English-Medium Instruction and Pronunciation

Exposure and Skills Development

Karin Richter

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788922470
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Phonetics & Phonology
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book offers new insights into the language gains of adult learners enrolled in an English-medium instruction (EMI) degree programme. It provides longitudinal empirical evidence of the phonological gains of the learners; discusses which individual factors contribute to the changes in the learners' pronunciation and investigates whether and to what extent increased exposure to the target language in EMI classrooms leads to incidental learning of second language pronunciation. Furthermore, it expands on the discussions surrounding the Critical Period Hypothesis, the native-speaker norm, foreign language accent and the role of English as a Lingua Franca. The comparative and longitudinal design of the research study fills a significant gap in the literature and the book offers considerable original and important research-informed insights into the fields of EMI, bilingual education and second language acquisition. As such, it is a valuable resource and must-read book for researchers, practitioners and policymakers in these areas.

1 Introduction

In the 21st century, the internationalisation of education and the wish to compete globally have triggered a dramatic increase in the number of English-medium instruction (EMI) programmes offered by universities all over the world. This current call for EMI is deeply rooted in the common belief that language learning takes place incidentally when content is delivered in a foreign language, which – in most cases – is English. And indeed, empirical research in the field of language learning and teaching at secondary school level seems to support the assumption that a second language (L2) is learned most effectively when it is used to convey content that is both interesting and relevant to the learner. However, to date, tertiary education has seen little empirical evidence that this is in fact the case. In particular, the field of pronunciation learning appears to be characterised by a dearth of scientific data to confirm or reject the view that EMI can have a positive effect on learners. As a consequence, many EMI students, teachers and programme designers alike wonder if and to what extent learners benefit from this approach. Can EMI keep its promises?

In exploring a very specific EMI context at an Austrian university of applied sciences (UAS), I seek to shed light on these highly pertinent questions by zooming in on the development of the pronunciation skills of a group of Austrian business students. As such, this book provides fresh insights into both the method as well as the language learning process in a very specific tertiary EMI classroom. Tracking and analysing the phonological development of 55 adult students over the entire duration of their bachelor (BA) studies, this research contributes to our understanding of pronunciation learning in a promising teaching approach that currently seems to be sweeping the world at remarkable speed. Thus, I hope that the findings presented in this book combine to create a single piece that fits into the much larger jigsaw puzzle of L2 acquisition.

A crucial point that needs to be addressed before I introduce the research background concerns considerations of anonymity. Of course, all the subjects involved in this study were promised anonymity and confidentiality. In order to avoid the cues that would reveal the participants’ identities, I have decided to discuss all the details that are relevant to the present project but to keep the study-external identifiers (such as the precise name of the UAS, the names of the participants and the exact time of data collection) as vague as possible. For this reason, the university is only referred to as the UAS or the UAS Vienna and I have used pseudonyms for those students whose individual variables are discussed in more detail (i.e. Anna and David). Instead of exact dates, reference to time is given by the respective semester. The data were collected in the second decade of the 21st century.

This chapter sets out to describe the background to the research and my own motivation for the study. Following this, the purpose of the study will be detailed and finally, the structure of the book will be outlined.

1.1 Research Background

The study presented in this book is based on a research project that developed out of my personal interest and involvement in two core areas of educational linguistics, namely the current spread of EMI at European universities and the development of L2 pronunciation skills in adult learners.

In the early years of the 21st century, the UAS Vienna where I was teaching English for specific purposes (ESP) courses at the time, pioneered a bilingual BA programme (German/English) as a novelty in the field of business education. This move was triggered not only by the demand of the management to pay tribute to a number of policies introduced by the European Union that aimed to promote multilingualism, but also by their wish to attract excellent local as well as international students. In those early days of EMI, institutional decision-makers hoped that the use of English to teach content courses would enhance both content and language competence, at the same time assuming that learners benefit from ‘two for the price of one’ (Bonnet, 2012: 66). This idea was further reinforced by the fact that the truly global society of the 21st century makes it more important than ever for business people working with colleagues, customers and partners across borders to understand each other and thus to form effective and productive working relationships. Business students today are expected to speak more than one language in order to occupy a favourable position in society and also in the labour market where the ‘war for talent’ (Michaels et al., 2001) is still said to be raging around the globe. In other words, the UAS Vienna identified a clear need for graduates who have the necessary skills to operate in culturally and linguistically diverse environments and to this end, content courses in English were introduced.

