English as a medium of instruction policy and practice in Ukraine and Kazakhstan: Bottom-up, top-down, and from the side

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Problematizing Education Reform: Implementing Multilingual Education as Change from Above, from Below, from the Side — or a Combination?

Proposal

As businesses and government institutions increasingly cooperate across borders in order to be competitive in the global marketplace or maintain a strong position in the global economy, scholars have found that state institutions cede some aspects of power supranational organizations (Inda, 2005; Ong, 2005). Similarly, universities interested in English-medium education, whether to attract international students or to help their local students compete in the international economy, are often involved in strategic partnerships with universities from predominantly English-speaking countries, e.g. the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia (Bolsmann & Miller, 2008; Jenkins, 2011; Phillipson, 2006). In these partnerships, the decision of which institution has sovereignty seems to be made by the partner from the English-speaking country, as Jenkins (2011) notes: “universities outside the mother tongue English speaking countries are regarded by the latter as unable to achieve academic internationalisation for themselves, and in order to do so, need complete guidance from mother tongue English institutions” (p. 933).

To illustrate this point in greater detail, this paper presents a comparative, mixed-method case study of two higher education institutions (HEIs) implementing English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in two former Soviet countries with divergent policy orientations. One HEI is a private university in Ukraine, where language policy is set in the constitution; however, the language of higher education—be it Ukrainian, Russian, or English—tends to be left up to institutions and even individual programs or teachers. The other is an HEI established by an act of national legislation in Kazakhstan, which has an overtly top-down approach to language-in-education policy at all levels of education. Both HEIs have partner universities from the UK, and the Kazakh HEI has additional partners from the United States and Singapore.

Ethnographic class observations and instructor interviews were conducted at the HEI in Ukraine from 2010-2011, 2012, and 2015. An online survey of professors at the HEI in Kazakhstan was conducted in 2016. The results from both studies indicate that the partner university representatives come from the side and impact teaching and learning practice at the institutional level in a number of ways.

The implications of this finding are twofold. First, policy agents can come from the side and impact language education policy and practice in both top-down and bottom-up contexts. Second, the choice of medium of instruction in a neoliberal marketplace can be understood as a factor in countries’ and institutions’ ceding of authority to a side power.

Bolsmann, Chis & Miller, Henry (2008) International student recruitment to universities in England: Discourse, rationales and globalisation. Globalisation, Societies and Education 6(1): 75–88.
Inda, Jonathan (2005) Analytics of the Modern: An Introduction. In Inda, Johnathan (ed) Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality and Life Politics, 1-10. Malden MA: Blackwell.
Jenkins, Jennifer (2011) Accommodating (to) ELF in the international university. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 926-936.
Ong, Aihwa (2005) Graduated Sovereignty in South-East Asia. In Inda, Johnathan (ed) Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality and Life Politics, 83-104. Malden MA: Blackwell.
Phillipson, Robert (2006) English: A cuckoo in the European higher education nest of languages? European Journal of English Studies 10(1): 13 – 32.

Authors

• Miles Rinehart, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Bridget A. Goodman, Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education