Teaching English-Medium Instruction Courses in Higher Education

A Guide for Non-Native Speakers

Ruth Breeze, Carmen Sancho Guinda

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350169784
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación superior

This book provides practical help and guidance for non-native English-speaking higher education lecturers faced with the need to deliver lectures and seminars in English. It builds on the authors' years of experience as researchers and teacher trainers in the area of English Medium Instruction (EMI), combining practical advice and research findings with useful case studies from different global settings, including Australia, China, Hong Kong, Slovakia, Spain, the UK and the USA, and a range of subject areas, such as philosophy, mathematics and genetics. The authors present an overview of what generally happens when university teachers make the transition to teaching in English. After dispelling some common myths and setting out priorities, Ruth Breeze and Carmen Sancho Guinda move on to explain how practitioners can prepare to give lectures and interact with both local and international students effectively in English, tackling difficult issues, such as encouraging participation, promoting creativity and critical thinking, and evaluating written student work. The final chapters address good practices in EMI, proposing ways to achieve excellence in global settings.

CHAATER 1

The Rise of EMI

Globalization and the
International University Scene

Chapter outline

1.1 Introduction

1.2 The Rise of EMI

1.3 Why Is English So Important?

1.4 The Ecosystems of EMI

1.5 Are the Teachers Ready for EMI?

1.6 Are the Students Ready for EMI?

1.7 Do Students Learn English through EMI?

1.8 Profile of the EMI teacher

1.9 A New Role for Language Teachers?

1.10 The Baseline: A Practical, Evidence-Based Approach to EMI

1.1 Introduction

Almost everywhere in the world, university education is now being offered in English, and all the evidence suggests that this trend is gathering momentum. Although this change is not welcomed by everyone, it is becoming broadly accepted as one of the main ways of opening up higher education to international contacts and exchanges, participating in global markets and putting local universities on the world map. At the same time, controversy still surrounds this tendency. A recent British Council report pointed out that many institutions appear to have problems finding enough teaching staff competent to give lectures, lead seminars or conduct tutorials in English. There is uncertainty regarding student language levels on admission to these programmes. There are few pedagogical guidelines concerning the way that English-taught courses differ from courses taught in a shared first language, and there is very little training for teachers who are new to this field (Dearden 2014).

Europe has been one of the leaders in the move to university teaching in English beyond the traditional reaches of English-language influence, and probably the area where the greatest amount of research has been carried out into this process. At the height of the first wave of such programmes in Europe, Wilkinson and Zegers (2007) pointed out that three questionable assumptions underlie this trend. First, they state that it is taken for granted that teaching staff are competent enough in English to give lectures, lead seminars, direct research work and examine students in that language. Second, it is supposed that students have good enough English-language competences to participate in specialized university-level courses taught in English. Third, it is widely assumed that all of this is positive; that is, the students’ English level improves as a result, and their content knowledge is not impeded. Ten years later (Dearden 2014; O’Dowd 2018), these assumptions still seem to underlie the thinking behind the implementation of university teaching in English – and there is still no clear consensus on the issues that they raise.

In this chapter we take an in-depth look at the move to teaching in English in higher education, based on previous research and experience. We will show how the situation varies from one context to another, and identify some patterns that can help us to understand what is going on in our own local situation. With a view to supporting teachers who are new to teaching content courses in English, or who are interested in consolidating their experiences in this area, we will address some of the major questions that are being asked, and look at how we can understand our role in the ongoing internationalization process of higher education worldwide.

1.2 The Rise of EMI

In many countries around the world, English plays an important role in education in general, and courses have long been taught in English at university level to students who have a different native language. When we think of this, places like Hong Kong, India or Kenya come to mind as examples of areas where English has a consolidated role in the education system, and is one of the main languages used in higher education. But the last ten years have seen a fast-moving trend towards teaching university courses in English almost everywhere in the world – even in countries with absolutely no historical association with the English language. To give a name to this phenomenon, experts are now using the term ‘English Medium Instruction’, or ‘EMI’, meaning the use of the English language to teach academic subjects in countries where English is not the first language of most of the population. So why is this happening? What factors can we identify that make universities in countries as diverse as Italy and China go over to using English to teach university courses?

