Abstract/Summary

Increasingly, English is used as a medium of instruction (EMI) at universities in non-Anglophone countries to teach academic subjects other than English itself (Macaro, 2018). Driven by trends toward the internationalization of higher education, EMI programs are often assumed to improve both students’ understanding of content knowledge and their English language skills. However, the degree to which EMI programs achieve these alleged dual aims remains unknown and highly debated (see Macaro et al., 2018a, for an overview). Moreover, there remains a lack of understanding in terms of how teachers and students perceive these dual aims with respect to EMI policy and the degree to which these dual aims affect their rationale or motivation for participating in EMI programs. An in-depth understanding of teachers’ and students’ perceptions of EMI policies and motivations for EMI is needed, given the role these stakeholders play in classroom-level implementation. The study reported in this chapter addresses that research gap by exploring EMI teachers’ and students’ perceptions of EMI policies and their motivations (or reasons) for joining EMI programs, to better understand how they understand the complexities of language and content learning in EMI university settings. The chapter draws from qualitative data gathered for a larger project which investigated EMI implementation in Turkish higher education. The study reported here relates specifically to teachers’ and students’ perceptions of EMI policy and perceptions of EMI motivations using data collected from interviews with teachers (n = 21) and focus group discussions with students (n = 150) in Engineering Faculties at seven universities in Turkey.