【Article by EMI Resource Centre】

To support NCCU faculty members in offering English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) courses, the University’s EMI Resource Centre is holding a series of faculty development events. In this session, Dr. Hsinyen Lai, who teaches at the School of International Relations, University of St. Andrews, United Kingdom, gave a talk titled “A Non-native Speaker Teaching in An English-Speaking Country.” The event drew enthusiastic participation from faculty members across the University’s colleges and was moderated by Mei-Chuan Wei, Director of the EMI Resource Centre.

Hsinyen Lai is an NCCU alumnus who graduated from the undergraduate program of the Department of Arabic Language and Culture. After completing his master’s degree in Taiwan, he went on to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where he earned his PhD in international relations, specializing in politics and international relations in the Middle East. Hsinyen Lai said that he had never studied or lived in an English-speaking country before his doctoral studies. He therefore felt very fortunate to have secured a teaching position at the University of St. Andrews right after receiving his doctorate. As a non-native English-speaking teacher, Hsinyen Lai said that his teaching career has been a hard-fought struggle from the very beginning.

Hsinyen Lai opened the talk with a brief introduction to seven teaching formats of at UK universities: lecture, tutorial, seminar, dissertation supervision, office hours, module coordination, and marking. He noted that although class sizes at most UK universities are growing because of cost considerations, the University of St. Andrews still strives to keep each class at an average of 20 to 23 students, so as not to place excessive teaching pressure on its staff.

Prior to the event, the EMI Centre asked registered faculty members to share what they most hoped to learn from the talk, as well as the biggest challenges they had encountered in teaching their own EMI courses. Drawing on this information and on his own experience of teaching in the UK, Hsinyen Lai identified the issues that worry EMI instructors most, including pronunciation and accent, students not being able to follow, not knowing how to answer tough questions, and writing comments and feedback on students’ papers in English. He then drew on his first-hand experience to walk through five major challenges of teaching EMI courses, offering suggestions for dealing with each.

Hsinyen Lai stressed that non-native English-speaking EMI teachers often find questions running through their minds while lecturing: “Is my grammar correct?” “Can students understand my pronunciation and accent?” “Will native English-speaking students find my English odd?” Fluency and confidence are not the same thing, he said. He advised that when lecturing, what matters most is that students can understand, and that sentences should not be too long. Pace and rhythm, he added, depend on the situation: in a small class, the flow of the session matters more, whereas in a large class, the speed of delivery matters more. As for the challenge of answering students’ questions, Hsinyen Lai said that students’ accents are one difficulty, but an even greater one for a non-native teacher who did not grow up in the same cultural environment is the heavy use of slang when students speak or ask questions. Teaching in English, he said, is much like performing on stage: no performance is ever perfect, so there is no need to dwell on a few misspoken words or sentences. Correcting oneself naturally and carrying on with the lecture is how a good performer handles it.

Summing up his years of teaching in the UK, Hsinyen Lai offered the faculty members several strategies for teaching EMI courses. At the start of a course, he said, teachers can let students get to know them and, in doing so, let students know that they are not native English speakers. On language anxiety, Hsinyen Lai believes that concentrating on course content helps shift attention away from the anxiety. He also suggested that teachers offering an EMI course for the first time can prepare a full script; once they have taught the course for some time and grown familiar with it, they will speak with greater ease and confidence. In his conclusion, Hsinyen Lai offered three principles for the participants’ reference: first, clarity matters more than fluency in lecturing; second, a clear course structure and discussion questions prepared in advance can help offset language challenges; and third, letting students know that a non-native English-speaking teacher is continually working on their own English is in itself an encouragement to non-native English-speaking students.

During the discussion session, faculty members from the Graduate Institute of Applied Physics and the Department of Psychology who teach undergraduate EMI courses shared their teaching experiences and course designs. Both use group discussion, placing international and local students together in each group in the hope of encouraging students to learn from one another, and especially in the hope that local students will take part in the discussion. Both observed, however, that local students appear to lack confidence and are less proactive in participating. Another participant noted that EMI courses in Taiwan often bring together students with varying levels of English proficiency, and asked how lecturers should strike the right balance. Hsinyen Lai replied that even in the UK he has students from non-English-speaking countries; his approach is to present the key content on slides and remind students to pay close attention to it.

In her closing remarks, Mei-Chuan Wei said that the experiences shared by the participating faculty members clearly show that promoting EMI courses requires attention to both language and teaching quality. Beyond faculty development activities and resources, student learning is also key, particularly students’ ability to learn course content through English. To that end, Mei-Chuan Wei said, in addition to its regular one-on-one writing consultation service and AI-assisted writing workshops, the EMI Resource Centre will hold a campus English presentation competition on December 10, and NCCU students are warmly encouraged to sign up.