本文是英语论文，The challenges international students face regarding teaching approach at English medium degree programs in China were investigated in this thesis. It is obvious that certain measures are required to be taken for the successful implementation of EMI. Institutions should have clear regulations concerning establish the necessary English proficiency level for both teaching staff and students. Teachers should monitor learning progress and achievements of students and based on that, make changes and adjustments concerning teaching approach to make content acquisition more effective. The challenges reported by international students involved a number of crucial issues related to teaching styles and methods. Certain majors and institutions showed a distinct shortage of between teachers international students. Effective teacher-student communication is an important aspect of any teaching approach, especially when the content is delivered in a language other than the mother tongue. Unclear instructions and lack of examples were repeatedly reported. Explanation given about new topic would often be described .Sometimes the difficulty was caused by rushed deadlines and the need to grasp a lot of content in a short period of time. In contrast, there were as ignificant number of participants reporting lack or absolute absence of homework and assignments stating that they were not challenged or pressured enough. Discipline in class should also be taking into account as a factor that may influence teaching approach, considering that the majority of responses indicated the presence of problems in this area. Personal attitude towards international students was generally described as good with occasional mentioning of indifference.Also, one of the most frequent suggestions was to make lessons more interactive and interesting.
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Chapter One Introduction
The first question narrowed down challenges to only those concerned with teaching approach due to the results showed in the pilot study, as looking for challenges without any specification turned out to be too broad for the scope of the current research. In addition, it is reasonable to not only identify the existing challenges but also find the reasons and possible solutions for them. This thesis consists of five chapters: Introduction, Theoretical Foundation and Literature Review, Methodology and Data, Results and Discussion, Conclusion. The first chapter introduces the background, object and focus of the present study, discusses the significance of this research and describes the structure of the thesis.The second chapter is divided into two sections: Content-based Instruction and The State of the Art i. The former serves as a theoretical foundation of the research, where the author summarizes known methods and approaches to teaching in a foreign additional language, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI)) and clarifies any misconceptions.The latter reviews notable and relevant previous studies concerning EMI, classifies them and identifies their limitations.The third chapter presents the methodology and data of the research, where the author talks about study, formulates research questions, gives details about research sites and participants, describes chosen data collection instruments (questionnaire and interview) and procedures. Chapter Four shows the analysis of data, results retrieved from the analysis, provides answers to the posed research questions and discusses the obtained findings. The last chapter draws conclusion on the major findings of the present study, notes the limitations of this work
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Chapter Two Theoretical Foundation and Literature Review
2.1 Content-based Instruction (CBI)
The implementation of English as a medium of instruction in non-anglophone countries should be based on the instructional approaches to teaching content in a foreign/additional language. In the current subchapter the researcher looks into thenstructional approach called Content-based Instruction (CBI) in order to establish theoretical foundation of the present study. First and foremost, it is necessary to provide a clear definition or an explanation of the instructional approach being described. CBI is defined as an umbrella term that covers“instructional approaches that make a dual, though not necessarily equal, commitment to language- and content-learning objectives(Stoller & Fitzsimmons-Doolan, 2017: 71). In CBI, content refers to non-language subject matter that is closely related to conventional subjects and courses at school or themes of interest to students. CBI has strong academic orientations, focusing on the subject matter that students need to acquire, in addition with the linguistic and cognitive skills. Content-based classes can be taught by content specialists, language specialists, or a combination of both. Most content-based instructional approaches share the common conception that content and language have a symbiotic relationship, in other words, learning of content contributes to language acquisition and language acquisition gives learners easier access to content (Lightbown, 2014; Snow 2014 as cited in Stoller & Fitzsimmons-Doolan, 2017). EMI has been defined as “The use of the English language to teach academic subjects in countries or jurisdictions wherethe first language (L1) of the majority of the population is not English”(Dearden, 2014: 2).This definition shows one of the very distinctive features of EMI– its use only in non-anglophone countries–that sets it apart from other forms of language instruction and shows that EMI truly is a global phenomenon.
2.2 The State of the Art in EMI
Research As a phenomenon worth researching EMI appeared to be only in the beginning of this century. Ammon and Mc Connell (2002) and Maiworm and Wächter (2002) published two comprehensive surveys on the spread of English in higher education, which laid the foundation of this research trend in the field of applied linguistics (as cited in Gundermann, 2014). The existing academic literature regarding EMI research and can be categorized it into four groups: (1) works that simply describe the EMI phenomenon, (2) works that complain about EMI’s spread (related to ideology and politics), (3) works that prove EMI’s effectiveness, and (4) works that provide practical solutions for the challenges posed by EMI (Gundermann, 2014). However, based on the personal investigation of the literature concerning EMI, the author of this study classified the existing EMI research in the following way: (1) works that focus on language proficiency, (2) works that focus on language policies, (3) works that investigate the effectiveness of EMI, (4) works that investigate the challenges of EMI through stakeholders’attitudes and perspectives, and (5) works that provide a general analysis of EMI situation. The following subchapters review the EMI-related literature according to these categories and discuss the limitations of the previous studies.
