Language Policy and ESP in Latvia - the Poster Exhibition

I was browsing through the poster exhibition and met Liga Belicka and Ruta Svetina who were standing by their poster on language policy and ESP.  Their poster highlights the difficulties of teaching in a country where the official language is Latvian but where there are many people who have other first languages - for example 29 per cent of their students are native Russian speakers.  They are obliged to teach ESP using Latvian but give sympathetic support to students whose first language is different.  Another delegate from Syria joined in the discussion and said that it was a similar situation in her country.  We debated whether using English as a sole language of instruction was possible but Liga and Ruta thought that some of the students would struggle with specialist vocabulary.