Reka R. Jablonkai

EMI programmes at a Hungarian university: the lecturers’ perspective

The paper will report on a small-scale, exploratory study that focused on the experience of lecturers who taught in the undergraduate Communication and Media Science programme in its first year of introduction in the academic year 2013/14 at Corvinus University of Budapest. The majority of previous research that investigated learning and teaching in a multicultural and multilingual student group took the student perspective (Carroll and Ryan, 2005; Jenkins, 2014) or investigated the novice teachers’ perspective and concentrated on secondary school settings (Yuen, 2010; Adler, 2011; Young and Montgomery, 2013). To extend our understanding of the aspect of teaching in such contexts, the present study aimed to identify the perceived challenges that teaching in English in a non-Anglophone, higher education context poses to lecturers. Findings suggest that challenges include the lecturers’ own and their students’ proficiency of English. This includes difficulties with terminology, pronunciation and listening skills. In this specific context, there seem to be two distinct categories of lecturers regarding their English proficiency. One that includes lecturers who studied their own subjects in Hungarian and learnt English as a foreign language. The second category is lecturers who studied English language as their first degree and became lecturers of their respective subjects at a later stage in their career. This difference has important implications for their preparation for their lectures and perceived confidence in their communication in English. In addition to the linguistic competence, results suggest that lecturers have to be prepared for several intercultural aspects of teaching in this context, such as, differences in the concept of time, space and academic requirements.

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References

Adler, S.M. (2011). Teacher epistemology and collective narratives: Interrogating teaching and diversity. Teaching and Teacher Education 27, 609-618.

Carroll, J. & Ryan, J. (2005). Teaching international students.

Jenkins, J. (2014) English as a lingua franca at the international university. New York: Routledge.

Yang, Y. and Montgomery, M. (2013). Gaps or bridges in multicultural teacher education: A Q study of attitudes toward student diversity. Teaching and Teacher Education 30,27-37.

Yuen, Y. M. C. (2010). Dimensions of diversity: Challenges to secondary school teachers with implications for intercultural teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26, 732–741.