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ABSTRACT
This article reports a case study, involving eight students taking an EMI undergraduate program, and one lecturer handling one course of the program at one university in Phnom Penh, a capital city of Cambodia. The analysis of empirical data garnered from interviews and classroom observations reveals that the students faced such serious challenges as: vocabulary-new words and key terms and content or disciplinary knowledge. The participants portrayed themselves as potential EMI students who actively adopted both individual and collaborative learning strategies to help them achieve learning outcomes in the program. The analysis also shows that the EMI students in this study received less support and language-oriented instruction from the lecturers. The authors, thus, argue that EMI programs should be revisited to equip the students with both the English language and content knowledge and to prepare them for international professional qualifications.
Keywords: Cambodian undergraduate students, disciplinary knowledge, English-medium instruction (EMI), learning strategies
Introduction
An EMI program has been established and enacted in the contemporary English Language Teaching (ELT) education in Cambodia for the last decade. First, the establishment of the program was to respond to the development of ELT education and English language use in Cambodia. Moore and Bounchan (2010a) observe that ELT in Cambodia has developed a status from which English was taught by English native speaking professionals in a few decades ago to which English is now taught by Cambodian ELT professionals. Likewise, English used to be spoken by some Cambodians with non-Cambodian English speakers, but now it is spoken among Cambodians themselves, especially among young Cambodians. Second, the program was initiated with confidence that Cambodian students have graduated from senior high schools, especially from international schools, with English competence appropriate for following a program in which English is used as a medium of instruction (EMI). Third, it was perhaps to fulfill the demand in Cambodian society moving to the integration of ASEAN community in 2015. This article reports a case study undertaken in early 2013. It firstly describes the current curriculum of a four-year EMI program at the Department of International Studies of the Institute of Foreign Languages of the Royal University of Phnom Penh, a prominent state university in Cambodia. This background information is useful for contextualizing this research project...