Rises and falls of EMI courses in Korea: From national policy to institutional strategies

Abstract

As part of the internationalization of Higher Education, English-medium instruction (EMI) has expanded widely in universities in Korea. In the Korean context, EMI began as the government’s policy to recruit more international students, and the proportion of EMI courses became a criterion for the evaluation of and the government’s financial support for universities. In addition to the government’s top–down approach to introducing EMI into HE, universities, too, have aggressively implemented EMI in various disciplines to obtain high ratings for governmental financial support, and in domestic, and international, university rankings. For instance, the percentage of EMI courses at Korea University was 10.0% in 2003 and 35.7% in 2011. However, this rapid expansion of EMI in universities has caused a number of problems and encountered various criticisms, as institutions, lecturers, and students were not properly prepared for EMI. Because of the government’s decision to exclude a proportion of EMI from the university evaluation criteria, the number of EMI courses started to decrease (for Korea University, the ratio droped to 22.6% in 2023). Nevertheless, universities still maintain a certain proportion of EMI courses in their official curricula, which is the result of each university’s effort to internationalize their education. The findings regarding the rise and fall of EMI in the Korean context reported in this article will provide meaningful implications to other non-English speaking countries that have implemented EMI.