical explanations, codeswitching strategies and input enhancement (typographical), have been found. The analysis of the results revealed a type of pre-emptive focus on form on the part of the lecturers which is rarely presented as such in the literature, namely codeswitching. Finally, the results furnish a pedagogical perspective, with evidence that content lecturers make certain use of FoF, thus revealing some degree of linguistic interest and awareness which could be further enhanced through the support of the language academic staff.