Innovation in Language Learning

English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) is an increasingly important element in the internationalisation of education, but it brings both benefits and challenges to the institution, faculty and students. 

One of the key challenges is English language proficiency for both students and lecturers.

Deficits in student proficiency mean that students will face difficulty in studying complex content and may suffer low grades in assignments and outcomes.

Deficits in lecturer proficiency mean that students may struggle to follow the classes, and student-teacher interactions may be less rich than needed.

This talk will look at the issues of EMI faculty competences, and how faculty can be supported, asking:

- how can we ensure that faculty have the language proficiency and pedagogical skills they need to ensure students in EMI courses have the best chances of success?

- how can we use new technologies to help faculty improve these skills and reach international standards?

The talk will look at online training materials and methods that help lecturers develop their skills. 

We will look at online and blended learning approaches to empower faculty to teach through the medium of English, develop the specialised language skills needed for classroom interactions, better prepare for seminars and classroom management, build their soft skill competences to help them deal with students' issues, and deal sensitively with student evaluation.

We will outline our research into the competences needed by EMI lecturers, and show how we experimented with mapping faculty skills against an online EMI Competence Framework.

We will also look at the washback effect of EMI on secondary school language teaching, where students preparing for university are increasingly expecting to study at least partly in English.

This raises issues of inclusion, and how we can use new technologies outside the traditional classroom to improve the language skills of disadvantaged and diverse students who are preparing to study their academic subjects in English.