Higher Education Teachers' Attitudes towards English Medium Instruction: A Three-Country Comparison.

By Julie Dearden, E. Macaro. 2016

226 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report on a small scale study carried out in Austria, Italy and Poland which investigated the attitudes of university teachers engaged in teaching their academic subject through the medium of English. The data consisted of 25 teacher interviews. We focused on the topics of internationalisation of universities, on policy and resourcing, and on the levels of English proficiency (theirs and those of their students) needed for effective English medium instruction (EMI). We also observed whether there were differences among the respondents from the three countries and attempted to relate any differences to the linguistic, educational and political context of each. Our findings suggest that whilst very similar concerns are in the minds of the teachers regardless of the country they were teaching in, some interesting variability in attitudes, relating to language and to history, could be detected. To our knowledge, this is the first study on EMI that compares teacher attitudes in three countries, hence its exploratory nature. Our findings would suggest that further research of such comparative kind might provide insights into how the phenomenon of EMI is being introduced and accepted across the world.

Subfields: Language and Linguistics, Literature and Literary Theory

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/43f696ece2d937c57b52a043a1a715f2c98585ac

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Language and Linguistics

1. Jack K. H. Pun
2. E. Macaro
3. Carol Griffiths
4. Julie Dearden
5. Mustafa Akıncıoğlu
6. Adem Soruç
7. Samantha Curle
8. Y. Lo

In Literature and Literary Theory

1. Jack K. H. Pun
2. Samantha Curle
3. E. Macaro
4. Carol Griffiths
5. Julie Dearden
6. Mustafa Akıncıoğlu
7. Jiangshan An
8. Adem Soruç

Citations in the corpus

• Exploring the role of language in English medium instruction (2020, background): “We should of course keep in mind that some EMI teachers might not consider themselves responsible for teaching language at any level (Dearden and Macaro 2016).”
• Turkish university students’ perceptions about English Medium Instruction: exploring year group, gender and university type as variables (2018, background): “The questionnaire was developed as a result of interviews carried out in Europe (see Dearden and Macaro 2016) and took into account survey items asked in some of the research papers described above.”
• English as a medium of instruction: students’ strategies (2018, background): “According to Dearden and Macaro (2016), two of the most salient reasons relate to the desire for internationalization and establishing a global profile, and the desire to attract international students and the revenue that they bring with them.”
• A systematic review of English medium instruction in higher education (2017, background): “For example, Turkish lecturers in Physics considered the language needed to put across the subject to be quite minimal (Macaro et al. 2016), and Dearden & Macaro (2016) cite one lecturer believing that in mathematics one is ‘saved by the formulae’ meaning that little or no language is needed beyond…”