Using English as a medium of instruction at university level in Denmark: the lecturer's perspective

Abstract

More than 25% of the master's degrees in Denmark are taught using English as a medium of instruction (EMI), but not all university lecturers feel they have the appropriate academic English proficiency to meet the standard required. Based on interviews conducted at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS), this article sheds light on the challenges faced by a selection of these lecturers. The interviews formed part of the project Students' Perceptions of the English of Academics, which examines the use of EMI at CBS. Audio recordings were made of 33 lecturers. Questionnaires were distributed to almost 1800 students on a range of issues, including the lecturer's English proficiency. The lecturers themselves also completed a questionnaire. Subsequently, 17 of them were interviewed, five of whom belonged to the group with the weakest skills. Inspired by a categorisation used by Marschan-Piekkari, Welch, and Welch for their recommendations for managing English as a corporate language, the literature review in the present paper discusses university language management under the headings of staff selection, training and development, international assignments and performance appraisal. The insights gained from the interviews address issues such as attitudes to EMI policy, experience with EMI teaching, student evaluations and support.

Keywords:

• higher education in Denmark
• English-medium instruction (EMI) from the lecturer's perspective
• university language management
• interview data

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the four anonymous referees for their constructive comments and helpful suggestions.

Notes

1. EMI is also often referred to as ‘Teaching through English’ or ‘English-taught programmes’. All terms are distinguished from ‘Content and Language Integrated Learning’ in not having language learning as a goal in itself (Ljosland 2010, 99).

2. For a discussion of how internationalisation of higher education is privileging English and threatening the role and status of other languages, see Kirkpatrick (2011).

3. These countries have much larger populations, and consequently more L1 speakers, they are geographically further from Britain, and their languages belong to the Romance languages. Thus it is only natural that there has been less interest in the English language and that it is a greater challenge to master the language. Furthermore, the economies of Spain, Portugal and Italy continue to falter. There is therefore less money to spend on the training of teaching staff. In the case of countries such as Italy, ‘measures to improve competence in English such as ETPs are as much economic as educational, since ETPs are open to both foreign and local students, and fee-paying foreign students raise additional resources’ (Costa and Coleman 2013, 4). A final matter is that some countries (both in northern and southern Europe) are bilingual or multilingual (e.g. Belgium, Spain, Finland, Switzerland), which adds the complication of introducing yet another language and raises issues of language loyalty. Research has been conducted in Spain, in particular, where Spanish and Basque/Catalan compete with each other (see, for instance, Cots 2013; Fortanet-Gómez 2012 for Catalan/Spanish, and Doiz, Lasagabaster, and Sierra 2012 for Basque/Spanish).

4. This is perhaps a bit of an overstatement. At the time the CBS language policy was formulated, the only information available was based on impressions gained from student evaluations.

5. We followed the CBS ethical guidelines on the recording of lectures.