The 9th International Conference on English Language Teaching (ELT) In China (ELT2020)

English Medium Instruction (EMI) has been widely implemented and promoted in Business English (BE) programs as it contributes to improvement of students’ English proficiency and intercultural communicative competence, and internationalization of higher education. However, using English as the language of instruction has given rise to a number of concerns, such as the loss of subject content, inadequate integration of content and language, etc.. To address these concerns, the present study develops an innovative teaching pedagogy, involving language support, collaborative project work, flipped classroom and online learning communities  to improve the effectiveness of EMI.
Using Bloom’s taxonomy of educational learning objectives and EMI as the theoretical framework, the study aims to explore the effectiveness of EMI both quantitatively and qualitatively. It investigates students’ perceptions of Economics, an EMI course in the BE program, in terms of their motivations, learning experiences, learning difficulties and academic achievement. A questionnaire survey is conducted among 200 students in BE program to evaluate the  pedagogy and teaching quality of the course, revealing areas for improvement concerning teachers, students and resources. Based on the findings, suggestions are also proposed to enhance the teaching quality of business English program to realize language and content integration.
 

English Medium Instruction; Business English; Economics