International students’ perceptions of multilingual English-medium instruction classrooms: a case study in Taiwan

Abstract

Many English-medium instruction (EMI) classrooms in non-Anglophone countries adopt a multilingual stance, using English alongside the host country’s local language(s). However, the perceptions of such multilingual practices held by students remain under-researched. Given many Asian countries’ current drives to internationalize and diversify their student bodies, a clear understanding of international students’ perspectives on multilingual EMI classrooms is long overdue. Through semi-structured interviews with international students from developing countries and the theoretical lens of language ideologies, this study investigates their perceptions of multilingual EMI classrooms in Taiwan. Most expressed a belief that their multilingual EMI classrooms, saturated with non-standard varieties of English, were not a legitimate pathway to acquiring their desired linguistic capital, i.e., standard English. These findings differ sharply from those of previous research, which has painted international students as holding positive attitudes towards English as a lingua franca (ELF). Moreover, the participants resisted the English-Mandarin translanguaging practices in their classrooms. As such, the findings highlight the need to understand the language ideologies of international students in Asia. Further investigation of learner resistance to multilingual EMI practices should also be conducted, with the wider aim of helping advanced English-language learners from developing countries accept different English accents, and accommodate ELF communication.

An erosive neritic area of Shantou in coastal NE South China Sea since at least MIS 5 revealed by OSL dating of cores

“…The cores in this study are located at the southern part of the paleo-channels of the Lianjiang River, where they likely experienced fluvial incision during the last glacial period. Lan et al (1991) demonstrated that the medium coarse sands in the Taiwan Shoal were mainly transported by the currents from the coastal region of southeastern China during 10-20 ka BP based on the 14 C dating. Sediments from the core sites were largely transported to the Taiwan Shoal by the Hanjiang diluted water and Guangdong Coastal Currents (Figure 1A), resulting in limited sediments in the neritic area of the Lianjiang River plain (Lan et al, 1991;Lian and Li, 2011).…”

“…Lan et al (1991) demonstrated that the medium coarse sands in the Taiwan Shoal were mainly transported by the currents from the coastal region of southeastern China during 10-20 ka BP based on the 14 C dating. Sediments from the core sites were largely transported to the Taiwan Shoal by the Hanjiang diluted water and Guangdong Coastal Currents (Figure 1A), resulting in limited sediments in the neritic area of the Lianjiang River plain (Lan et al, 1991;Lian and Li, 2011). Studies have shown that terrigenous sediments can be transported and spread by oceanic currents once they enter continental margins (Liu et al, 2008;Liu Z. et al, 2016;Zhang et al, 2022).…”

The Use of Questions in Master’s Oral Defences in English as an Academic Lingua Franca in Universities

“…English as the medium of instruction (EMI) has been gradually developed and applied in numerous universities in Asian countries to promote international competitiveness in higher education and attract more international students, and Taiwan is no exception. Arising from this, many studies have drawn attention to related aspects, such as institutional policies and practices of EMI (Lau & Lin, 2017;Lin, 2023;Vuong et al, 2021;Wu, 2023), curriculum development and course evaluation (Le & Tang, 2022;Liu et al, 2022), professional development (Graham & Eslami, 2023), intercultural interaction in academic settings (Lacaste et al, 2022;Nguyen, 2021), academic assessment (Lin, 2020), students' perspective on EMI (Hsu, 2023;Lan, 2022;Moncada-Comas, 2022), EMI lectures in online settings (Picciuolo, 2023), and language-content partnership at Chinese universities (Li et al, 2024). Nevertheless, how participants interact in EMI in the context of using English as an academic lingua franca lacks attention, not to mention oral forms of academic assessment in higher education and oral defences for theses and dissertations, which have rarely been explored because of their blocked nature and the difficulty of collecting oral defence data.…”

The European Conference on Education 2022: Official Conference Proceedings

“…For decades, motivation has played an important role in human behaviour; for instance, why people make their decision to do something ---'the choice of a particular action', how long people will continue to do the activity ---'the persistence with it' and how hard they will chase for it ---'the effort expended on it' (Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2013, p.4). A number of empirical investigations were devoted to the motivation of learning English as a target language both in Anglophone and non-Anglophone contexts (see for example Boo et al, 2015;Clément, Gardner & Smythe, 1997;Lan, 2022). However, the research attention on the motivation of learning LOTEs in China has so far remained elusive.…”