The Secret Life of English-Medium Instruction in Higher Education

Examining Microphenomena in Context

David Block, Sarah Khan, David Block, Sarah Khan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000208726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

This volume explores the inner-workings of English-medium instruction (EMI) in higher education (HE) at two universities. After an introductory chapter that sets the scene and provides an essential background, there are four empirically based chapters that draw on data collected from a range of sources at two universities in Catalonia. Thisincludes interviews, audio/video recordings of classes, audio logs produced by both lecturers and students, policy documents, students' written work, and student presentation evaluation rubrics. These chapters examine the following issues: (1) the choice of either English or Catalan as the medium of instruction by students and lecturers; (2) how students display ambivalence towards EMI, as well as a general lack of enthusiasm towards and an ironic distance from 'doing education'; (3) how students resist EMI by contravening its English monolingual norm, using their L1s in the classroom; and finally, (4) how EMI lecturers on occasion act as English language teachers despite their continued claims to the contrary. The book ends with a concluding chapter that draws all of the strands together around key themes.

This book is written for scholars interested in issues surrounding EMI in HE in general, as well as those EMI in HE practitioners who have adopted a reflective approach to their professional practice and wish to know more about the ins and outs of EMI in HE from multiple perspectives. It is a useful resource for MA and PhD students on applied linguistics programmes in which the roles and uses of English inHE worldwide are deemed to be important and worthy of attention. Additionally, this will be relevant to courses or modules focusing on language policy, as well as curriculum issues more broadly and language teaching practice more specifically.

1 The secret life of English-medium instruction

Setting the scene

David Block and Sarah Khan

Introduction

In 2015, the authors of the chapters that make up this short-form book, along with several other colleagues, began meeting to discuss what would become a research project entitled Towards an empirical assessment of the impact of English-medium instruction at university: language learning, disciplinary knowledge and academic identities (ASSEMID). The research proposal that emerged from these meetings was positively evaluated by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (El Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad – MINECO), and we were granted funding for the three-year period of December 2016 to December 2019.

The chief aim of ASSEMID was to focus on how English-medium instruction (EMI) in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) subjects was carried out at two Catalan universities – the Universitat de Lleida and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Our interest in this specific topic came from the experience of team members, who had, over the years, done research on English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and more specifically, English for Academic Purposes (EAP), as well as Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). These researchers were poised to add to their repertoires of knowledge of EMI, given that this modality was progressively taking over spaces where the previous three had, at different times in the past, been prominent.

As EMI has emerged in a range of contexts worldwide, so too has there been an exponential increase in the amount of research that aims to explore it in policy, curricular, and practical terms. In this regard, books on EMI appearing over the past several years include Barnard and Hasim (2018); Bradford and Brown (2018); Breeze and Sancho-Guinda (2017); Brenn-White and Faethe (2013); Dafouz and Smit (2020); Dimova; Hultgren and Jensen (2015); Fenton-Smith; Humphries and Walkinshaw (2017); Fortanet-Gómez (2013); Henrikson; Holmen and Kling (2019); Hultgren; Gregersen and Thøgersen (2014); Hyland and Shaw (2016); Jenkins (2013); Jenkins and Mauranen (2019); Macaro (2018); Mukerji and Tripathi (2013); Murata (2018); Nikula; Dafouz; Moore and Smit (2016); Preisler; Fabricius and Klitgård (2011); Ruiz de Zarobe; Sierra and Gallardo del Puerto (2011); Smit and Dafouz (2012); Valcke and Wilkinson (2017); van der Walt (2013); Wächter and Maiworm (2014); and Zhao and Dixon (2017). In addition, there have been numerous special issues in applied linguistics journals over the past several years (e.g. Doiz and Lasagabaster, 2020; Haberland and Mortensen, 2012; Kuteeva, 2011; Pecorari and Malmström, 2018; Smit and Studer, in press), to say nothing of the growing list of specialised journals such as Journal of English-Medium Instruction. The series in which this book appears – the Routledge Focus on English-Medium Instruction in Higher Education, edited by Annette Bradford and Howard Brown – is a further indication that EMI has established itself firmly as a key area of research. Finally, the presence of EMI as an important research focus has been in evidence at applied linguistics conferences and, more recently, there has been a clear increase in the number of conferences devoted exclusively to this topic. More locally, we note how in Spain there is a growing number of academic groups devoting time and attention to EMI in HE, producing suggestive results which, it is hoped, will be taken on board by policy makers and stakeholders in the future. This research is reflected in a series of publications (e.g. Doiz and Lasagabaster, 2020; Fortanet-Gómez, 2013; and contributions to collections such as Breeze and Sancho-Guinda, 2017; Doiz et al., 2013; Lasagabaster and Ruiz de Zarobe, 2010; Ruiz de Zarobe et al., 2011). In our research, and in this book more specifically, we align ourselves with these publications and aim to further the discussion and debate about this context and EMI in HE more broadly.

