(Reported by Ting-Yu Huang, Tamkang campus)
On November 15 at noon, the Center for Teacher Professional Development TKU invited EMI center section chief, associate professor Ming-Huei Lin, to speak under the topic “Creating the interactive EMI class model: techniques as easy as 123”. Over 40 teachers were in attendance. English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) is a teaching model that Tamkang is actively promoting, where courses are taught in English in order to enhance students’ international perspectives and boost their competitiveness in the job market.
Professor Lin mentioned that in most EMI classes, the most common problem teachers runs into is the fear that students have towards an EMI environment. This may make students afraid of speaking up, or they may be too used to communicating in Chinese. Thus he emphasizes that when using EMI, students’ confidence towards their own English skills will be key. Associate professor Lin shares his teaching methods, where he initially start with simple questions, and gradually increase their difficulty levels in order to establish students’ confidence. As for the degree of student response in the classroom, he proposed the reinforcement theory, where through positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, punishment, and extinction and other approaches to set suitable methods for meet students’ needs, and improve the quality of interactions in the classroom. He suggests teachers refer to the students’ characteristics to use the appropriate measures to simulate classroom interactions and discussions.
Next, associate professor Lin provide 7 task-based teaching methods: information-gap, opinion-gap, reasoning-gap, unfocused, focused, input- providing and output-providing. Optimally, each task can be designed to be 15-20 minutes in length, and the task chosen can be based on the design and theme of the course. Through these, the students can be trained to use actual language to carry out the exchange and application of knowledge, thus enhancing students’ motivation and the results for their learning. Lecturer Yuan-Ching Wang from the Department of Artificial Intelligence said that he has thought about using EMI as his main teaching aim in the future, and he felt he has learnt a lot from the techniques the speaker spoke of. The enhancement of theories in particular left an impression on him, as it could allow adjustments to be made to deal with problems that can come up during the teaching process, and can make student learning even more effective.
