A Book Review Of “Internationalizing Learning in Higher Education: The Challenges of English as A Medium of Instruction”
Jiayan Zhang, Independent Researcher, Shenzhen, China
The demand for talents capable of addressing international issues in different areas, including but not limited to business, science and technology, tourism, and global cultures, has contributed to the worldwide application of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) in higher education. It was confirmed by Macaro et al. (2018) that EMI has evidently grown in popularity within the higher education sector. Along with the spread of EMI across nations and regions, challenges have arisen. The book Internationalizing Learning in Higher Education: The Challenges of English as a Medium of Instruction, edited by María Luisa Carrió-Pastor, tends to help EMI instructors, administrative staff, and English as a second/foreign language teachers to learn more about specific challenges brought by EMI in the tertiary level and possible ways to solve these challenges. This book collects nine chapters organized into three parts, namely, Policy into Practice, Training Issue, and Specific Aspects of English as a Medium of Instruction.
This book addresses challenges that English Medium Instruction (EMI) programs may encounter. These challenges are mainly regarding: (1) Achieving coherence in language policy, (2) Ensuring student participation and academic outcomes, (3) Recruiting professors whose language proficiency and pragmatic competence meet program requirements, (4) Providing effective in-service support for lecturers, and (5) Facilitating cooperation between teaching faculty and administrative staff. The first part consists of two chapters, mainly discussing the importance of EMI professors’ English language proficiency and its great impact on the effectiveness of EMI programs and students’ content learning. Based on the detailed explanation in the previous chapters, Part Two Training Issue focuses on EMI instructors’ needs for professional training and the supportive role of training from linguistic, cultural, and pedagogical perspectives. After that, this book presents specific applications of EMI in higher education by showing pragmatic strategies in oral presentations, an analysis of teaching faculty and students’ evaluation of EMI programs in the Turkish context, a case study of analyzing the disadvantages and challenges of EMI in a Spanish university, and scientific research on auditory stimulation to emphasize the importance of improving teachers’ listening skills.
As a global language professor in a Sino-USA joint law program in China, I below discuss how this book sparked my thoughts and ideas about the possible ways to overcome the difficulties in the EMI program and improve the chances of an EMI program’s success, primarily focusing on feasible tactics for EMI instructors and prospective partnership among EMI staff.
Pragmatic Strategies for EMI Instructors
This book holistically discusses multi-faceted problems related to EMI instruction and provides thought-provoking ideas and feasible practices for EMI lecturers. In Chapter 2, Elena Orduna Nocito and Gretchen Obernyer emphasized the importance of professor candidates’ language proficiency in EMI programs in terms of both oral and written language and pointed out that instructors’ language competence in writing should be measured in the recruiting process. However, these professors who are qualified for their positions would be likely to have difficulties in teaching, which is particularly true with professors who neither know students’ native languages well, nor are competent to use English proficiently for instruction. As a response, Javier Munoz de Prat, in Chapter 9, showcased four ways to address the aforementioned teaching challenges by presenting how he improved his students’ comprehension of the International Commerce course. He introduced key vocabulary and definitions to his students to develop their understanding of key concepts, created slides as a written base, provided an easily accessible source of information and learning materials, created a cooperative learning environment where students with different skills and capabilities could make contributions, and used foreign lectures to extend students’ knowledge.
In fact, Munoz de Prat’s strategies can be generalized for EMI professors in other fields. First, professors are encouraged to emphasize students’ development of language skills in a given field so that students will be able to communicate with people in the same profession. Hyland (2002) emphasized the importance of field-specific literacy skills for students to effectively communicate in their professional communities. To develop students’ academic language skills, I, with the help of my coordinator, carefully created basic academic English word lists for my students to accumulate necessary words and/or phrases for communications with people in academia. Second, learning materials can be adapted for all students based on their language proficiency. English academic articles could be overly challenging for foreign language learners, especially those who have never been exposed to any academic articles. Learning materials should be challenging, from which students can learn and make some improvements; however, the language should be accessible to students. Therefore, I provided my students with simplified and/or modified materials, hoping these documents would probably be a good choice for their comprehension of key concepts and contents in academic English writing. Third, group work can be assigned to students, allowing them to work together and learn from each other. Group work encouraged students to collaborate to improve their overall learning experience (Macaro, 2018). In my experience, learning is not solely driven by teachers but also by peer interaction. Teacher-student learning is an efficient way to support student learning, but my students were also motivated to interact with their peers. I found that student-student interaction could be even more effective because the communication and cooperation among peers could influence their attitudes toward this course and the ways they learn. Fourth, additional learning materials and sources, including audio and video on some universities’ websites, could be carefully selected and introduced for students’ after-class self-study. According to my past learning experience and this teaching experience, the time for each course each week in a university or a college which is usually about four to six hours is inadequate for a course learning. Therefore, students in my class were provided with other resources, such as relevant TED Talks, and motivated to make good use of their time by reading supplementary articles.
