English medium of instruction in Chinese higher education: a systematic mapping review of empirical research

Abstract

In 2001, the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China issued guidelines to promote the quality of higher education and to advocate the expansion of the use of English (Ministry of Education (MoE). 2001. Guanyu jiaqiang gaodeng xuexiao benke jiaoxue gongzuo tigao jiaoxue zhiliang de ruogan yijian [Guidelines for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Teaching at Higher Education Institutions]. Available at: http://old.moe.gov.cn/publicfifiles/business/htmlfifiles/moe/moe_309/200412/4682.html). This paper reviews empirical studies in English and Chinese on EMI in Chinese higher education published from 2001 to 2019, during the last two decades since these guidelines were released. The review contributes to the field of EMI by documenting, analysing and synthesising empirical evidence and by situating EMI studies in China in the global trends of EMI research. The review aims to give an overview of studies targeted at both global and local audiences, therefore, publications in both English and Chinese were included. To select the Chinese articles the core journals indexed by CNKI were searched, and for the English articles, we used ERIC, IBSS, SCOPUS and WOS databases. After excluding theoretically oriented studies, literature reviews and commentaries, 42 articles remained. The in-depth analysis revealed that the main topics of these studies included the student perception, implementation and educational practices, and the role of language. We conclude that in general there are insufficient empirical studies, especially about EMI teachers’ perspectives to inform policies and practices at the micro, meso and macro level. Based on the findings, directions for further research are identified and recommendations for methodological approaches for future studies are also made.

“Does Chinese philosophy count as philosophy?”: decolonial awareness and practices in international English medium instruction programs

“…This study drew on key theories on epistemic decolonization to analyze how decolonial awareness and decolonialization practices were understood and adopted by teachers and international students in an EMI master’s degree program on Chinese philosophy and culture at a top-rated, comprehensive university in China. Extant studies have extensively argued that the implementation of EMI often equates Anglicization with internationalization and thereby risks endangering the status of local languages as legitimate mediators of knowledge (Galloway et al., 2020 ; Gu and Lee, 2019 ; Jablonkai and Hou, 2021 ; Phan, 2017 ). In dialogue with these studies, this article provides a counter-case that includes an explicit agenda and strategies to foster disciplinary epistemic justice that can be put into practice in curriculum and in pedagogical design.…”

“…With the rate of international student enrollment as a well-recognized index of internationalization, universities in non-Anglophone countries are increasingly striving to develop English as a medium of instruction (EMI) programs to attract international students (Kuroda, 2014 ; Macaro et al, 2021 ). A growing body of EMI-related research has focused on problematizing the hegemonic role of English in European and Asian universities (e.g., Dafouz and Smit, 2021 ; Galloway et al, 2020 ); these studies have primarily focused on the tension between a monolingual English-only language policy at the institutional level and the translingual practices of teachers and students at the interpersonal level and the difficult-to-achieve balance between teaching and learning English for academic purposes and discipline-specific content knowledge mediated in English (De Costa et al, 2021 ; Jablonkai and Hou, 2021 ). Even though the “E” in EMI has been critically examined in multi- and trans-lingual pedagogies, the existing literature largely failed to address the potential risks of epistemic injustice in the internationalization of EMI curriculum (Leask, 2015 ; Song, 2021 ).…”