Institutional Strategies on Internationalisation and English-Medium Instruction in Romanian Higher Education: A Case Study

In recent years, Romania has started to develop a fully-fledged national internationalisation strategy targeting both internationalisation of education and of research (Deca and Fiț 2015). The strategy is aimed at encouraging and financially supporting higher-education institutions (HEIs) to offer joint degrees with universities from abroad and to undertake curricular reforms in order to provide full programmes in international languages (especially in English). In this context, English-medium instruction (EMI) is seen as a way to develop internationalisation at the institutional level, to promote staff and student mobilities, and to improve university ranking, so all important Romanian universities have included these objectives in their strategic plans. However, the actions taken in this direction are less visible, and only a small number of EMI-based study programmes have been included in the study offer in the last few years. Thus, in this article, we examine how institutional policies and strategies with regard to internationalisation and EMI are implemented at the University of Craiova (UCv), including the types of programmes and language use, and how it is conceptualised by different stakeholders (students and academic staff). To this purpose, we analyse a more ‘experienced’ English-taught programme at UCv, namely the Bachelor specialisation in Computer Science (English), started in 1993