English Medium Instruction and the potential of translanguaging practices in higher education
In the UAE, although Arabic is the first and official language (L1), English has become the medium of instruction
and the language of discourse in higher education in most subject domains. The pedagogical implications of English Medium
Instruction (EMI) in the specific context of higher education in the UAE are not well understood, and research is needed to
establish what kinds of support speakers of English as a second or additional language (L2) might need to fully access content
knowledge in English without burdening learning. Our empirical work hypothesizes that learning content through L2 may lead to more
favourable results if the L1 is explicitly drawn upon as a resource in addition to the L2. This study provided undergraduate
students with learning materials in three experimental conditions (Arabic-only, English-only, and dual language). Students’
performance was then assessed in three areas of linguistic competence, namely translation into Arabic of a list of English words
and phrases, comprehension of an English written text, and translation into Arabic of English words and phrases in context. A
series of one way ANOVAs and post-hoc comparisons were carried out to determine differences between the three conditions. The
study confirms that overall, for students with an intermediate language level, the presentation of dual language reading materials
has a greater impact on their outcomes in comparison with the presentation of reading materials in the L1 or L2 only. This
highlights the critical need for raising awareness of translanguaging practices in EMI contexts.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Literature review
- 2.1EMI in higher education
- 2.2Translanguaging and translation within EMI
- 3.The present study
- 3.1Method
- 3.1.1Participants
- 3.1.2Language proficiency tests
- 3.1.3Instruments
- 3.1.4Procedure
- 3.1.5Scoring of TCT assessment
- 4.Results
- 4.1Overall final score on TCT assessment
- 4.2Score in individual components of TCT assessment
- 4.2.1Translation
- 4.2.2Comprehension
- 4.2.3Contextual translation
- 5.Discussion
- 6.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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