Perceived Needs of English-medium Instruction Lecturers in an Italian University: Before and After Training

English-medium Instruction (EMI) has seen significant development over the last 15 years in Italy (Campagna and Pulcini, 2014; Molino and Campagna, 2014; Ackerley, Guarda and Helm, 2017; Broggini and Costa, 2017). In an effort to improve and assure quality for their EMI courses, it is now common practice in some Italian universities to offer specific training courses for the teaching staff involved in their “internationalised” courses (Costa, 2015). Because of the variety of experiences observed at different universities in Italy it is important to analyze every single context. In turn every context might provide insight into the training of lecturers which may very well be applicable to other European countries. This current paper presents the results of a case study carried out using a triangulation of data on: 1. the analysis of a lecturer questionnaire on EMI, 2. the description of the EMI lecturers training course undertaken by following the lecturers’ needs 3. the analysis of the feedback questionnaire received at the end of the course. The study was performed in a public medium-sized university in the north of Italy which has 6 faculties and is growing in terms of students. The lecturer questionnaire was sent to 440 lecturers in order to investigate, among other things, if the teaching staff of EMI courses actually perceived the need to be trained, if they had any concerns about their teaching, if they were more interested in improving language proficiency or in developing teaching methodologies and if there was a difference in their perceived needs according to the discipline they were teaching. After this feasibility study a training course was developed and offered for free from the university Language Centre to 15 lecturers from the faculties of Economics, Engineering, Humanities and Law. The course design (both linguistic and methodological) will be presented in light of the results of the questionnaire; these are then compared with those of the feedback questionnaire administered to the participants after the course itself in order to understand if the actual experience of an EMI training course effected the lectures’ naïve perceptions. The focus is on the needs perception in order to reveal a possible evolution for them, linking the discussion to current research on EMI issues.