Content and language in EMI assessment practices: Challenges and beliefs at an Engineering Faculty in Turkey

With recent trends toward the internationalization of higher education, the number of English-medium programs at universities around the world has grown rapidly. Research on English-medium instruction (EMI) has examined stakeholders’ attitudes, classroom interaction, and students’ achievement in content subjects. However, what is missing from this growing body of work is research addressing issues of assessment in EMI contexts, where students’ English proficiency is not explicitly measured but where students are required to interpret and respond to assessment tasks in English. In this study, we address this research gap by examining assessment practices in an EMI engineering faculty. Employing qualitative research methods, data are collected through interviews and focus group discussions with university lecturers and students at an engineering faculty in Turkey in order to explore how lecturers and students perceive the role of language in EMI assessment and describe their own assessment practices. The findings shed light on teachers’ and students’ approaches to EMI assessment, including how students use the resources available in their linguistic repertoires to make sense of assessment tasks and how teachers approach students’ responses to assessment tasks with consideration for students’ language proficiency and preference. The findings have implications for EMI teachers' pedagogical practices as well as for EMI teacher training courses