A Study On EMI Teacher Identity In Higher Education Institutions

In the wave of globalization and "double first-class" construction project in Chinese universities,disciplinary construction and teacher development also need to be internationalized.On the one hand,EMI courses springs up as higher education institutions intend to build “first-class disciplines” to align with international academic discourse and create an international environment for teaching and research.On the other hand,research of identity and cognition of EMI teachers finds its value to be investigated,since it responds to theoretical and practical problems of EMI teacher development situated in Chinese educational background.Drawing upon sociocultural theory,a framework of four-dimension and eight-factor is established.Guided by quantitative and qualitative methods,the study received questionnaires from 42 EMI teachers in S-university and conducted semi-structured interview on 5 of them and observed 6 courses by purposefully selecting to probe into two questions:(1)What is the status quo of EMI teachers’ identity in Chinese university?Is there any difference in gender and age of EMI teachers’ identity?(2)What are the core influencing factors of EMI teachers’ identity from the perspective of sociocultural theory?The results indicate that:(1)The overall status of EMI teacher identity is above the medium level.Specifically,four dimensions of their identity is unbalanced: occupational,professional and personal identities are relatively high;while situational identity is close to a low level.Among all 8 factors,maximum mean value is professional value while organizational support is the lowest.Female EMI teachers’ role identity is higher than male,except for that,there is no significant gender difference in EMI teachers’ identity.There are significant differences in EMI teachers’ identity among 3 age groups: The younger EMI teachers are,the more positive attitude they tend to have.(2)From the perspective of sociocultural theory,the influencing factors of EMI teachers’ identity can be divided into three levels: social factors are global tendency of EMI teaching and recognition received from public;school factors are top-level design,policy support,school culture,teaching management,conferring of academic titles,etc.;individual factors are professional knowledge and language proficiency,techniques and methodologies of EMI teaching,enthusiasm and motivation,etc.It concluded with some implications to improve EMI teachers’ identity from three mentioned aspects.First,national educational intuitions should standardize education policies and regulations,gain more recognition from the public and create an international atmosphere for EMI teaching.Second,as for school,more emphasis should be paid on administrative management,favorable school culture,EMI teacher cultivation and course construction.Last but not least,EMI teachers should constantly improve language proficiency and enrich their pedagogical and pedagogical content knowledge(PCK)by putting the theory into practice with immediate reflection.