Possible Cooperation Among Faculty
Chapter 6 emphasizes the importance of meeting the language needs for communication in English at work and highlights the need for cooperation between EMI instructors and the Administrative and Services Staff (ASS). Julia Zabala Delgado, in her study on language training for ASS at the Universitat Politècnica de València, conducted interviews with ASS to identify the challenges ASS faced in using English at work. The ASS participants reported difficulties in demonstrating their proficiency due to a lack of specific vocabulary when providing support for the EMI program; some expressed concerns about the inadequacy of their oral English and cross-cultural communication skills for communication. This chapter suggests that effective communication between EMI professors and ASS could significantly enhance the success of an EMI program. Otherwise, an EMI program will either be unsuccessful or cause unwanted terrible consequences.
The possible cooperation between EMI instructors and administrative staff further inspired me to think about more possibilities for teaching faculty to achieve the success of EMI instruction. In short, the collaboration among EMI content instructors, as well as that between EMI content instructors and EMI language professors, if there is a language program, will be more likely to improve an EMI program. Based on my observation of the EMI law program where I worked, there are two possible ways to achieve collaboration between EMI instructors. In this program, law professors who taught the same course usually worked independently. However, if they could work as a team on specifying learning expectations, corresponding curriculum design, and major projects’ schemes, law professors would create a context in which they could learn from each other’s opinions and ideas about teaching. This environment will probably be beneficial for them in producing a well-developed, appropriate course for students. Additionally, regular team meetings among EMI teachers could be significant for problem-solving and decision-making. The likelihood of encountering problems in an EMI program is not low, such as problems concerning different cultures and preferred teaching practices; the cooperation could thus make it more possible for professors to decipher practical and pragmatic ways to cope with these delicate problems if they work collectively.
Furthermore, it is worth considering the cooperation between EMI instructors and language professors. In the Spring Semester, language professors in my program were unexpectedly required to integrate legal writing into the general academic English writing course. Frankly, it was not easy for language professors with little legal knowledge to complete the integration. However, in collaboration with our law colleagues, we developed high-frequency legal word lists based on different legal topics to help students accumulate the necessary professional vocabulary; academic articles related to the same topic were then carefully selected and assigned as a reading task to help students learn the usage of those words. Furthermore, the law professors assisted us in identifying major legal writing genres and their related features. Not surprisingly, their knowledge was helpful for language professors in designing learning activities for our law students to compare general academic writing and legal writing, which better prepared them for the forthcoming legal study. Even though it might be too early to tell how effective the combination of academic English writing and legal writing could be, this combination provides an opportunity for language faculty to consider possibly viable alternatives to the success of an EMI program.
In conclusion, it is true that this book does not discuss all the related topics in the field of EMI, but it is well-edited and well-designed to expose its readers to the needed language training for EMI professors, the existing challenges in EMI, and possible strategies for EMI implementation. In addition, it is thought-provoking and inspiring for its audience to further explore more possibilities in EMI. Whether you are looking for a basic understanding of EMI or seeking to explore approaches to address its challenges, this book will be impressive and insightful to inspire meaningful reflection.
References
Carrió-Pastor, M. L. (Ed.). (2020). Internationalizing learning in higher education: The challenges of English as a medium of instruction. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21587-3
Hyland, K. (2002). Specificity revisited: how far should we go now? English for Specific Purposes, 21(4), 385–395. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0889-4906(01)00028-X
Macaro, E. (2018). English medium instruction: Content and language in policy and practice. Oxford University Press.
Macaro, E., Curle, S., Pun, J., An, J., & Dearden, J. (2017). A systematic review of English medium instruction in higher education. Language Teaching, 51(1), 36–76. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444817000350
Jiayan Zhang was a global professor of English in the IFW program at the University of Arizona microcampus at Ocean University of China in Qingdao, China. She holds an MA in TESL from the University of Delaware. She has over ten years of teaching experience and is skilled at providing multilingual scaffolding for her students.