Prof. Kristina Hultgren

In the past few decades, higher education institutions in non-Anglophone Europe have seen a dramatic increase by more than 1,000% in English-taught programmes. Despite a recent surge in interest in this phenomenon, mainly from Sociolinguists and Applied Linguists, the reasons why it happens are not yet fully understood, arguably due to a failure of researchers to sufficiently engage with academic governance. The overarching hypothesis to test in this project is whether English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) is an explicit policy decision or whether it happens indirectly as a - perhaps unintended - consequence of ‘New Public Management’, an approach to governance which draws on techniques from the private sector to enhance the quality and efficiency of public institutions. Derived from the UK, this type of governance has increasingly been adopted by European higher education institutions (Broucker and De Wit 2015; Enders et al. 2011; European Commission 2011). As EMI is expected to continue to grow and has profound economic, educational, professional and societal implications not just for non-Anglophone Europe but also for the UK, the need for research into this area is both pressing and immense. Fieldwork will be conducted in higher education institutions in six European nation states that are known to differ in the amount of EMI offered. The aim is to gain an in-depth understanding of whether the variability in EMI can be traced to different institutional and national governance structures. A desk-based cross-case comparison will then be conducted of 15 higher education institutions in Europe to enable us to arrive at a generalized model of which institutional and national factors are conducive to EMI. Designed to assess causal inference, the methods of Process Tracing, borrowed from Political Science, and Qualitative Comparative Analysis will be employed. In combination, these two methods will enable us to obtain both an in-depth, contextually sensitive understanding as well as a generalizable model of the factors leading to EMI. The outcomes of the project will benefit both academics and wider society. The main theoretical outcome will be an understanding of how the implementation of specific governance structures impact on language shift and the valuation of different languages. The main societal benefit will accrue from a 'best practice' framework to ensure that EMI is delivered without adverse effects on teaching, learning and wider society. This will pave the way for the second stage of the project which will explore the opportunities brought by EMI to the UK English for Academic Purposes industry. In sum, by researching the causes of EMI and devising innovative solutions to facilitate a more thought-through implementation of it, the outcomes of the project will be of mutual benefit to both UK and non-Anglophone European economy and society.

Examining gender and English as a medium of education (EME) in low and middle income contexts.

The TOEFL EMI project will draw on Evidence-Centred Design (ECD), identified as an important conceptual framework "for the design and delivery of educational assessments, organized around the idea of assessment as evidentiary argument" (Mislevy and Yin 2013). Within the ECD framework, the project will investigate the potential role of the TOEFL iBT examination in two diverse university contexts which use English as a medium of instruction (EMI), one in Sweden and the other in Nepal. Since reading is a key conduit by which university students must access content information, the project focuses on academic reading practices and on the potential role of TOIEFL iBT reading test materials in testing academic reading in such EMI settings. The project will accordingly research both domains in terms of academic reading practice and levels of ability, and as part of this will deploy TOEFL iBT reading tasks to test the reading of undergraduates in both contexts (n=100). If the TOEFL iBT exam is to be used in future in EMI contexts, such Domain Analysis is indispensable. The central aim of the project is therefore to elucidate the potential role of the TOEFL iBT test in testing academic reading in such contexts, and to recommend approaches to deploying the exam in such domains in future.

This is a University of Westminster led project investigating policies and practices of English Medium Education in selected higher education institutions in four ODA (Official Development Assistance) contexts. The cases have been chosen to represent different positions on the ODA continuum, from ‘least developed’ (Nepal and Bangladesh) to ‘upper middle income’ (Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan). The overarching objective is to understand the role of English in creating, mediating and perpetuating inequality in global higher education.

This research will explore the evidence of the potential of English Medium Instruction (EMI) to improve equity and access to school that results in better educational and life chances, particularly for disadvantaged groups in India and Ghana