English-medium instruction (EMI) teaching strategies for Korean engineering students

Abstract

This talk will first discuss the current states of English-medium instruction (EMI) in Asian universities and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in Europe, especially Dutch universities. Then it will talk about the Korean government’s EMI policy and the states of EMI in Korean engineering schools, most aggressive providers of EMI among Korean universities. After that, it will discuss Korean engineering students’ and professors’ beliefs about EMI and code-switching and other effective classroom strategies to be used in EMI classes. The results of a survey study where undergraduate students and professors from three Korean engineering schools participated will be reported. Despite their lower levels of satisfaction over EMI classes than Korean-medium instruction classes, most of the students participated in the survey agreed that EMI should continue to be provided but with more freedom of choice for them and professors instead of mandatory EMI policies. Moreover, the majority of the student respondents recognized code-switching as an important learning strategy in EMI, while this talk will also report other effective teaching strategies in EMI settings from professors’ point of view. These findings require modifications of school administration’s English-only instruction in EMI classes. The main theoretical orientation of this study comes from Wong Fillmore (1986), Cook (1996), and Merritt (1992), who claimed that code-switching is natural behavior in bilingual contexts, and Cook and Merritt argued for the development of code switching as a legitimate language learning strategy.