MEMIS: A Mobile-Supported English-Medium Instruction System

Abstract

Education is one of the most important elements in our lives, as it provides a direct gain in knowledge. Thus, in order to provide better academic achievement, more and more instructors are adapting collaborative learning to their classes. However, two major problems lurk behind collaborative learning. First, it is difficult to apply collaborative learning because students tend to engage passively with traditional lectures. As a result, interactive technologies such as clickers have been applied to increase interactive learning and raise the rate of interaction. Nevertheless, these interactive technologies still have some limitations, such as limited mobility, high costs, setup issues, technical difficulties, and little support of higher-order thinking skills. Second, recently there has been an increasing number of EMI (English as Medium of Instruction) courses added to university course offerings in countries where English is not the first language. The goal of these courses is to support university internationalization and address the global status of English. However, it is even harder to achieve in-class interaction in large EMI lecture courses. In addition, some studies argue that EMI courses might affect the overall learning of course content because of students’ poor lecture comprehension and passive engagement in class.In order to address the limitations of interactive technologies, encourage more collaborative learning, facilitate greater in-class interaction in large lecture courses, and resolve students’ poor lecture comprehension in EMI courses, the author introduces MEMIS (Mobile-Supported English-Medium Instruction System), which includes both a T&S (Teachers & Students) mobile app and an EMI pedagogical method. The author first provides detailed implementation and all the features of the T&S mobile app, which improves students’ perceptions of classroom participation and in-class interaction. Then the author explains how she develops her EMI pedagogy such that it utilizes the features of the T&S mobile app to: 1) increase students’ overall learning in her EMI course, 2) develop students’ construction of knowledge and higher-order thinking, and 3) achieve all six cognitive processes from Bloom’s revised taxonomy. The author adapts a quasi-experimental design, statistically analyzes the effectiveness of both exam scores and final grades between a control group and an experimental group, and then asks students to evaluate their experiences and provide feedback about MEMIS. Based on both statistical results and students’ overall feedback, the author confirms that MEMIS is an effective approach that improves lecture comprehension, encourages more class engagement, promotes collaborative learning, and achieves better learning outcomes.