Abstract:

English as a medium of instruction (EMI) in higher education institutions is of utmost importance for those interested in developing the internationalization of academic education. In terms of educational offer, the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca provides English-medium courses in several fields of engineering, including Civil Engineering. The methodology of this work is based on the interpretative group of methods, focusing on understanding the issue of course design in Higher Education Institutions in a comprehensive, holistic way. By using the interpretive methods, we focused on analytically disclosing the meaning-making practices, while showing how they arrange in order to generate observable outcomes. It has allowed us to recognize our connection to the phenomena under investigation. The curricula combines theoretical knowledge with applications practiced via projects, lab activities and site practical work, to offer the students the skills and abilities needed on the labor market. For an effective course design we started with understanding who our students were, deciding what we wanted them to learn; determining how we would measure student learning and planning activities, assignments and materials that support student learning. The Department of Modern Languages and Communication works closely with the EMI students, by providing language seminars packed with language activities, which bridge the gap between the mainly receptive vocabulary (obtained through reading / listening at the specialized courses) by activating the productive vocabulary (through speaking / writing activities), in close connection with the CEFR definition of language activities as what a learner is “able to do with a language”. EMI at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca started in the mid-1990s, but historically speaking, the Civil Engineering specialization has a tradition of training large numbers of international students. In 2003, on the celebration of its semi-centenary, the Faculty of Civil Engineering had a turn out 13,915 graduates, out of which 600 were international students (from Greece, Vietnam, Jordan, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Algeria), many of whom are currently successful businessmen, planners, researchers or members of the academia. Official documents of this faculty outline the principles and objectives which underlie EMI in this higher education institution. It is essential that, whatever the scope of the EMI program, it should not lose direction and momentum, its main features should continue to provide opportunities for reinforcing language, but at the same time, it should be designed to include a greater range of resources for the integrated learning of content and language. In terms of results, by asking ourselves these questions at the onset of the course design process, we were able to focus more concretely on learning outcomes, which has proven to increase student learning substantially as opposed to merely force-fitting large quantities of content into the courses.

Keywords:

English medium instruction (EMI), higher education, civil engineering, course design, integrated learning of content and language.