We believe that this short-form collection distinguishes itself from previous publications on EMI, not so much for one single defining characteristic, but for how it combines several characteristics existent elsewhere but that have never before been combined in the way we have combined them here. First, it explores events in a somewhat (though not completely) unique EMI context, in which the dynamic is English in addition to two local languages (Catalan and Spanish), as opposed to English in addition to one local language. Similar contexts exist in other parts of the world: for example, Finnish and Swedish are official languages in Finland, Arabic and Hebrew in Israel, Belarusian and Russian in Belarus, Greek and Turkish in Cyprus, and in Spain itself, Basque and Spanish in the Basque Country. However, as Elliott, Vila and Gilabert (2018, p. 122) suggest: ‘Catalonia offers a sociolinguistic situation which is particularly interesting as far as HE language policies are concerned, given its complex sociolinguistic reality and its long history of language contact and language conflict’. This complexity arises from several factors. First, Catalan in HE co-exists with not one but two languages with claims to being international – English and Spanish. Second, against some odds, over the past four decades Catalan has experienced a remarkable recovery as regards its use in wide range of social and institutional contexts in Catalonia, to the point that there are perhaps as many as ten million speakers in Spain, France, and Italy. Third and finally, there is the fact that while Catalan has status as an autochthonous language and is the near exclusive official language of education in primary and secondary school, it nonetheless shares considerable space with Spanish at the HE level. These signs of complexity are evidence in the aforementioned trilingual contexts; however, in them the three languages in play are not used or distributed across communicative settings in the same way. Thus, for example, while Hebrew shares space with two international languages (English and Arabic), its sociohistorical recovery post-World War Two was very different from what occurred with Catalan from the late 1970s onwards. In addition, the current language contact dynamics in Israel, involving Hebrew and Arabic, are very different from what one finds in Catalonia, involving Spanish and Catalan. Hebrew can be said to be in a much more powerful position of dominance than Catalan, which shares far more social and institutional space with Spanish. Similarly, while Basque, like Catalan, shares space with Spanish, its relative presence in social and institutional settings is very different from what one finds in Catalonia; it can claim a far lower percentage of daily users than Catalan.

Secondly, the chapters in this volume report on events taking place in a Southern European (SE) context, which is very different from what one finds in Northern, Central, or Eastern European contexts, to say nothing of contexts in East Asia and other Pacific locations. Due to under-resourcing and (unfortunately) a lack of planning, EMI in HE in many parts of Southern Europe is conceived and implemented in very unique ways. EMI began later there than elsewhere in Europe and particular concerns have been whether lecturers and students’ English proficiency is sufficient for EMI to be a viable alternative to L1-mediated instruction (Aguilar, 2017; Dafouz, 2018). A disconcerting finding by Costa and Coleman (2010) in Italy was that many Italian lecturers had to teach through EMI regardless of their English language competence and that 77% of institutions that answered a survey claimed that they provided no linguistic or methodological training for lecturers (Costa, 2013). Although some ten years later conditions have no doubt improved in Southern European contexts, the relative gap existent between these contexts and other European contexts remains.

Thirdly, in terms of methodology, this book provides a relatively under-researched approach to EMI with data collected from multiple sources, including questionnaires, interviews, audio and video recordings of classes, audio logs produced by both lecturers and students, policy documents, course materials, exams, students’ written work, lecturers’ power point slides, and evaluation rubrics, resulting in an ethnographic approach to the study of two EMI in HE contexts. Research on EMI in HE to date has tended to be based on language policy, language curriculum development, teacher education (and especially, teacher cognition), and narrative studies, and most research has drawn on either one data source (e.g. based on questionnaires or interviews) or two data sources (at times combining questionnaires and interviews). Some research that is based on questionnaires and/or interviews also includes the analysis of documents. However, apart from notable exceptions (e.g. Fortanet-Gomez, 2013; Smit, 2010), there is a real paucity of publications in which researchers use the aforementioned data sources in addition to fieldnotes based on the observation of classes; the description, categorisations, and analysis of classroom interaction; and the interpretation and analysis of diaries or logs collected from stakeholders. For example, Dimova, Hultgren and Jensen’s (2015) English-medium instruction in European higher education contains 14 chapters, with just one (Arkin and Osam, 2015) adopting a truly multi-dimensional approach to data collection in an attempt to view the EMI experience through as many windows as possible. Meanwhile Valcke and Wilkinson’s (2017) Integrating content and language in higher education does slightly better in this regard, with three out of 13 chapters (Costa and Mariotti, 2017; Gierlinger, 2017; Simbolon, 2017) drawing on multiple data sources. Other edited collections show a similar pattern.

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