Cristina Escobar Urmeneta has taught English as a Foreign Language in Primary and Secondary Education and has been involved in the development and implementation of a number of Teacher Education programmes. Currently she is Full Professor at the Department of Language Education, in the Faculty of Education at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), where she works as a researcher and a teacher-educator.
Dr. Escobar Urmeneta is the principal investigator of the officially recognised ‘Language and Education’, LED, research group (Ref. 2014SGR1190) and the CLIL-SI Action-Research Collaborative Team, which runs school-university partnership projects for the promotion of plurilingual education in inclusive classrooms. Her main research interests are the teaching, learning and assessment of Oral Communication, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education (ICLHE), Classroom Interactional Competence (CIC), Portfolio Assessment, including the European Language Portfolio, and Empowering Approaches to Pre-service and In-service Teacher Education. Currently she is the principal investigator of the PATHWAY project on ICLHE in the English-Medium Primary Teacher-Education Bachelors Degree (Ref. 2015 ARMIF 00001), funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya.
As a teacher educator – among other responsibilities – she coordinates the UAB’s English branch of the Master’s Degree on Secondary Education offered by the Faculty of Education. She also coordinates the Master’s Degree in Teacher Development for Foreign Language Education and Content and Language Integrated Learning (MEd CLIL & FLE), which aims at enabling participants to become methodologically and linguistically equipped to teach content-matter through English, and the Certificate in CLIL for Professionals of Physical Education and Outodors Activities.
Dr. Escobar Urmeneta has served as a consultant to several national and regional education departments and agencies in the design of foreign language curricula and teacher-education programmes for multilingualism, and for the assessment of foreign language competences.
