English Medium Instruction in Secondary Education: Policy, Challenges and Practices in Science Classrooms

Jack Pun presents best practices in pedagogy and teaching to facilitate effective content-subject learning at the secondary school level.

Increasingly, parents are sending their children to English Medium Instruction (EMI) secondary schools in their home countries, to prepare them for full immersion in EMI in English native-speaking countries. The book explores the teaching and learning processes in EMI senior secondary science classrooms based in thirty secondary schools in Hong Kong. Conducting analyses of classroom, teacher and student perception data, the author discusses the issues of teaching science through the medium of English in secondary schools, the implications and applications for professional development of science teachers and other content-subject teachers, and suggests strategies for teaching science in different EMI contexts.

This volume is highly relevant to scholars in the field of educational linguistics, particularly in English language teaching, content-based instruction, content and language integrated learning, and English as a medium of instruction. It is also useful to education policymakers, school teachers, research students, English and education majors.

Jack Pun is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the City University of Hong Kong. He completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford, which explored the teaching and learning process in EMI science classrooms, with a special focus on classroom interactions, use of codeswitching, and teachers’ and students’ views of EMI. His research interests lie in EMI and health communication. His research has been published in journals such as ELT Journal, Language Teaching, RELC Journal, Journal of English for Academic Purposes and International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. He is associate editor of Journal of Research in Science & Technological Education, and published two books in EMI: Teaching and Learning in English Medium Instruction: An Introduction (with Jack C. Richards) and Research Methods in English Medium Instruction (with Samantha Curle) by Routledge.