Abstract
Chinese universities have been strongly supported by government to promote English-Medium Instruction (EMI) in the past two decades. While EMI is not simply translating lecture contents into English, the teaching methods should be adjusted accordingly. This study aims at seeking effective EMI teaching methods for engineering courses, taking the case of Computer Networking course in Shanghai Maritime University. Several computer-aided teaching methods have been practised, including interactive teaching with Rain Classroom, class demonstration with Wireshark and Packet Tracer, video review, online teaching resources, and hands-on projects. Based on our teaching experience, a 3-step interactive teaching routine was set up and practiced. The comparing result of three consecutive years’ final exam scores and labs scores show an overall improvement of the students’ learning outcomes. An online questionnaire was designed to investigate the students’ opinions on teaching contents and methods. The collected survey results and feedbacks show that most of the students approve of our EMI teaching methods. But there are up to 27.5% students who still consider EMI academic course is difficult. The cross comparative result of the online students’ survey reveals that the students’ previous EMI experience greatly affects their perceived level of difficulty. It should be very helpful to offer an introductory EMI course or an ESP (English for Special Purpose) course for the engineering freshmen to prepare them for the follow-up EMI academic courses.
Highlights
Since the late 1990s, Chinese universities have been growing rapidly in order to cultivate more high-level personnel
In order to motivate the undergraduates’ learning desires and improve their learning outcomes in Computer Networking course, this paper presents a blended teaching method which includes adopting an interactive teaching tool (Rain Classroom), designing class demonstrations with Wireshark and Packet Tracer, and providing on-line teaching resources and hands-on projects
This paper aims at seeking effective English-Medium Instruction (EMI) teaching methods for Computer Networking course
Summary
Since the late 1990s, Chinese universities have been growing rapidly in order to cultivate more high-level personnel. Chinese government has introduced a series of policies to balance between the expansion of enrolment and the quality of education [1]. EMI has been continuously promoted as an approach to internationalize the high education and enhance the universities’ academic ranking in China. With the discipline of science and engineering education, EMI is definitely not translating the contents into English, the teaching methods should be adjusted . An educational methodology may result superior consequences in teaching a specific course, whereas it fails in that of the other course [3]. It is important for the EMI teachers to find suitable teaching methods for their own courses and students
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