Thinking of EMI in areas of the world with no historical association with English, we will look specifically at Europe, China and Latin America. If we start by looking at Europe, the trend towards EMI began to be documented there in the late 1990s (Dearden 2014; Wächter & Maiworm 2008, 2014; Wilkinson 2004), where it was interpreted both as an aspect of globalization and competitive forces in higher education markets, and as a correlate of the dominance of the English language in an increasing number of sectors across the globe. Paradoxically, perhaps, another of the driving forces behind university courses in English was the Erasmus scheme, initially set up to foster European integration through cultural, linguistic and educational exchange. As increasing numbers of students applied to take semesters in other EU countries, it quickly became apparent that many countries would be left out of the scheme unless they started to offer courses taught in a language accessible to students from abroad – and the default option was rapidly accepted to be English. Despite initial predictions that this would not work, EMI courses have enjoyed a steady expansion across Europe. For example, the surveys by Wächter and Maiworm (2014) identified a rise from 725 English-taught programmes in Europe in 2001 to 8,089 in 2014. The countries leading this trend were the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands and Germany, but countries in Southern and particularly Eastern Europe have been catching up rapidly. Interestingly, the original dynamics driving EMI seems to be changing slightly. In the most recent survey, after the need to remove language obstacles for international students, the most commonly mentioned reason given for EMI in Europe was to improve the job prospects for local students (Wächter & Maiworm 2014, 18). Widespread public acceptance of the need for English as the language of international and professional communication is thus still fuelling the move towards EMI, even where the goals of attracting foreign students or taking part in exchanges have largely been met.

Of course, in the global balance we can hardly ignore the importance of English in China. As one of the new internationalization moves ushered in around the time that China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, it became official policy that children should study English from the age of eight or nine. According to Bolton and Graddol (2012), by 2010 there were around 400 million English learners in China. English is an obligatory subject, alongside only mathematics and Chinese, for students taking the Gaokao, that is, the National University Entrance Exam, taken by around 9 million students every year. But this is not the only thing. For many Chinese people, modernity and prosperity are strongly associated with the English language, and for upwardly mobile Chinese families, schooling with and even in English has become popular, with English taught in kindergartens and in private language schools, as well as throughout the school system. All Chinese university students are required to study English, not only as an admission requirement but also to graduate – those majoring in subjects other than English have to sit the College English Test (CET) before graduation. Educational high achievers are often encouraged to go abroad to take a master’s or PhD in the United States, Australia or Europe. In fact, China is the top source country for international students at US universities, and in Europe, too, vast numbers of Chinese students undertake higher education, with around 40 per cent of them choosing the United Kingdom, followed by France and Germany. Unsurprisingly, Chinese universities are now increasingly moving towards EMI programmes, partly in response to local demand, and partly to attract students from elsewhere. In 2012–13 some leading Chinese universities were offering degrees in medicine taught in English, and attracting large numbers of students from India and Pakistan. Currently, there are large numbers of EMI programmes in China across all educational levels from primary school to graduate study, on offer in public and private institutions alike (see Chen et al. 2020).

The third area of the world that we would like to highlight here for special attention is Latin America. We might imagine that at least the Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas would have little need for English, since after all, Spanish itself is a widely spoken language with a massive number of native speakers, a well-developed academic and scientific language, and a buoyant culture. In this particular context, it seems that the initiative to promote EMI comes more from the private sector. Faced with a state sector that is underfunded and overrun, and where higher education is struggling with unmanageable numbers, the middle-class parents increasingly opt for private education, even at university level. The prestigious international schools and private universities favoured by upwardly mobile social groups tend to include English as an integral part of what they offer, thus conforming to global trends and providing added value for their students. Recent surveys suggest that Brazil, too, followed this tendency until the mid-2010s, with EMI programmes widespread in private education at all levels, but with less penetration in the state sector (Dearden 2014). Within Latin America, Argentina and Chile have taken the lead with reinforced English-language education throughout formal schooling, while other countries lag behind, perhaps through lack of resources or an absence of political will in this sense. For example, Mexico recently launched a state initiative to gradually implement English in the state school system, with the aim of having school leavers reach a B1 level by 2037 (Secretaría de Educación Pública 2017), but is currently struggling with a lack of resources and trained teachers, while legislation in Paraguay still only requires students to take two years of English during their schooling, instead giving priority to teaching Spanish and Guaraní. Where EMI is making rapid progress in Latin America is in the competitive private schools and universities favoured by middle-class parents. Throughout the continent EMI is thus becoming associated with an elite education at all levels that makes students upwardly mobile.

