English and more: a multisite study of roles and conceptualisations of language in English medium multilingual universities from Europe to Asia

ABSTRACT

The rapid increase in English medium instruction (EMI) in higher education has resulted in the need for a greater evidence base documenting EMI in practice spanning a range of settings. Studies of EMI focusing on linguistic issues are beginning to emerge but there are few comparative studies looking at multiple sites, levels and stakeholders. In response to this, the study reported here examined the roles of and conceptualisations of English and other languages in three EMI programmes in Thailand, Austria and the UK. A mixed-methods approach was adopted making use of a student questionnaire (N = 121) and interviews (N = 12) with lecturers and students, supported by documentary analysis and observations. Quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed diverse roles of English and other languages, various levels of recognition of multilingualism, and a sophisticated range of conceptualisations of language by stakeholders. In particular, English as discipline-specific language use emerged as a key concept, straddling language and content learning and teaching, as well as problematising simplistic divides between language and content. Furthermore, the complex understanding of the diverse roles of languages by participants offers a counter to perspectives of English in EMI as an unambiguous, monolithic entity.

KEYWORDS:

• English medium instruction
• internationalisation
• higher education
• multilingualism
• language beliefs
• English as an academic lingua franca

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Naowarat Patipatpakdee and Sompratana Ratanakul for their assistance in data collection and translation at the Thai site and Miya Komori-Glatz for her help at the Austrian site. We would also like to thank Ute Smit for her insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Typically, the labels EMI and ICLHE/CLIL are used to distinguish diverse levels of language focus. In this paper, we shall employ the term EMI, as overtly the programmes addressed did not include a specific language focus, while acknowledging that in practice the boundaries are fuzzy and hence the terminology less than exact.

2. Further information on the questionnaire is available on request from http://dx.doi.org/10.5258/SOTON/390811.

3. See note 2.

4. All speakers are referred to by an ID, for example, R = Researcher, TL1 = Thai lecturer 1, ATS2 = Austrian student 2.

5. We recognise that standard English and native English are not synonymous but while the research initially distinguished between the two, it quickly became clear that for the participants the two were conflated and so they are presented as such here.

6. See note 2.

7. See note 5.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Annual Adventures in Research Grant, 2014-2015, University of Southampton.