【Article by EMI Resource Center】

On the morning of December 2, the NCCU EMI Resource Center successfully hosted the EMI lecture titled "EMI at NTHU and the Department of Electrical Engineering: My Personal Practice and Reflection." The lecture invited the guest speaker Professor Yi-Wen Liu, Distinguished Professor of Department of Electrical Engineering and Associate Vice President of the Office of Academic Affairs at National Tsing Hua University, along with two panelists: Professor Tsung-Jen Shih, Professor of College of Communication and Director of Media Research & Development Center, NCCU, and Professor Hsiu-Chuan Hsu Associate Professor of Graduate Institute of Applied Physics, NCCU. The speakers shared their experiences and challenges in EMI teaching across different fields. The lecture was moderated by Professor Siaw-Fong Chung, Director of the EMI Resource Center, with Professor Yi-Ning Chen, Executive Director of the Bilingual and Multicultural Promotion Office delivering the opening speech.

In her opening remarks, Executive Director Yi-Ning Chen emphasized the critical role of the EMI Resource Center in the bilingual education program, noting that teacher training and EMI teaching are highly specialized skills. She explained that EMI courses, whether in the aspect of course delivery or curriculum design, are both significantly different from traditional Chinese-medium courses. She also shared her recent interaction with Distinguished Professor Yi-Wen Liu during a Ministry of Education meeting, where she gained insights into National Tsing Hua University’s strategies and experiences in promoting EMI education. As Professor Liu comes from an engineering background, she believed his talk would provide important inspiration for the development of EMI teaching in National Chengchi University’s College of Science and College of Informatics.

Distinguished Professor Yi-Wen Liu began by reviewing the development and transformation of EMI teaching at the Department of Electrical Engineering at National Tsing Hua University since 2004. He used his course "Introduction to Digital Signal Processing" as an example to discuss the application and challenges of EMI in science and engineering courses. He specifically mentioned the design of “two discussion classes”, distinguishing between follow-up and homework with varying levels of difficulty, and encouraging students to actively ask questions and solve problems in class through a grading incentive system. Additionally, Distinguished Professor Liu offered discussion sessions in both Chinese and English, encouraging students to engage in English learning. As a result, most of the students in the over 100 people course chose the English discussion sessions. However, he also pointed out ongoing challenges, such as the fairness of the grading incentive system and how to balance an engaging teaching style with a more traditional one. At last, Professor Liu shared the outcomes, challenges, and future vision of Tsing Hua University’s EMI program, particularly in terms of institutional development and maintaining teaching quality.

Next, Professor Tsung-Jen Shih and Associate Professor Hsiu-Chuan Hsu each shared their own experiences on EMI teaching. Professor Shih’s presentation, titled "Reflections on EMI Course Design: Teaching for Diverse Audiences and Purposes," explored the application of EMI in multicultural education. He highlighted the challenge of balancing localization and internationalization in courses with over 50% international students, noting that students from diverse cultural backgrounds bring a broader range of perspectives and discussions to the classroom.

Associate Professor Hsiu-Chuan Hsu presented on "EMI in Applied Physics," discussing the challenges and strategies of implementing EMI in the field of physics. She shared her experience of teaching physics concepts in English, noting that students' understanding may be limited by language barriers. She also reflected on her participation in an EMI training program co-organized by the EMI Resource Center and AIT, enabling her to utilize Bloom’s Taxonomy to ensure student comprehension and kept students engaged through mini-lectures and flash quizzes to assess their understanding of key concepts.

During the discussion session, the speakers and panelists responded to questions from the audience. When asked how to enhance student motivation for EMI courses, Distinguished Professor Liu emphasized that the expertise of the instructor is a key factor in whether students choose to enroll in the course. He also discussed how the schedule of Chinese and English discussion sessions could encourage greater student participation in English-language courses. Professor Shih added that balancing the number of students in Chinese and English courses is a current challenge, but he hoped that EMI education would become more widespread in the future, so that language would no longer be a barrier to students’ learning motivation.

This lecture provided rich insights into EMI teaching and fostered interaction across universities in the Taiwan University System. We would like to thank Distinguished Professor Yi-Wen Liu, Professor Tsung-Jen Shih, and Associate Professor Hsiu-Chuan Hsu for their excellent presentations. The EMI Resource Center is currently collaborating with National Tsing Hua University to plan training events for the upcoming semester. We look forward to more meaningful activities in the future!

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