English-medium higher education, the delivery of undergraduate or postgraduate programmes through English, is now a global phenomenon. As Macaro et al. (2018) indicate, there are higher education institutions throughout Asia and Europe which now offer specific programmes in English or have adopted English as the exclusive medium of instruction. For example, in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries such as Oman or the United Arab Emirates, the majority of higher education institutions have maintained an exclusive or partial English-medium policy since the 1980s or 1990s (Donn and Al-Manthri 2010). There may be a number of motivations for the partial or comprehensive adoption of English as a medium of instruction in countries where English is a second or foreign language. Macaro et al. (2018) suggest that one common and powerful motivator appears to be the dominance of English in international scientific communication and academic publication. If ESL students and academics are to engage with international science, the ability to construct and share knowledge through the medium of English is essential, and English-medium higher education is perceived to be the best way of achieving this.
Nevertheless, whatever the motivations for adopting English-medium instruction in countries with English as a second language (ESL) populations, there are widespread concerns about its implementation. Macaro et al. (2018) review 83 studies of English-medium instruction from ESL or EFL countries, and their findings do not present a positive picture. Although they found no clear evidence that English-medium instruction has a negative effect on content learning, they found little to suggest that it was having a positive impact on studentsā English language levels. They cite, for example Rogier (2012), a doctoral study which measured the language gains of Emirati students in English-medium higher education over a four-year period, using the International English Language Testing System (IELTS)1 as the comparative measure. This study indicated that after four years of full-time English-medium instruction, the participating students had made overall gains of no more than 0.5 of a band, which seems slight progress. Further, Macaro et al. (2018) found a widespread concern on the part of academics and students about student levels of English proficiency. Studies reporting staff and/or student concerns about low or inadequate levels of student proficiency in English were noted from Turkey (Basıbek et al. 2014), Spain (Doiz et al. 2011), France (Napoli and Sourisseau 2013), the UAE (Belhiah and Elhami 2015), Iraqi Kurdistan (Borg 2016) and Korea (Choi 2013) to list just a few. In each of these cases, academics considered the English proficiency of their students to be so low as to severely restrict learning.
My concern in this book is chiefly with one such English-medium higher education context: the countries of the GCC. The GCC is a strategic bloc, comprised of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait, with a stated mission to achieve regional economic and political integration (Hanieh 2018). One of the things the GCC countries share is an educational system in which primary and secondary education is conducted through the medium of Arabic but in which tertiary education is conducted largely through the medium of English (Donn and Al-Manthri 2010). This enforced transition from Arabic-medium secondary education to English-medium tertiary education poses young Arabs and the higher education institutions which they enter, with a significant problem. Even though almost all GCC higher education institutions run preparatory programmes from one to two years in duration, the levels of English with which students enter first year degree studies are markedly lower than the level they require to cope with their lectures, complete their assigned reading and write their assignments and exams (Belhiah and Elhami 2015; Ghobain 2015). In the UK and other countries where English remains the majority first language, higher education institutions generally require second language users of English to have an English language proficiency in the B2 or C1 bands of the Council of Europeās (2011) Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). In the UK, this is typically evidenced by an IELTS score of 6.0ā7.0 overall. In the GCC countries, despite some variation, they are consistently significantly lower. Stated requirements for IELTS across institutions in the GCC are usually in the 5ā5.5 band but as the majority of students enter their degree studies on the basis of institutionally administered language assessments, rather than IELTS/TOEFL assessments, actual levels of proficiency may well be rather lower. Arguably, a reasonable assessment for the majority of students entering higher education in the GCC would probably be CEFR B1, a whole CEFR band lower than their counterparts in the UK.
As it has been estimated that movement from B1 to B2 requires between 180 and 260 hours of guided study,2 there is a chasm between the linguistic resources students can deploy when they enter their studies and the linguistic challenges posed by the discourse they encounter in lectures, in reading material, in discussions with their tutors, and the level of discourse they must try to produce in their coursework and examinations. This linguistic chasm has significant impacts: it severely restricts studentsā ability to learn and to develop the āacademic literacyā skills they require to construct and share knowledge through the medium of English. It also provokes, as a consequence, specific strategic pedagogic responses from academics grappling with the fact that their studentsā low English proficiencies filter out much of their expository and explanatory discourse.
In this book, I want to do two things. My first objective is to highlight the problems posed by low entry-level English language proficiencies and the way higher education institutions and academics in the GCC currently respond to them. My second objective, drawing on contemporary theories of academic literacies and disciplinary teaching, is to suggest the outlines of an alternative solution.
Chapters 2 and 3 are preparatory. Chapter 2 provides a working definition of the concept of academic literacy as the ability to construct and share knowledge within specific academic contexts, drawing on recent work by Wingate (2015), Lillis et al. (2015), Lillis and Scott (2008), Bawarshi and Reiff (2010), and Swales (2016), amongst others. Chapter 3 complements Chapter 2 by considering the way the construction of academic literacies may be scaffolded (Woods et al. 1976; Mercer 1995). Specifically, the chapter considers a number of choices that higher education institutions face in planning the scaffolding of academic literacies. These choices concern who should receive academic literacy support; what degree of disciplinary specificity is necessary in this support; and what areas academic literacy support should emphasise. I shall offer exam...