English as a medium of instruction at a Chilean engineering school: Experiences in finance and industrial organization courses

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Highlights

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    EMI in Finance and Industrial Organization courses at a Chilean engineering school.

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    EMI does not decrease performance of native Spanish speakers students.

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    Performance differences mainly explained by student's previous grades.

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    Performance differences are not explained neither by gender nor attendance.

Abstract

Implementing English as a medium of instruction (EMI) in Latin American countries contributes to reducing language exchange isolation in the region and helps prepare higher education students for future labor opportunities. However, one of the main concerns around EMI is whether English instruction could negatively affect content acquisition. This paper examines if the performance of native Spanish speakers is affected by EMI. Specifically, it discusses experiences from finance and industrial organization courses given to industrial engineers at a Chilean university. The results of a multivariate analysis of tests and final grades show that performance differences can mainly be attributed to students’ performance in previous courses; only on rare occasions do language, gender, and attendance explain performance differences.

Section snippets

Objectives and contributions

The use of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) has grown rapidly over the last two decades. According to Macaro (2018), this is mainly due to two factors: (i) the private education sector's use of EMI to differentiate itself from the public sector, which has forced the latter to adopt EMI as well; and (ii) the need for secondary schools to employ EMI to prepare their students for higher education (HE). With respect to HE institutions, Wächter and Maiworm (2014) find that between 2001 and

Internationalization

Implementing EMI frequently comes as part of the internationalization policies of HE, which in the LA region are not considered as important as in other regions. The 2010 IAU survey4 shows that only 51% of LA institutions consider the process of internationalization to have a high level of importance, compared with 71% in Europe and 68% in North America.5

Course details

As part of a larger trend toward internationalization, the Chilean engineering school studied here begun implementing EMI in 2015. The aim is to prepare students to be what the university terms global engineers – meaning that, upon graduation, they should be capable of working in any company worldwide. The university has also stated that these English courses can help prepare current students for study-abroad experiences before and after graduation and encourage the enrollment of

Finance course

Table 7 shows the results when applying the model for each of the tests and the final grade. In T1 and T2, the model was applied to the entire sample. However, in T3, the goodness of fit was shown to be poor. Thus, the sample was split by average GPA, because this variable best explains the difference in performance between students. Attendance does not statistically explain possible score differences. Students who have taken the course before do worse on the three tests, even in T3 which is

Discussion

The finding that EMI does not produce a drop in students’ grades aligns with the results of studies like Grift et al. (2012), Tatzl and Messnarz (2013), and Dafouz et al. (2014). However, there is also evidence–such as in Jochems (1991), Del Campo, Cancer, Pascual-Ezama, and Urquía-Grande (2015), and Civan and Coşkun (2016), to name a few–that suggests otherwise. Interestingly, positive results have mainly been found in cases where EMI is implemented across an entire program, rather than in

Conclusion

This work presents the positive results of implementing EMI in two different economics-related courses. The most important finding is that using English as the language of instruction does not lead to performance differences between students. The language variable in the industrial organization course is significant in only one of the four semesters. In the finance course, there is no clear evidence that the language of instruction causes performance differences between students. As discussed

Acknowledgement

Lorenzo Reus acknowledges financial support research for this study was supported by Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico [#11170012].

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