Journal article
English medium higher education in China: challenges and ELT support
- Abstract:
- This mixed-methods study explores the language-related difficulties and ELT support offered in English-medium programmes at eight universities in China. Data included a student questionnaire (n = 394) measuring the difficulties of 45 academic tasks, organized around the four skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Results revealed students faced the largest difficulties with productive skills, especially writing. To explore structural language support for overcoming such challenges, fieldwork interviews with twenty-six senior faculty at eight universities in four cities in China were conducted. These revealed three main types of institutional support: concurrent language support from English language teachers offered alongside English medium programmes; preparatory programmes taken before students enrolled in English medium courses, which were prevalent in language-specialist universities; and self-access learning and writing centres, which were found at two transnational universities. When structural support was lacking, content teachers reported making grassroots efforts to help students understand content via use of the students’ multilingual repertoires in explanations, interactions, and materials.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 139.2KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1093/elt/ccab082
Authors
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- Journal:
- ELT Journal More from this journal
- Volume:
- 76
- Issue:
- 2
- Pages:
- 261–271
- Publication date:
- 2021-12-21
- Acceptance date:
- 2021-09-27
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1477-4526
- ISSN:
-
0951-0893
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1229007
- Local pid:
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pubs:1229007
- Deposit date:
-
2022-01-04
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Zhou et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2021
- Rights statement:
- ©2021 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact [email protected]
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