2早稲田教育評論 第 39 巻第1号MEXT-led policy, highly ranked universities in Japan expanded their implementation of EMI (Aizawa & Rose, 2019; Hashimoto, 2017). While EMI has had beneficial effects on students’ academic outcomes and English language skills (Macaro, 2018), student challenges and difficulties have been reported in actual EMI classrooms in Japan. Aizawa (2024) raised concerns about the methodological limitations and gaps in studies addressing student challenges in EMI. He discussed the potential problems with the current skew toward large-scale studies that fail to capture the unique experiences of individual students in a particular context and emphasized the importance of “contextualised experiences through a focused, context-specific analysis” (p. 22).Following this perspective, several case studies were conducted to report the challenges arising in vari-ous EMI contexts in Japan. Curle et al. (2023) conducted an interview-based survey of EMI stakeholders from Japanese national universities. Five lecturers and five students across a variety of disciplines (e.g., sociology, engineering, and economics) responded with their perceptions of challenges and other topics related to EMI (e.g., advantages/disadvantages of EMI and differences from regular specialized classes). The results highlighted the struggles faced by lecturers and students when teaching or learning academic content through English. Four out of five students reported difficulties producing English (speaking and writing) and understanding English (listening) in EMI due to their lack of English skills. Kojima (2021) is another of the detailed case studies conducted in Japanese EMI contexts that focus on student challenges; it explored Japanese students’ perceptions of and motivation for EMI in a private university EMI setting. The results showed that Japanese students frequently feel incompetent, neglected, and alienated in their EMI classroom community. The author emphasized that pedagogical interventions are crucial for transforming EMI classrooms into a safe and supportive learning environment. Another study on challenges students faced in EMI is a small-scale questionnaire survey conducted by Kudo et al. (2024), the authors of this paper, at a private university. We investigated the tasks in EMI classrooms undertaken by undergraduates majoring in English language and literature (n = 21) in terms of frequency and difficulty. The results showed several reading, listening, class and group discussions, and presentation tasks that were both frequent and difficult, which suggested that both receptive and productive language skills are crucial for students to succeed in the EMI context. The importance of reading comprehension skills for reading assignments was particularly emphasized. Unlike the findings of Curle et al. (2023), the authors’ questionnaire-based survey highlighted reading skills, and this discrepancy indicates that the difficulties students face may vary depending on the context. While Kudo et al. (2024) identified common patterns in task difficulty in their EMI context, they did not capture the specific contextual factors influencing these difficulties. From a pedagogical perspective, we also need to know the types of support students need based on their challenges. For example, Ruegg (2021) provided a comprehensive description of how to run a student support center (e.g., an academic support center) for a full-degree EMI program in Japan, including whole-class sessions (e.g., general skills required Call for Contextualised Studies on Student Challenges in EMI
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