In higher education, using English as a language of instruction has a marked negative impact on learning outcomes when it is not the student’s first language, according to a new study from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Swedish students were divided up into English- language and Swedish-language versions of an introductory course in programming, those students who were taught in English got worse results and more dropped out of the course prematurely.
English is widely used as a global language of instruction in higher education, which is known as English Medium Instruction or EMI. An important beginning point for EMI is that the language of instruction must not affect students’ learning quality. The main goal is that a student taking a course in English should learn just as well as a student studying in their first language. but a new study now casts doubt on this assumption.
Swedish students who did the course in which the language of instruction was English performed significantly worse and they also dropped out to a much higher degree compared with students who took the same course in Swedish.
Hans Malmstrom, Professor at the Department of Communication and Learning in Science at Chalmers University of Technology says that, in this field our study is unusual because the groups were assigned on a completely random basis. This means which only influencing factor was the language of instruction and we were shocked by the results.
For an introductory course in programming, when 2,263 students registered, they were randomly divided into either an English or a Swedish version of the course. The course was completely digital and self-paced. Students’ performance was measured based on the number of properly answered test questions and on how many left the course without completing it. With both versions of the course, researchers compared the number of questions answered and emerged that those who studied in Swedish gave the correct answers to 73 percent more questions in the test on average.
Viggo Kann, Professor of Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology says that, someone who drops out is not likely to have learnt as much as someone who completes the course. So, we see in this that English as the language of instruction can lead to less learning outcomes.
The study now increases issues about the advantages and disadvantages of having such a large proportion of teaching at universities and higher education institutions in English, something that is common in Sweden as well as in other countries where English is not the first language for the majority of the population.
Malmstrom says that, a single study should not be used as the basic for a radical overhaul of the language or teaching policy in higher education nor at local national level. However, from this research we believe that the results can contribute to a more informed discussion about the consequences of using English as the language of instruction.
