From the inside out and outside in: A duoethnography on English-medium instruction in higher education in Korea and Taiwan

• In Event: Decolonizing and Resisting Hegemony in English Language Teaching and Learning

Proposal

Teaching content courses in English is not a new phenomenon, especially in inner circle contexts that have long used English in their societies, and outer circle contexts that have often adopted their former colonizer’s language – English – as the language of education and administration. The practice of teaching content courses in English, now more widely known as English-medium instruction (EMI), has also started emerging in expanding circle settings since the early 2000s (Macaro, 2018). While the expansion of EMI has stayed ahead of its research developments in the past decades, the field is witnessing an exponential growth of EMI-related articles, special issues, edited volumes, and books in recent years, making the research landscape of EMI today much more dynamic than ever before.

The fast-developing trend of EMI, however, is fraught with many issues: the negative impact it has on learning, threat to local language ecologies, domain loss, and widening socioeconomic divides are not uncommon themes highlighted repeatedly in the EMI literature. It is also not unusual to hear of policies on either national or institutional levels stipulating an “English-only” definition of the “E” in EMI, making the issues above even more challenging to address. Along with a growing number of researchers who are taking a critical approach to studying EMI (Kester & Chang, 2021; Kim, 2016; Sah & Fang, 2023), in this paper we engage in deep dialogue – through duoethnography – on the nexus of theory, policy, and practice related to EMI. We write from the contexts of Taiwan and South Korea, interrogating similarities and differences that “insiders”/“outsiders” (e.g., local/international faculty) face.

Characterized by rapid industrialization, intense competition, and a social imaginary of strong links between economic performance and education (Kedzierski, 2016), Taiwan and South Korea have seen a steady increase in the percentage of EMI in the past two decades, and the numbers are still rising under continuing efforts to enhance levels of internationalization. The growth of EMI, though, is slightly different in the two contexts: Taiwan is currently experiencing seismic changes in terms of EMI provision because of a 12-year, nation-wide “bilingual” policy that was introduced in 2018, while the situation of EMI in Korea seems to be somewhat plateauing.

Specifically, we first share autoethnographic reflections of our own EMI practices in the different policy settings in which we are situated, and then theorize our reflections with Gloria Anzaldua’s (1987) concept of borderlands. As Anzaldua writes, “the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy” (preface). Borderlands, for us, therefore provides a concept that explains our experiences working and teaching at the center/in the margins, looking in/out from borders of one national, cultural, and linguistic context as it intersects with another.

The research questions we seek to answer in this paper are: What potential borders does EMI create? How do these borders open up and close down educational possibilities in university settings? To address these questions, we reflect on the dimensions below:

1) How we understand EMI
2) What linguistic profiles our EMI contexts are like and how we position ourselves there
3) How we design and carry out our EMI classes
4) What we are (and are not) able to achieve in these classes
5) How we imagine alternatives for EMI

Methodologically, autoethnography has emerged in recent years as a critical avenue through which to access, interrogate, and theorize scholars’ professional activities, where the scholar him/herself is both the object and subject of analysis. Autoethnography – and duoethnography by extension – allows researchers to engage epiphanies through reflection on their own life course, and to theorize on the significance of these moments for themselves and others’ pedagogies. Responding to the call of CIES 2024, The Power of Protest, as our ultimate goal is to move policies in directions that are linguistically, pedagogically, and epistemologically more just, we see duoethnography as an early but important stage in language activism and also the re-making of EMI.

The duoethnography we conducted involves three stages. First, each of us responded in-depth to the research questions drawing from our professional experiences and observations. At this stage, we wrote our reflections over the course of three months. During this stage we additionally read each other’s responses and offered commentary. In responding to each other’s comments, this brought in new stories, examples, and empirical evidence (e.g., course evaluations, websites, university brochures). In the second stage, we re-read the revised responses and empirical data to search for common themes. Finally, in the third stage of the process, we re-examined the themes with the analytical lens of border thinking.

Through the concept of borderlands, the paper makes visible – and questions the legitimacy of – the many geographical, linguistic, and epistemic borders that have been reified in current mainstream understandings of EMI. To move away from furthering colonial divides, the paper calls for a need to foreground more race- and class-based consciousness among EMI scholars and faculty. Implications for policy and practice are provided.

Authors

• Sin-Yi Chang, National Taiwan University

• Kevin Kester, Seoul National University