Abstract
Abstract The growth of English medium instruction (EMI) in higher education in China over the past two decades has been promoted via implicit and explicit policies that aim to incentivise activities associated with the creation of English-taught courses and programs. This study investigates the components of such incentivisation schemes. It also explores how incentivisation policies are being implemented by policy arbiters, EMI programme directors, and EMI teachers. Data were collected from two sources: 93 institutional policy documents on EMI provision collected from 63 Chinese universities, and 26 interviews with senior university staff at a selection of eight Chinese universities. Results revealed that incentivisation policies focused on increased workload weighting for EMI courses, greater access to career development opportunities for teachers, increased monetary rewards, and dedicated financial support for creating and delivering courses. A comparison of policy and practice revealed areas of policy misfires and misalignments. EMI teachers considered the workload incentives insufficient and were not primarily motivated by financial rewards, but rather chose to teach in English for professional, academic, and personal intrinsic rewards; many viewed EMI at the core of their teacher-researcher academic identities. The paper concludes with recommendations to better align incentivisation policies with the driving forces attached to EMI in China.
Highlights
1.1 English medium instruction (EMI) as an internationalisation agendaThe Chinese higher education sector has undergone extensive internationalisation in the past decades, which has laid the foundation for the rapid growth of English taught courses (Zhang 2018)
This study investigates the incentivisation of EMI teaching at Chinese universities, by drawing on the analysis of two datasets: 93 institutional policy documents on EMI provision collected from 63 Chinese universities, and 26 interviews with university staff and faculty at eight Chinese universities
The 93 university-level EMI policy documents from 63 universities were collected in July 2019, via searching in the official websites of each double first-class university (DFCU) and double first-class discipline university (DFCD) using two search engines, Google and Baidu
Summary
The Chinese higher education sector has undergone extensive internationalisation in the past decades, which has laid the foundation for the rapid growth of English taught courses (Zhang 2018). Inherent aspects of the internationalisation reform agenda are efforts to improve mobility, to broaden experiences, to standardise qualifications, as well as to increase English medium instruction (EMI) Such standardisation assumes a distinctly Western conceptualisation of the internationalisation of higher education that conflicts with Chinese conceptualisations (Liu 2020; Lo and Pan 2020; Mok 2007). The focus of the study by Hu et al (2014) was not primarily on incentives, so little more than these general impressions and effects of these policies are understood This gap in knowledge necessitates a closer inspection on how EMI teaching is currently incentivised by Chinese universities, and what stakeholder responses are to different types of incentivisation
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