A Comparison of English-mediated Instruction in Korean and Nordic Higher Education

English-mediated instruction (EMI) is a teaching approach in which the course content of any given subject (e.g., engineering or medicine) is delivered exclusively in English. AS often as not, English is not the first language (L1) of the majority of instructor and student populations (Airey & Linder, 2006). The hallmark of EMI is to help English as a foreign language (EFL) students to simultaneously master both content knowledge and English skills so that they can function more successfully in the global market (Coleman, 2006). Influenced by the globalization and internationalization of higher education, English has become the dominant language of science and scholarship (Ammon, 2001; Wilson, 2002). One evidence of such phenomena is a dramatic increase of EMI courses across many EFL countries, such as East Asia (e.g., Korea, China, and Japan) and several Nordic countries (e.g., Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden), which have strong academic reputations and high levels of English proficiency. A global expansion of EMI courses is an inevitable phenomenon (Airey et al., 2017). In response to the expansion of EMI courses, somewhat different reactions have arisen among EMI professors in Korea and Nordic higher education contexts. This article presents a comparative analysis of English-mediated instruction (EMI) between Korean and Nordic higher education contexts. In the first section, a rationale for this article is provided. After a brief description of the research method in the second part, the third section analyzes background information on the motivation for the implementation of EMI policy, linguistic environments, and philosophy of teaching and learning between two contexts. Based on the research literature as well as the researcher’s insight from her involvement in EMI workshops, teaching consultations, and analyses of Korean professors’ EMI lessons, the next section offers pedagogical implications for more effective implementation of EMI in EFL universities like the ones in Korea. The final section discusses the value of this study and directions for further research.