A Review of English-medium Instruction in South Korean High Education

Abstract

The implementation of English-medium instruction (EMI) has encountered challenges and difficulties at all levels of education and diversity around the world, particularly in high education. To gain a broader sense of the EMI implementation environment, this study, taking existing EMI studies in South Korean universities as its reference, examined the following questions: (1) What are the contents of the Korean HE EMI classroom? (2) What are Korean HE EMI classrooms like? (3) What are the attitudes towards EMI from the research? Based on an analysis of 40 empirical studies from 2008 to 2020, the results show that the contents are mainly in engineering-related majors crossing different academic years; the South Korean EMI classroom is challenging in the following three main binary relations: lecturing vs. verbal participation/interactive activities, students' higher vs. lower English proficiency, and achievements in English proficiency vs. content knowledge, which are also the universal challenges in the EFL EMI environment; and the attitudes, perceptions, and motivations of both students and professors were positive in general. This paper expects to provide references for future EFL EMI studies in different environments.