This trend in itself may have a knock-on effect on public institutions, and there is evidence from a few countries that some state universities are now opting to launch EMI, despite the enormous investment and reorganization required. For example, in Brazil the short-lived ‘Science without borders’ programme, and the recent ‘Programa Institucional de Internacionalização’ (PRINT), have acted as an incentive for many Brazilian state higher education institutions to start implementing EMI, and pilot programmes are now under way in thirty-six universities, with EMI training courses for lecturers, most of whom have intermediate levels of English competence (Martínez & Fernandez 2020). Although such moves are often perceived locally as controversial, or as a waste of scarce resources, one Brazilian seminar participant commented that some universities feel that it is worth persisting, because ‘EMI could mean putting an institution on the map as a destination in the international scene’ (Madhavan & McDonald 2014, 4).

So universities all over the world are doing EMI – EMI is a truly global phenomenon. But is all EMI the same? Is it safe to make generalizations about EMI? How can we talk meaningfully about EMI in our own context, and think about what it has in common with EMI in contexts that are very different? And how can we understand the special features of our own context that make it different from many of the others? In what follows, we will take a look at the background in more detail. In concrete, we will address some important questions that inevitably arise in any discussion of EMI: Why is English so important? How can we understand the role of English in our own context? Are teachers and students really ‘ready’ for EMI? What kind of person should the EMI teacher be? Is there any room for language teachers in the new scenario? How can we learn from other institutions’ experiences to build a solid basis for developing EMI programmes and courses in our own context?

1.3 Why Is English So Important?

So EMI is a global phenomenon. But why is this the case? In essence, we have to say that this is because English is currently the global language. This is not a political statement, but simply a statement of fact. As David Crystal so eloquently explained in his best-selling book English as a Global Language (Crystal 1997, 2003), the rise of English to global status is the end result of a combination of different economic, political and social processes that have taken place over the last two hundred years. As he describes (2003, 3–4), ‘a language achieves a genuinely global status when it develops a special role that is recognized in every country’ and to achieve this unusual status, this language has to be taken up by other countries around the world, which ‘must decide to give it a special place within their communities, even though they may have few (or no) mother-tongue speakers’. This can happen when a country decides to make this language official or co-official, authorized for use in education, the media, law courts and affairs of government. It can also happen when a language that has no official status is made a priority in the education system, as the first or obligatory foreign language to be studied or used as a vehicle of education for large numbers of students.

But why does one particular language achieve this status? As Crystal goes on to explain (2003, 9), ‘A language does not become a global language because of its intrinsic structural properties, or because of the size of its vocabulary, or because it has been a vehicle of a great literature in the past, or because it was once associated with a great culture or religion.’ Actually, English is not intrinsically easy to learn: its phonetic system is rather complex, its verbal system follows intricate rules, and its spelling is highly irregular, so if English were competing for global status on grounds of simplicity, it would probably lose out. The reason why English is important today has nothing to do with this. In fact, if we want to understand the dominance of English, we have to look to the way that power is shared out in the world. A language achieves global status primarily through the power of its speakers – but there are different kinds of power. Cultural, political, military, technological and economic factors are all important in the race to making a language powerful, and in all of these areas, English has gradually overtaken its closest competitors.

But if this is making speakers of other languages feel somehow worried, this was not our intention. Because when a language ‘goes global’, in some way it also frees itself from its former identity and associations as the language of the dominant power. As Crystal also points out (2003, 11), there is a sense in which ...