South Korean higher education English-medium instruction (EMI) policy

Abstract

In the past two decades, South Korean universities’ ‘top-down’ implementation of English-medium instruction (EMI) policy has been critiqued for inadequately addressing the linguistic challenges students and instructors face (Kim, 2017). Research suggests that rapid implementation of such policy is primarily motivated by the pursuit of internationalisation, where global ranking takes precedence over the appropriateness of the policy (D. W. Cho, 2012) resulting in issues of injustices (Williams & Stelma, 2022). As a result, of these injustices, taking EMI courses is not a popular choice amongst South Korean higher education students.