Researching assessment in EMI

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of English Medium Instruction (EMI) in bilingual and multilingual contexts, plenty of research has been conducted to examine students’ achievements, classroom interaction and, more recently, teacher education. However, research focusing on assessment issues in EMI remains scarce. Considering the fact that students are inevitably assessed of their English knowledge in conjunction with their content knowledge in EMI assessment, there are concerns about whether EMI students’ learning progress is accurately measured. Other related questions include how to design valid assessment in EMI and how to better support students to tackle assessment in EMI. Hence, there is an urgent need to address the research gap on EMI assessment. This chapter will report a research project exploring the assessment practices in EMI. With a validated analytical framework, the research team analysed cognitive and linguistic demands of over 8,500 questions sampled from school textbooks, school-based examinations, and university entrance public examinations. The text/question analysis employed in this study revealed interesting patterns in different types of assessments and across different grade levels. These not only show the integral role played by language in EMI assessments but also illuminate valid assessment design and effective pedagogy in EMI.