Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
The 8th JAAL in JACET (Japan Association for Applied Linguistics), Osaka, Japonya, 6 - 07 Aralık 2025, ss.8, (Özet Bildiri)
As English-medium instruction (EMI) expands across diverse higher education contexts, student perspectives are essential for understanding how disciplinary practices and institutional policies shape learning. Despite some large-scale studies aiming to reveal Turkish students’ views on EMI contexts (e.g., Macaro & Akincioglu, 2018), their lived experiences across and within faculties remain underexplored qualitatively. The present study draws on 100 peer-to-peer interviews conducted across five faculties (Architecture, Arts & Sciences, Economics and Administrative Sciences, Engineering, and Education) at a Turkish EMI university, where the student-led design fostered openness and reduced the potential influence of researcher presence. The dataset was analyzed through thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), examining students’ perspectives on EMI regarding affordances and constraints, instructional practices, learning needs and strategies. Findings reveal both shared and discipline-specific themes. Across faculties, students consistently characterized English as the language of science, framing EMI as a gateway to global knowledge and future professional mobility. While acknowledging its benefits, they also pointed to challenges such as terminological overload, varying levels of readiness, and passive lecture styles. The findings also revealed disciplinary differences in barriers to classroom participation and communication, emphasis on globalization and opportunities abroad, challenges linked to mandatory internships and L1 use, dense technical terminology, and concerns about the mismatch between English-medium training and national job requirements or examinations. Students’ reported strategies such as peer collaboration, bilingual note-taking, pre-class preparation, and increasing reliance on AI tools further underscore their adaptive agency in navigating EMI. Situated in Türkiye, a non-Anglophone context sharing many parallels with Japan, this study foregrounds cross-disciplinary contrasts alongside shared challenges and argues for the design of discipline-sensitive EMI faculty training frameworks that go beyond generic language support. The findings stress the need for tailoring EMI to disciplinary epistemologies in multilingual higher education contexts.