Exploring assessment issues in EMI

Speaker: Dr Lo Yuen Yi (University of Hong Kong)

With the increasing popularity of English as the Medium of Instruction (EMI) in bilingual and multilingual contexts, particularly in English as a foreign language (EFL) regions such as Europe and Asia, plenty of research has been conducted to examine students’ achievements in content subjects and English, classroom interaction and, more recently, teacher education and professional development. However, there is a paucity of work focusing on assessment issues in EMI. Such a research gap is problematised given that EFL learners are inevitably assessed of their English knowledge in conjunction with their content knowledge. Furthermore, without a better understanding of EMI assessment, students’ knowledge of content subjects (usually measured using some sort of assessment) may be under- or over-estimated, thus undermining the validity of claims of research related to achievements in EMI programmes. In this talk, the speaker will first attempt to tease out the complexities of assessment in EMI, which involve content knowledge, cognitive skills, as well as implicit and explicit language demands. She will then share some findings of her research projects surveying the assessment practices in Hong Kong secondary education and examining the potential hindering effect of language on students’ achievements. These findings have significant implications for EMI teachers’ pedagogical practices, particularly with regard to providing language scaffolding to help students tackle the language demands in assessment. The findings also illuminate EMI teachers’ professional development concerning their assessment literacy.