Turkish Undergraduates’ Perspectives on EMI: A Framework Induced Analysis of Policies and Processes

Abstract

There has been an exponential growth of English-medium instruction (EMI) programmes in Turkish higher education in the past 20 years, and accordingly there has been an increasing number of studies investigating university students’ points of view of EMI as well as their expectations and experiences in the process. However, only limited research to date has investigated the extent to which institutional EMI policies are perceived and enacted. To address this gap, we examined how a group of EMI university undergraduates conceptualise EMI, in terms of its perceived advantages and disadvantages, and to what extent students’ conceptualisations are addressed and covered by institutional policies. Drawing on a set of qualitative data from a Turkish university context, and based on the analyses using the ROAD-MAPPING framework (Dafouz E, Smit U, Appl Linguist 37:397–415, 2016) we found that although EMI is perceived to contribute to the development of English language proficiency, a number of factors appeared to constrain the students’ efforts to learn through EMI due to the lack of clear EMI management policies. We offer several curricular and pedagogical implications from the students’ lens to the EMI universities. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.