Perceived Effectiveness of the Implementation of English Medium Instruction among Students and Lecturers at a Turkish State University


Öğr. Gör. Meryem KARAMAN

Tez Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: İstanbul Üniversitesi, Hasan Ali Yücel Eğitim Fakültesi, Yabancı Diller Eğitimi Bölümü, Türkiye

Tez Danışmanı: Kırık M.

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2018

Tezin Dili: İngilizce

Özet:

Aiming to adapt to the ever-evolving world, higher education institutions seek to adopt

new practices to attract national and international students, which leads them to the

pursuit of English medium instruction (EMI). Attitudes and perceptions of

stakeholders towards EMI seem to have been accustomed to this educational

evolution, which is reflected on their learning and teaching events. Although EMI is

highly appreciated as a notion, the attempt to put the theory into de facto

implementation may not always be practical and yield favourable results, considering

the readiness of the stakeholders to EMI process. This being the case, how students

and academic staff being the main subjects of this process, consider the practice of

EMI appears to be an open-ended question. Thereby, the aim of the present study is to

investigate the implementation and perceived effectiveness of partial and full English

medium instruction courses in undergraduate engineering programs at a state

university in Turkey. Initially, this study sheds light on the concepts paving the way

for EMI; secondly, it presents the related field research that has been conducted in

national and international contexts; and lastly, with respect to students and lecturers’

opinions, it attempts to answer the research questions through a mixed method

research design. The findings reveal that 1) Almost all participants give due

importance to English as a foreign language and as an instructional medium at tertiary

level. 1a) Students of partial EMI programs, who do feel less linguistically-ready to

succeed in EMI content courses, hold similar attitudes with their counterparts studying

in full EMI programs. 2a) Students reflect that their classroom performance and

academic success are adversely affected by EMI. 2b) In a similar vein, lecturers

acknowledge their concerns with regard to students’ impaired content and language

learning which is reflected on their instructional process as challenges.