Shelley K. Taylor

Meeting on Common Ground? Professors and Students Navigating EMI in Higher Education

Increasingly, countries in non-Anglophone Europe have turned to new language policies and English-medium instruction (EMI) to maintain a competitive edge in the internationalization of higher education. In the Nordic countries, this trend is situated within the broader context of ‘parallel language policy,’ which emphasizes the use of English while aiming for a balance between English and the national language/s (Holmen, 2017). This talk presents exploratory research into EMI in a Nordic university that investigates the views and experiences of professors from a variety of disciplines (Social Sciences, Health Sciences, Maths and Sciences, etc.) teaching graduate courses through the medium of English. Preliminary analyses of (any) connections they feel between challenges they face in a de facto bilingual university and within the broader Academy (publishing, faculty involvement, and gaining tenure), and the challenges their students face functioning academically in an additional language are discussed.

Reference

Holmen, A. (2017). Parallel language strategy. In N. Van Deusen-Scholl & S. May (Eds.), Second and foreign language education (pp. 301-311). Encyclopedia of Language & Education (3rd ed., Vol. 4). Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

С��Ƶ the speaker

Shelley K. Taylor, Professor of Applied Linguistics (Western University, Canada) teaches courses on minority language issues, L2 teaching and learning, and the CEFR. Her current research focusses on EMI in higher education, and youth refugees. Previous research involved Nepali-Bhutanese refugee children, plurilingual youths in French immersion, and introducing the CEFR into FSL programs in Ontario. She has worked on MLE materials development in Nepal, trilingual language policy in Greenland, and promoting plurilingualism in TESOL. She has published in Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics; Canadian Modern Language Review; Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism; Intercultural Education; International Journal of Bilingual Education & Bilingualism; Race, Ethnicity & Education, and TESOL Quarterly, and served on TESOL’s Board of Directors (2016-2019).