English medium education in basic and higher education: lessons learned from across the globe

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• Mark Levy, John Simpson, Ann Veitch (British Council)
• Monday 16 November 2020, 16:00-17:30
• Online.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Karen Forbes.

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The British Council works globally in supporting governments and institutions to address some of the challenges faced in providing quality education in bi/multilingual education systems, or where English is an additional language but is the medium of instruction for all or part of the education system (EME). Where EME is viewed as means of gaining fluency in the language, two distinct activities may be conflated in the debate on language of learning and teaching: learning a language (English) and learning in a language (English medium), a much more challenging task whose success is dependent on cognitive and academic language proficiency. This session will present our approach and some of our work in this area in Basic Education (BE) and Higher Education (HE) and across different contexts, specifically Sub-Saharan Africa and Spain. In low and middle income countries, EME in BE can be characterised as complex, challenging and controversial. We will look at the evidence-based approach, promoting relevant research findings on the relationship between medium of education and learning outcomes, that the British Council adopts when advising Ministries of Education on English in BE. In Spain, multilingual, bilingual education and CLIL is mainstreamed, and the latest official figures (18-19) show that 36.8% of primary and 35.3% of secondary schools offer subjects taught in English. The only national Bilingual Education Programme, a collaboration between the Spanish Ministry of Education, the British Council and 10 regional governments, is about to celebrate its 25th anniversary. Pulling on the learning from our own direct involvement, we will reflect on factors that appear to make the difference between success and failure and on the challenges that still remain. Moreover, over the past decades, there has been rapid growth in EME in HE. We will reflect on the negative and positive impacts of this growth, the implications for organisations like the British Council in promoting quality and successful learning outcomes through EME , and discuss some of the difficulties in having a global approach – as we do with EME in BE in low and middle income countries – to this phenomena.

This talk is part of the Second Language Education Group series.

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