‘Surely they can't do as well’: a comparison of business students’ academic performance in English-medium and Spanish-as-first-language-medium programmes

Abstract

For years, universities worldwide have offered English-medium degrees as a way to attract international students and staff, enhance their institutional profile and promote multilingualism. In Europe and the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), English-medium instruction (EMI) is more recent, but the dimension and speed of its implementation has outpaced language policies, methodological considerations and empirical research. In view of this, this paper focuses on an empirical study examining the effect that the teaching of a Business Administration degree in English as a foreign language may have on Spanish students’ academic performance (as measured through coursework and final grades), when compared to their counterparts’ learning in Spanish. Students’ grades are analysed in three different disciplinary subjects and treated statistically. Findings show that both cohorts obtain similar results, suggesting that the language of instruction does not seem to compromise students’ learning of academic content. Differences, however, are found regarding learners’ performance in the three disciplinary subjects under scrutiny, with history yielding slightly higher results than accounting and finance. This finding runs counter to the general belief that the more verbal subjects, like history, would have a ‘limiting’ effect on EMI students’ final performance and, moreover, raises questions concerning disciplinary differences and assessment.

Keywords:

• English-medium instruction (EMI)
• student academic performance
• disciplinary discourse(s)
• higher education
• assessment

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the UCM participants, and especially Jesús García de Madariaga, former vice-dean of international relations for their collaboration. Our thanks also extend to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and to Ute Smit, Christiane Dalton-Puffer and Cristina del Campo for their insightful observations on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

¹The acronym EMI is used purposefully here as it describes this specific learning context whereby the focus is on content rather than on the integration of both content and language (or ICL). Section 2 will address this distinction again.

²In these ‘transmission-oriented approaches’ (Coyle 2008: 101-102), attention to foreign language issues gradually diminishes as students’ expected competence in the foreign language increases. Nevertheless, this assumption (although often followed in different higher education settings) is not necessarily true and should be treated with great caution.

³Although considerable differences may exist along the soft/applied – hard/applied continuum, for descriptive purposes, accounting and finance will be viewed together since they are both examples of applied disciplines and neither of them occupies extreme positions in the soft/applied scale.

⁴The CLUE project investigates the impact that internationalisation and EMI programmes have on higher education in the Madrid/Spanish context. Using a multidimensional research design, it has gathered as data: semi-structured teacher and student interviews and questionnaires, surveys on lectures and reading comprehension and classroom video-recorded observations of lectures and seminars. Since 2010 the original team has worked in collaboration with the SAER project (Statistics and Accounting Education Research), based at the School of Economics and Business at the UCM, to provide a more interdisciplinary approach to the issue of university internationalisation and multilingualism.

⁵For an interesting account of the debate on language and identity in English-medium universities, from an ethnic minority student perspective, see Language and Education No. 24, No.1 2009, special issue entitled ‘Imagining higher education as a multilingual space’.