ICLHE: are those who might willing and prepared? A quantitative survey and an in depth qualitative analysis of case studies of ICL attempts in the university context.

In this paper, we describe the background, process and outcome of an ICL Programme which was officially implemented in the Political Science (PS) Faculty, University of Calabria, in the 2005-2006 academic year whereby subject teachers who are highly competent users of English offered their subject courses in English. As an ideal ICL programme is not a simple matter of just teaching a subject in a foreign language, not only did this require an official context for coordinating subject-EFL coursework and instruction. Indeed, other factors such as instructor and student motivation, teaching and evaluation format as well as pedagogical, bureaucratic and motivational considerations were issues which determined the success of the programme. The PS-ICL Programme is, in fact, the outcome of a longitudinal cumulative effort which began two years earlier with an ICL survey designed to investigate how willing the teaching staff of the University of Calabria would be to teaching their courses in a FL. The paper, firstly, presents the quantitative as well as qualitative data which reveal that many subject teachers are hesitant about teaching in a FL since they themselves do not feel competent with it. These and other feedback provided the premise for the institutionally founded PS-ICL Programme. The paper, then, analyses this PS-ICL case study through three interrelated perspectives:  the pedagogical aspect, which will give an overview of the methodology proposed (Argondizzo and Laugier 2004) and the criteria selected for assessment; the students’ feedback which highlights what motivations encouraged them to enrol in the courses and what results they achieved; the academic aspect which underlines what reasons encouraged the coordinators to develop an ICL programme.This paper provides a working model of an ICL Programme which we feel must, above all, be based on the willingness, strengths and weaknesses of potential participant subject teachers who, in our case, shed light on how their willingness could be enhanced.