Profile and professional career of teachers of Catalan as a Foreign Language abroad

Abstract

The Institut Ramon Llull promotes Catalan language studies at universities outside the Catalan-speaking territories, with a current total of 3,500 students and 134 teachers worldwide. This study focuses on the characteristics of its teachers, who form an understudied group. More specifically, we aim to describe the teachers’ academic backgrounds, their teaching and research profiles, their working conditions and their opinions on how their experience will impact their future careers. To describe how working in the Llull Network affects teachers’professional career, we provide the same data on former teachers. Information from 71 informants was gathered through an online survey. The results show that although the teachers have some similarities in their profiles, working conditions vary greatly from one post to another and also that they are often in an unstable situation due to the temporary or non-permanent nature of their contracts. In addition, while current teachers believe that the experience of working in a Llull Network destination can help them to find work later on, former teachers’ answers vary depending on whether they are working at present abroad or in the Catalan-speaking areas.