Korean University Students' Satisfaction with English-Medium Instruction (EMI)

Abstract

As English has positioned itself as a lingua franca in various fields including academia, the importance of acquiring fluent English proficiency in South Korea is emphasized. As a way of improving its citizens’ English proficiency, the Korean government implemented English-medium instruction (EMI) in higher education. However, there have been conflicting discussion regarding the effectiveness of EMI in developing English proficiency as well as the satisfaction with EMI. This study aimed to investigate how university students in Korea perceive EMI as well as how their satisfaction with EMI differ across different majors, year and English proficiency levels. The study implemented the descriptive statistics method to examine the overall satisfaction with EMI and one-way ANOVA to identify the relationships between major, year, English proficiency and satisfaction with EMI, respectively. A total of 139 Korean university students from six different majors participated in electronic questionnaire survey. The results of this study reveal that Korean university students have moderate attitudes toward and satisfaction with EMI, scoring 3.37 out of the 5-point Likert scale. The outcomes of ANOVA analysis present that there is no significant differences found of the independent variables’ (major, year and English proficiency) effect on the satisfaction level with EMI. However, it was found that there is a meaningful difference across students’ self-perceived English proficiency on their satisfaction with EMI, implying that the higher English proficiency the students perceived they had, the more they were satisfied with EMI.