English-Medium Instruction (EMI) in Higher Education: a case study of an EMI programme in Vietnam

Abstract

Our time of globalisation has led to a number of significant changes in various aspects of education, including a phenomenon called internationalisation of Higher Education. Universities around the world have a wide range of internationalisation strategies, one of which is the introduction of English-Medium Instruction (EMI) programmes. During the last few decades, there has been a striking increase in the number of EMI programmes (Doiz, Lasagabaster, & Sierra, 2013c). In Vietnam, EMI is strongly supported by key governmental policies such as the Higher Education Reform Agenda and the National Foreign Languages 2020 Project. While more and more programmes are implemented, EMI is still an under-researched area in this context. The limited number of existing studies mainly address challenges of implementation from the perspectives of stakeholders, with data collected from interviews and focus groups (e.g. Nguyen, Walkinshaw, & Pham, 2017; Vu & Burns, 2014).

Against that backdrop, this PhD research aims to examine EMI classroom practices in an undergraduate programme and explore the ‘ways of doing’ and ‘ways of thinking’ of lecturers and students. The project is developed based on the ROADMAPPING framework proposed by Dafouz and Smit (2016), trying to offer a holistic description of EMI implementation in a Vietnamese university. It employs an ethnographic case study design, with data collected during an academic semester via three main instruments: classroom observations, interviews and focus groups. In addition, research diary, site documents and archives of informal communications function as supplementary tools to explore the case. Both thematic analysis and discourse analysis are used.

Key findings highlight the roles of lecturers and students as policy makers and policy actors in the implementation and negotiation of EMI policy at classroom level. Additionally, both English and Vietnamese play important roles in the knowledge construction process, underlining the necessity of translanguaging pedagogy in EMI settings. The study also underscores the importance of pedagogical practices for EMI lecturers when teaching content subjects in a second language. These findings are hoped to offer insights into what actually takes place inside an EMI classroom, especially when both lecturers and students speak the same mother tongue. Based on these results, a number of implications are suggested for policymakers, teacher trainers, lecturers, and researchers.

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