Comparing Teacher Priorities and Student Uptake in EMI Lectures: An Exploratory Study

Joseph Siegel

doi:10.3390/languages7010039

Abstract

English medium instruction (EMI) has been increasing in higher education with broad intentions of stimulating internationalization and cross-cultural learning experiences. This form of education presents opportunities and challenges for teachers and students alike. Key challenges involve various levels of second language (L2) speaking and listening abilities among teachers and students operating in EMI contexts. This exploratory study therefore examines the relationship between the main ideas two EMI lecturers in Sweden intended for their students to learn during lectures and the main ideas that EMI students report learning in the same lectures. Prior to six lectures, the teachers summarized to the researcher the main ideas to be included in the respective lecture. Immediately following the lecture, students provided their own summaries of the main ideas. A keyword analysis comparing the teachers’ intended messages and students’ reports shows that students may not be recognizing and acquiring the main ideas that the teacher intends. Further analysis distinguished two sub-groups of students: those with self-reported Swedish as a first language (L1) and those with self-reported L1s other than Swedish. A binomial proportion test showed that L1 impacted the amount of lecture main idea key words reported by the students in this study. The paper closes with a pedagogic perspective encouraging EMI lecturers to monitor student uptake on a regular basis and adjust their lecture delivery to support better learning and retention of content delivered via EMI.

Highlights

As institutions of higher education continue drives for globalization and internationalization, so too has English medium instruction (EMI) maintained a high rate of influence, development, and demand worldwide
The findings tentatively indicate that students in EMI lectures may take away only 25–50% of what the teacher considers main ideas and key words
This study set out to investigate a fundamental relationship between teaching and learning: that students leave a lecture with the same main ideas that the lecturer intends to deliver

Summary

Introduction

As institutions of higher education continue drives for globalization and internationalization, so too has English medium instruction (EMI) maintained a high rate of influence, development, and demand worldwide. Challenges facing students, and potential strategies adapted by both groups have been surveyed and reported Despite their appeal and popularity, the quality of EMI programs and the learning they might facilitate has often been overlooked (e.g., Aguilar 2017; He and Chiang 2016). The processing essentially begins at the “bottom”, with perceiving at the phoneme level before moving “upward” to parsing the speech stream into meaningful chunks, and so on (e.g., Lynch and Mendelsohn 2002). The latter, top-down processing, involves experiences, perceptions, and characteristics that each person brings to the listening event.

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