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Academic English Language Policies and Practices of English-Medium Instruction Universities in Turkey from Policy Actors’ Eyes

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English as the Medium of Instruction in Turkish Higher Education

Part of the book series: Multilingual Education ((MULT,volume 40))

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Abstract

Recently, there has been a substantial rise in the number of English-medium instruction (EMI) programs all around the world. This profound linguistic transformation has drawn researchers’ attention to several issues around the delivery of courses via EMI. However, research seems to be scarce concerning academic language policies and practices. This chapter attempts to narrow this gap in the Turkish higher education context by exploring language policy actors’ perspectives about their institutions’ academic English language policies and practices informed by quantitative and qualitative data collected through survey questionnaires and interviews with 72 Turkish lecturers from three long-established EMI universities. The study demonstrates that overall, lecturers are familiar with the existing policies and practices concerning students’ and teaching staff’s English. They favour institutional language admission and recruitment policies on English proficiency despite acknowledging their being grounded in native English standards. Likewise, agreeing on the usefulness of pre-faculty and faculty language support, most do not find them adequate for students to manage their academic tasks, particularly for discipline-specific language use and to follow so-called academic English standards. The results suggest that lecturers’ views are guided by certain language ideologies, which are also elevated by institutional policies through various language policy mechanisms.

This chapter was largely generated from the data collected for the first author’s PhD project entitled ‘Turkish lecturers’ and students’ perceptions of English in English-medium universities’, which was completed under the supervision of the second author.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy Univeristy, Burdur, Turkey

    Ali Karakaş

  2. University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

    Jennifer Jenkins

Authors
  1. Ali Karakaş
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  2. Jennifer Jenkins
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Correspondence to Ali Karakaş .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. English Language Teaching, Faculty of Education, Çukurova University, Saricam, Adana, Turkey

    Yasemin Kirkgöz

  2. English Language Teaching, Faculty of Education, Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy University, Burdur, Turkey

    Ali Karakaş

Appendix: Transcription Conventions

Appendix: Transcription Conventions

Symbols

Explanations

(.)

Pause of about one second or less

(2)

Pause of about two seconds, etc

XXX

Unable to transcribe (unintelligible word or words)

@

Laughter (length indicated by a number of @)

A

Ali (the researcher)

L1, L2, L3

EMI lecturers

[ ]

Overlapping utterances

=

Latched utterances

uh-huh

Used to indicate affirmation, agreement

/…/

Speech not included in the example as material is irrelevant

< >

My additional information to make meaning clear

I

Italics are used to highlight issues under discussion in the extracts

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Karakaş, A., Jenkins, J. (2022). Academic English Language Policies and Practices of English-Medium Instruction Universities in Turkey from Policy Actors’ Eyes. In: Kirkgöz, Y., Karakaş, A. (eds) English as the Medium of Instruction in Turkish Higher Education. Multilingual Education, vol 40. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88597-7_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88597-7_1

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