Search

For years, universities worldwide have offered English-medium degrees as a way to attract international students and staff, enhance their institutional profile and promote multilingualism. In Europe and the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), English-medium instruction (EMI) is more recent, but the dimension and speed of its implementation has outpaced language policies, methodological considerations and empirical research. In view of this, this paper focuses on an empirical study examining the effect that the teaching of a Business Administration degree in English as a foreign language may have on Spanish students' academic performance (as measured through coursework and final grades), when compared to their counterparts' learning in Spanish. Students' grades are analysed in three different disciplinary subjects and treated statistically. Findings show that both cohorts obtain similar results, suggesting that the language of instruction does not seem to compromise students' learning of academic content. Differences, however, are found regarding learners' performance in the three disciplinary subjects under scrutiny, with history yielding slightly higher results than accounting and finance. This finding runs counter to the general belief that the more verbal subjects, like history, would have a "limiting" effect on EMI students' final performance and, moreover, raises questions concerning disciplinary differences and assessment.

The present paper applies the recently developed construct of the Cognitive Discourse Function (CDF) in the context of student writing at tertiary level, using it to explore differences in exam performance between high and low-level answers, and between L1 (Spanish) and L2 (English) classrooms. We analyse the exam answers from two Business Administration cohorts (n = 30) at a large Spanish university who had taken the same content course with the same teacher in one of the two languages. Results suggest that the high-level exams, whether in Spanish (L1) or in English (EMI), succeeded in providing explicit responses to the combination of DESCRIBE-CLASSIFY and DESCRIBE-EXPLAIN CDFs requested in the exam questions. In contrast, the low-level exams usually failed to make meaningful and overt connections between the CDFs activated and their linguistic realisations, irrespective of the language used. These findings suggest that while academic literacy may be less developed in students' L2, it should be systematically addressed in both learning contexts. In our conclusions, we evaluate how the CDF construct sheds light on language demands in specific content areas, we argue for its utility in EMI settings, and we make some concrete pedagogical recommendations to scaffold student writing and increase content specialists’ language awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As higher education institutions (HEIs) across the world strive to become increasingly international, English-medium instruction (EMI) is swiftly becoming mainstream in contexts where English has traditionally held a foreign language status. This change in the language of instruction has given rise to a number of concerns, which are still largely under-explored. Amongst these, research into the effects of EMI on students' disciplinary knowledge is of great importance and should be regarded as crucial so that HEIs offer the same possibilities for student construction of knowledge, irrespective of the language used. Our paper duly examines the impact that EMI may have on student academic performance when compared to their counterparts' in their L1 (Spanish). As sample data, a comparable set of first year student grades was collected for the subject of Financial Accounting I in a Spanish university during four academic years (2010–14). A total of 383 student grades were gathered and compared using mean difference tests. Overall, findings show no statistical differences across groups and that the use of EMI does not lower student final academic outcomes. These results may be relevant for other EMI contexts, the business education community and ESP course developers in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For years, universities worldwide have offered English-medium degrees as a way to attract international students and staff, enhance their institutional profile and promote multilingualism. In Europe and the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), English-medium instruction (EMI) is more recent, but the dimension and speed of its implementation has outpaced language policies, methodological considerations and empirical research. In view of this, this paper focuses on an empirical study examining the effect that the teaching of a Business Administration degree in English as a foreign language may have on Spanish students’ academic performance (as measured through coursework and final grades), when compared to their counterparts’ learning in Spanish. Students’ grades are analysed in three different disciplinary subjects and treated statistically. Findings show that both cohorts obtain similar results, suggesting that the language of instruction does not seem to compromise students’ learning of academic content. Differences, however, are found regarding learners’ performance in the three disciplinary subjects under scrutiny, with history yielding slightly higher results than accounting and finance. This finding runs counter to the general belief that the more verbal subjects, like history, would have a ‘limiting’ effect on EMI students’ final performance and, moreover, raises questions concerning disciplinary differences and assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]