Early signs of a systemic shift in higher education towards significant use of English can be seen across some continents where English is not the usual spoken language. Such a shift derives from universities’ efforts to internationalize and capitalize as they navigate the currents of globalization. The use of English as the Medium of Instruction (EMI) as pedagogy should be examined more closely in the context of the concurrent growth of higher education around the world and the increase in the number of international (and local) students who are studying in English as a Second Language (ESL). A robust model of EMI as pedagogy is presented, which can be useful in supporting an internationalizing institution’s EMI policy.
English as the Medium of Instruction (EMI) is gaining ground as an internationalizing policy at universities in countries where English is normally used as a second language. However, EMI as developed pedagogy in support of such a policy is yet to establish itself at many such institutions. In a country such as the United States, on the other hand, there is already extensive experience covering several decades on the challenges faced by International Teaching Assistants who use English as a Second Language for their teaching. Many of the challenges they face, and the strategies which institutions have devised to assist faculty instructors who use ESL, have relevance for institutions which are now moving to EMI. As those institutions move towards EMI, they may also need to develop their own language and pedagogy training for their new instructors who use ESL. For universities which aspire to rise in the international league tables, such preservice teacher education may be essential for the fulfillment of their aspiration As part of their pre-service teacher education, new instructors at a rising young university in Hong Kong received basic training in English For the Medium of Instruction (EFMI), an original term to articulate this novel reification of a subgenre of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). New instructors found the training helpful but insufficient and expressed a strong interest for additional training in EFMI.
Texts in the genre of travel writing provide description and analysis of the author's journeys and destinations. A variety of foci exists among texts in the genre, including accounts of explorations, personal narratives, or military memoirs. This article discusses Rev. George Smith's A Narrative as an example of a missionary narrative, a sub-genre of travel writing, embodying features of British imperial ideology.Smith's Narrative contributed to the discursive formation of China in the minds of people at the imperial center of London and probably other centers. His account and commentary of his travels to China in the early years of Hong Kong's colonial history helped to foster the imperial meaning-making process. Written in a time of stable classifications of knowledge gleaned from the British imperial project, Smith's travel writing affirms, consolidates, and incrementally expands features of the British imperialist ideology. Building on existing structures and employing the rhetorical and discursive strategy of binary oppositions, Smith's Narrative depicted China as an inferior culture and Britain as superior to others and with a divine mission. Whereas China was dark and pagan, British civilization was enlightened and Christian. A hierarchy emerges where Britain is positioned above all others in terms of culture, religion, medicine, military technology, and law.
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