Given its status as a global language or lingua franca, it comes as little surprise that English is often the first choice when selecting an L2 to be learned and taught. As a result, more and more educational institutions, particularly in Europe, are now jumping on the bandwagon by promoting the learning of English to pay tribute to the changing demands of the labour market. This also ties in neatly with the fact that English is already the most dominant language of research in higher education (Ament & Perez-Vidal, 2015). Of course, caution has to be exercised as the concentration on one single language, i.e. English, may be counterproductive in that one language is monopolised, thereby severely restricting the use of others. As a consequence, some researchers already see English as the ‘killer language’ (Price, 1984: 170) fostering linguistic hegemony, whereas for others it is still the key that may open the door to the global marketplace.

Regardless of the perspective from which these undeniable changes are viewed, internationalisation has become a hard and fast reality. To keep up with this trend, schools and universities all over the world have introduced strategies for internationalising their programmes. In Europe, raising international awareness, teaching intercultural communication skills and increasing foreign language competence are often considered central educational concerns. A closer look at regional practices to achieve these goals brings forth a multifaceted and multilayered picture of how educational institutions cope with the changing demands of professional bodies and the labour market. This becomes evident in the plethora of measures and strategies employed, such as cross-border study programmes and research projects, the recruitment of international staff and students and the introduction of internationalised curricula (Knight, 2008: ix–xi). Recognising the need to respond swiftly and effectively to those global changes, the UAS Vienna took up this challenge and responded by offering one of three parallel classes of the Entrepreneurship BA programme as a bilingual degree programme with the intention of attracting both international students as well as international lecturers.

One of the major challenges with the UAS’ introduction of this programme was the task of hiring suitable teachers for their English-taught courses. As it turned out, first and foremost, native speakers (NSs) of English were recruited. In hindsight, this circumstance can only be seen as a mere coincidence rather than a strategic choice. As far as I know, there was never an official commitment from the institute head or the chief executive officer, neither oral nor in writing, stating that preference should be given to first language (L1) speakers of English. At a time when recruitment was not centralised in the form of an established human resources (HR) department, the programme designers relied heavily on existing or newly formed partnerships with other universities mainly located in the United States and Australia to recruit guest lecturers for their EMI courses. Slowly, a network of L1 teachers of English unfolded and gave the UAS the chance to set itself apart from other business degree programmes by offering a bilingual (German/English) programme that was, to a large extent, taught by NSs of English.

Having witnessed the various stages of this newly created programme since its very beginning and having the knowledge gained in the course of this research project about the various implications of the successful implementation of EMI, one can now only marvel at the courage it took the programme designers to implement an approach for which they did not even have a name let alone a conceptual framework. Initially, it was strongly believed that this transition would not entail any major changes to the curriculum. The only challenge appeared to be to find lecturers who could teach the subject matter – as described in detail in the German curriculum – in English. In fact, the international office of the UAS, which was installed around the same time and established partnerships with universities abroad, proved to be of great help in this respect. Although the programme has undergone a number of significant changes since then, it still enjoys a unique position in the Viennese educational landscape today with high numbers of applicants and overwhelmingly satisfied graduates confirming its popularity.

What particularly spurred my interest in this context, however, was how these L1 teachers’ accents impacted the students’ pronunciation skills. As I also taught pronunciation classes to future English teachers in an entirely different setting at the University of Vienna, I felt inclined to investigate the implications of implicit pronunciation learning in the bilingual programme. In particular, the questions I asked myself were: Do the students simply pick up the teacher’s accent without consciously engaging in the matter or is it irrelevant what accent (foreign or native) the teacher speaks as adult learners at this level have already passed the critical period for acquiring a native-like accent?

As English-medium teaching is still a fairly new field, it comes as little surprise that studies into the linguistic gains of tertiary EMI students are still scarce (cf. Macaro et al., 2018). Yet, it has to be noted that in the last few years, growing scholarly interest in the teaching of content courses in English can be observed a...