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Although content-area courses adopting English-medium (EM) instruction have become more widespread in university-level settings in response to the internationalization of higher education (de Wit, 2002), many operate on the unspoken and inaccurate assumptions that all the students and teachers are capable of learning or teaching content in English (Erling & Hilgendorf, 2006a, 2006b). This paper aims to provide an in-depth understanding of how students, teachers, and administrators perceive the design, implementation, and effectiveness of EM curriculum through a qualitative case study on a university campus in Taiwan. Interviews with three administrators, four teachers, and twenty-four students were conducted. Data were reconstructed and analyzed based on Carspecken's (1996) reconstructive analysis. The findings showed great satisfaction with the socio-cultural aspects of content learning and enhanced English abilities but unanimous concerns over the discipline-specific knowledge and English abilities, rendering unsatisfactory feelings toward the proportional design of the immersion program with the implementation of the English-only policy. The paper, thus, calls for additional attention to EM curriculum design and implementation involving the joint efforts of language and content teachers. Pedagogical implications and directions for future research are also provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article details a mixed methods study conducted during the 2007–2008 academic year at the National Chengchi University (NCCU) in Taipei Taiwan. It contributes to discourse examining the opportunities and challenges of international student enrollments in institutions of higher learning around the globe. In scope it details an empirical study exploring the dispositions of NCCU international students in terms of their academic and social spheres. Trends in Taiwan reflect traditional East Asian patterns; substantial numbers of university students from Taiwan studied in the United States and Britain while very few incoming international students chose the island nation as a host destination. In recent years the influx of international students to Taiwan has increased significantly, rising from 6,380 in 2001 to 21,005 in 2007 (Ko, , 2008). The use of both quantitative and qualitative methods provided clarity and extended critical interpretations of the issues and dilemmas surrounding the international student experience in Taiwan. Results indicate that the capability of the NCCU as a host institution to sustain and attract increasing numbers of incoming international students is linked to factors such as the unique opportunity to study traditional as opposed to simplified Chinese characters, the availability and accessibility of Taiwan government sponsored scholarships, and the high standard of the NCCU Mandarin Studies program. Implications suggest that universities committed to internationalization are called to address the realities—both positive and negative—of operating as globally competitive institutions. As such, attracting the right kind of international students at the NCCU and determining standards for their contribution to campus life are more important goals than the total number of international students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines language practice in international higher education (HE) in non-Anglophone countries, with a focus on language choice and negotiation in engineering and science lab meetings among culturally and linguistically diverse students and professors. Analyses of 53 in-depth interviews with students and professors in a research university in Taiwan show that the professors addressed the linguistic diversity among domestic and international students by imposing an English policy or having an open policy for the lab meetings. Whatever the policy is, the language choice was subject to constant negotiations among all lab members, leading to dynamic flows and configurations of translanguaging. The language choice and negotiation is embedded in the local-global tensions in that local students' language preference is the local language Chinese, while international students' language preference is the global lingua franca English. The study suggests that multilingual multimodal academic communication in international HE is natural but not all language choices are equally inclusive and conducive to learning for all members. This study has provided a comprehensive picture and nuanced analyses of language choice in multilingual lab meetings. Future research with discourse data would enrich the present findings to further explicate optimal translanguaging practices in international HE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades many East Asian countries have initiated ambitious policies to increase their global prominence as education hubs. This article examines the development of Taiwan’s international student recruitment policies from 1950 to 2011, exemplifying the case in a non-Western, non-English speaking context. While Taiwan’s case is distinctive with the dominance of noneconomic factors in shaping the state policy orientation and agendas, the strong role of the state and the Confucian model of higher education constitute a valid example of developments in the internationalization of higher education in East Asia. The analysis further shows that the intertwining forces of localization, nationalization, and globalization influenced the policy development throughout three stages of the trajectory. These findings demonstrate the transformationalist viewpoint of globalization and support the “glonacal agency approach” proposed by Rhoades and Marginson claiming that local, national, and global domains are simultaneously significant in understanding globalization and higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]