Language-Content Partnership at Chinese Universities: A Review of Practices

Abstract

Language-content partnership or the interdisciplinary collaboration between English teachers and content teachers is an issue of wide interest in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and other pedagogical traditions where there is a dual concern with developing learners' language skills and disciplinary content knowledge. While the English-medium literature on language-content partnership has been growing, a fuller picture of what is happening on a global scale cannot be obtained without exploring academic literature published in a language other than English. In this paper, we report a review study that was based on a body of Chinese literature purposefully collected through systematic searching. Content analysis of the 36 identified Chinese papers was conducted to address the research question "How is the collaboration between English teachers and content teachers practiced at Chinese universities?". Our findings on the Chinese scene will be enlightening for practitioners, researchers, and policy makers in other contexts who are interested in exploring the educational value of language-content partnership.

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.…”