Investigating Teachers’ and Learners’ strategies to Implement English as a Medium of Instruction.

Abstract

The present study aims to uncover different strategies that teachers and learners use to implement English as a medium of instruction in a successful way at the Institute of Biology at Mila University Center.Four Questions are raised:(1)What are the strategies that teachers use to implement EMI successfully in class? (2) What are the strategies that learners use to understand the content in English ? (3) What challenges do teachers face when incorporating EMI ,and how do they address these challenges ? (4) What challenges do learners face when incorporating EMI ,and how do they address these challenges? To answer the resarch questions, the present research adopts a qualitative method. In order to gather data about students’ and teachers’ strategies, a questionnaire was administered to fifty (50) first-year students of biology at Mila University Center, in addition to an interview that was conducted with seven (7) teachers in the same department. The findings revealed that learners utilize strategies such as asking questions, self-encouragement, organization, seeking clarification, practicing, and repetition. While teachers utilize limited teaching strategies to facilitate EMI, ranging from delivering lectures while explaining concepts simultaneously to utilizing planners and present situations to acquire scientific terminology. Moreover, findings revealed that the majority of the participants had challenges using English as a medium of instruction. It ends with some recommendations for both teachers and students and suggestion for further research.