Abstract
In 2014, Japan’s Ministry of Education (MEXT) announced the Top Global University Project (TGUP), a large-investment initiative to internationalise higher education that implicitly signalled increased emphasis on English-medium instruction (EMI) at Japanese universities. Despite substantial funding behind the initiative, little research has evaluated the implications for language planning, including contextualised implementation challenges. This study aims to investigate how the policy is being enacted into practice at a university in Japan at two different policy levels: the meso (institutional) and micro (classroom) level. The study contrasts one university’s TGUP meso-level policy documentation with data from semi-structured interviews with students and teachers to illuminate micro-level challenges. Data were coded according to emergent themes via qualitative text analysis, following similar processes to research into TGUP policy. The findings suggest that the meso-level policy goals of the university do not trickle down to micro-level practice as envisioned, revealing underlying challenges arising from policy diffusion. In comparing our results with data from other TGUP university studies, we conclude that micro-level linguistic challenges for teachers and students has relevance for other universities where English-taught programmes are being expanded via national and university-level policies.
Highlights
One of the most prominent higher-education (HE) trends in the twenty-first century has been the drastic expansion of English-taught programmes in countries where English is not the Higher Education (2019) 77:1125–1142 native language (Wächter and Maiworm 2014)
As our research questions centred on the language planning implications surrounding this growth in English-medium instruction (EMI), we present our coded data under four broad language-related themes: 1. Issues surrounding the language used as the medium of instruction 2
Whilst the university aims to increase the number of English-medium courses, it does not articulate what constitutes EMI in their policy document; faculty members have their own criteria to determine the amount of Japanese used in their EMI classes
Summary
One of the most prominent higher-education (HE) trends in the twenty-first century has been the drastic expansion of English-taught programmes in countries where English is not the Higher Education (2019) 77:1125–1142 native language (Wächter and Maiworm 2014) This trend is a consequence of the increasing globalisation of HE (Healey 2008) coupled with the emergent status of English as the world’s academic lingua franca (Galloway and Rose 2015). This study, aims to fill this gap by exploring how the TGUP is interpreted and implemented by one participant university, analysing its language-related strategic plans in detail. It evaluates how its students and teachers have responded to the push for EMI, under the most recent policy. By understanding how this initiative is being comprehended by different parties at the different levels of policy implementation, it examines extant gaps between EMI policy and practice
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