Design and implementation of English-medium courses in higher

Abstract

Although content-area courses adopting English-medium (EM) instruction have become more widespread in university-level settings in response to the internationalization of higher education (de Wit, 2002), many operate on the unspoken and inaccurate assumptions that all the students and teachers are capable of learning or teaching content in English (Erling & Hilgendorf, 2006a, 2006b). This paper aims to provide an in-depth understanding of how students, teachers, and administrators perceive the design, implementation, and effectiveness of EM curriculum through a qualitative case study on a university campus in Taiwan. Interviews with three administrators, four teachers, and twenty-four students were conducted. Data were reconstructed and analyzed based on Carspecken’s (1996) reconstructive analysis. The findings showed great satisfaction with the socio-cultural aspects of content learning and enhanced English abilities but unanimous concerns over the discipline-specific knowledge and English abilities, rendering unsatisfactory feelings toward the proportional design of the immersion program with the implementation of the English-only policy. The paper, thus, calls for additional attention to EM curriculum design and implementation involving the joint efforts of language and content teachers. Pedagogical implications and directions for future research are also provided.