Motivations of Higher Education Students to Enrol in Bilingual Courses

Abstract

This paper addresses the views on motivation of students who participated in higher education bilingual programmes in a Spanish state university for two academic years and were asked to inform on the experiences that they found more motivating and the changes they would introduce to feel more enthused to participate in a similar programme in the future. Qualitative data were gathered through a questionnaire administered to 310 students that included two open questions related to motivating factors. The responses were coded in relation to 6 fields that emerged consistently and were converted into percentages. The obtained results show evidence that students display signals of motivation that are related to aspects of the L2 motivational self-system. The relevance of this study lies on the voice of the students participating in an EMI context in HE as well as on the new paths shown on the benefits of self-confidence and self-efficacy, the need to focus on professional opportunities and communities of practice, and a consideration of critical views on current practice and overwhelming use of English.

Challenges to Internationalisation of University Programmes: A Systematic Thematic Synthesis of Qualitative Research on Learner-Centred English Medium Instruction (EMI) Pedagogy

“…5 (13) [ 12,13,64,68,74] Teacher-student rapport "Yet this is not the case with teachers who are native speakers of English. We dared not ask them for clarification after class because we cannot understand their English" [13].…”

“…2 (5) [13,95] Frustration "Some students do not understand what the teacher says and that interrupts the flow of the class that becomes really slow and some of us feel frustrated" [64].…”

“…Students referred to the impracticality of EMI for some content disciplines in 11 studies. Some students expressed concerns and negative feelings [64,65,68,70], while in other studies they voiced mixed or positive views regarding the practical utility of EMI for studying content [12,53,67,69,71,72]. In addition, students seemed to have divergent perceptions of English in content classrooms, especially when it comes to comparisons among international and home students [70,[73][74][75][76].…”

“…For both home and international students in at least 12 studies, concerns stemmed from adapting to a bilingual academic environment in which students had low general English proficiency. Students believed that their inadequate English was one of the leading causes of poor content comprehension [6,12,64,66,78], and as such this had a negative effect on their confidence 'to speak in front of classmates' [6,79] and their motivation to learn [82]. Many students pointed to the weaknesses of their academic English skills and attributed it to the lack of prior experience with English Medium Instruction [6,76,82].…”

“…On the one hand, due to their insufficient level of spoken English, lack of vocabulary knowledge or due to the difficulty of the content subject, many students welcomed the possibility of using their first language (L1) when they felt the need [12,53,67,[74][75][76]91]. This practice was especially expected and tolerated when used by lecturers with unclear pronunciation and who lacked the ability to 'put everything together' in English [53,64,66,67,76,89,91]. On the other hand, extensive code-switching in class caused a backlash from international and a few home students who either did not speak the L1 (such as Spanish or Mandarin) or expected their EMI course to support their 'genuine' English learning [64,74].…”