77IntroductionEnglish-Medium Instruction in JapanKeywords:English-medium instruction (EMI), needs analysis, task difficulty, task frequency【Abstract】 This study aimed to identify the challenging tasks frequently encountered by students taking English-medium instruction (EMI) courses at the Department of English Language and Literature, School of Education at Waseda University. A questionnaire containing a list of 56 tasks was distributed to undergraduates in the department, inquiring about the frequency and difficulty of each task based on their experience of taking one of the most impressive EMI classes. Responses from 21 undergraduates were used to calculate the mean scores for the frequency and difficulty of each task and analyze data trends. Descriptive statistics revealed that several reading, listening, discussion, and presentation tasks were high-frequency and high-difficulty. Based on these results, we discussed the types of English skills required for EMI implemented by the department in question. The study’s results indicate that receptive (reading and listening) and productive skills (discussion and presentation) are essential for success in EMI classes, while emphasizing the importance of reading comprehension for completing reading assignments.English-medium instruction (EMI), in which academic subjects are taught in English, has notably increased at leading universities worldwide (Curle et al., 2020; Macaro et al., 2018). By EMI, we refer to Dearden (2014)’s working definition as “the use of the English language to teach academic subjects in countries or jurisdictions where the first language (L1) of the majority of the population is not English” (p. 2). EMI courses emphasize content delivery without explicit language objectives (Airey, 2016). In Japan, the introduction of EMI was facilitated by the government’s policy initiatives on the internation-alization of Japanese higher education, namely, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT)’s Global 30 initiative in 2013, followed by the Top Global University Project in 2014 (Ota, 2018). Due to this policy, EMI is no longer rare in elite Japanese universities (Bradford & Brown, 2017; Brown & Iyobe, 2014; Shimauchi, 2017, 2018). However, many Japanese high school graduates who enroll in these universities face a significant gap between the English language skills they practice during high school English classes, which typically place Shuhei KUDO, Akiko KIYOTARyo MORIYA, Kana MATSUMURALearners in English-Medium Instruction Courses: A Questionnaire Survey for English MajorsFrequent and Challenging Tasks for
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