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Chapter Three Methodology and Data ..... 32
3.1 Research Questions ............ 32
3.2 Instruments ........................ 32
3.3 Research Sites and Participants ........................ 33
3.4 Pilot Study .......................... 33
3.5 Data Collection ................... 42
Chapter Four Results and Discussion ....... 45
4.1 Data Analysis and Results ... 45
4.2 Challenges International Students Face in EMI . 57
4.3 Causes of Challenges in Relation to CBI............. 61
Chapter Five Conclusion ........................... 63
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Chapter Four Results and Discussion
4.1 Data Analysis and Results
Coding was used as a method to analyze the responses to open-ended questions in questionnaires and the data retrieved from interviews. The process of coding implies that certain words and phrases are assigned a code, or grouped into categories in order to see the pattern among the answers (vivo coding). The closed-ended answers from questionnaires were also categorized according to already provided choices. All responses from questionnaires and interviews transferred to Excel file were color-coded for the sake of demonstrativeness that made the analysis and interpretation of the results easier. In the following subchapters the researchdescribes the patterns and categories emerged from the data analysis. Among the questionnaires found eligible (87) there were a certain number of those filled in comprehensibly or incompletely. In addition, it is worth mentioning that more than one code can be assigned for one response. Therefore, the total number of times all codes appeared in all responses to one question does not equal to the total number of all responses to that question or the number of respondents answered that question but only represents the code frequency. The first question dealt with English proficiency of the respondents. It was a multiple-choice question with three possible answers: “I am a native English speaker”, “I am not a native English speaker”and “I am not a native English speaker but I successfully passed English proficiency exams”. Therefore, the answers were grouped into the following categories: NES or native English speaker (27), NNES or non-native English speaker (29), and NNES with proof of English competence (29). Two respondents did not provide information about their English proficiency. As can be seen from Figure 4.1, each category roughly accounted for a third of all the respondents. The instructions for assignments and tasks were always clear (Question #6) and the participants expressed a wish to see challenging learning material (Question #7). In response to Question #8 about difficult tasks one interviewee stated: “none, because we don’t get enough tasks, and there is notmuch pressure on us”, whereas another interviewee replied that had problems with computerdata base and statistics (“any task due to difficult personally”code). When it came to question about discipline (Question #9), respondent from HEI #4 mentioned students being regularly late (“late to class”code) and respondent from HEI #5 said that students were very disciplined (“good”code). Both interviewees were satisfied with teachers’attitude toward international students (Question #10), e.g., “very polite and they’re willing to help when they can”. Learning environment (Question #11) was characterized as “exiting”(“good”code) and “has good potential to become top class”(“good”code). The answers to the last question showed the difference between the same majors at two institutions. When asked about what kind of changes should be made to the teaching approach and the way teachers conduct their lessons (Question #12), one interviewee stated that everything should stay the way it is: “I think they're doing just fine”, whereas another interviewee gave a detailed response:“[teachers] should give us a little bit more homework and discuss it to make sure we understand. Also have more tests to see if we understand. It is also important that the English they use isunderstandable and clear”(“more tasks and exercises”, “English-related issue”and“make sure students understand”codes). #p#分页标题#e#
4.2 Challenges International Students Face in EMI
Referring to the theoretical part of this research, EMI can be described as a global phenomenon where English is used in non-native contexts to teach academic courses (Doiz et al., 2013 as cited in Kırkgöz & Dikilitaş, 2018). It is an instructional setting in which English is used as a lingua franca among multilingual speakers for whom it is the only language shared by all parties. EMI is a setting where English is used as means of communication between teacher and students . Bearing the above-mentioned definitions in mind, the implementation of EMI meets certain challenges, such as establishing required threshold level of English language proficiency for both students and teachers in order to guarantee the successful realization of EMI. One very important aspect worth paying attention to, which, unfortunately, is often overlooked–exclusive and partial use of English in EMI. Usually, EMI refers to programs where English is the only language used for teaching. However, the term EMI can also be used to talk about programs that are only partially instructed in English, which makes them, in fact, bilingual, because tuition is carried out both in English and the local language. The analysis of the data gathered from international students in this research showed that those respondents who studied in classroom with local students would often find themselves lost and “disoriented”because of the excessive amount of Chinese language used during lessons. This had a negative effect on the evaluation of teaching quality, teacher-student communication, clarity of instructions and assignments’difficulty level.
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Chapter Five Conclusion
Despite having prominent merits and filling the identified research gap (interinstitutional investigation of EMI in Chinese educational context in relation to international students), the present work has its limitations. First of all, the number of participants should have been larger. This would have reinforced the validity of findings and emerged trends. Another limitation can be attributed to the manual analysis of the data and thus, any human error occurring without researcher’s realization. The following are main difficulties encountered during collection and analysis of the data: Personal attitude of students–a lot of returned questionnaires had short replies; some questions were left blank. Subjectivity–what was evaluated as“good”by one respondent could be“ok”for another. Credibility (truthfulness) of answers–there was some discrepancy between the answers provided by the same people. The pace of the data gathering process–the majority of questionnaires had to be distributed manually, which slowed the data collection down as well as limited the research to certain HEIs due to transportation issues. The researcher recommends to conduct a further investigation with a larger number of participants to see a broader picture. In addition, it would be useful to approach the challenges of English-instructed programs for international students taking into consideration not only students’opinions but consulting their teachers to get a better understanding of a situation. Also, other research instruments can be of a great help–observation method would provide an insight into the actual state of EMI and allow the researchers to see challenges on their own.
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